War Games

From: Allison J Parent <allisonp_at_world.std.com>
Date: Tue Sep 23 13:19:26 1997

<> What's neat is that this movie came out in 1983, probably filmed in 1982
<> or so. This is still nearly 3 years after the heyday of the IMSAI.

Filming likely started in '81 and extended into '82.

At that time you had altair (way off the their time), IMSAI, TRS80,
Apple][, early PC, atari, commodore, various S100 crates, and some
minis to pick from.

What the imsai had was a colorful pannel with blinking lights, the only
other one that matched that were Ithaca Intersystems s100 crates, and
minis most of wich were no longer FP machines. The kid was not supposed
to own a mini as a budding hacker.

<Did it strike anybody as odd that while David was seen to turn the IMSAI
<CPU on at various times, he never once turned on the disk drives? B^}

He did a lot of majik that was technically suspect! Most secure systems
back then would at best give you three tries at the password and drop you
and if you tried the account within 15 minutes you were again dropped and
the timer reset. The was to prevent cracking via successive tries. That
was an example of commercial systems, secure military would not even have
outside access that wasn't encrypted and highly secure.


Allison
Received on Tue Sep 23 1997 - 13:19:26 BST