Browser bigamy

Double your pleasure

Firefox knows that I am Zeno, remembers all kinds of things about me in its cookies, and enables me to post blog comments under that name with a minimum of difficulty. I can go traipsing through the ScienceBlogs and the Discover blogs and Facebook with my Internet identity firmly established (an on-line identity, by the way, that actually dates back to the pre-Internet era—no kidding!). My browser's memory preserves my preferences and smooths my on-line excursions.

Except when it doesn't. I need my real-life identity when I check into my faculty website or my personal Facebook page (not to be confused with my blogger Facebook page). Before I hit on a convenient solution, I found myself having to log out of various accounts and log into others. It was a minor nuisance. I especially didn't like it when I would be finishing up a post or comment, only to discover upon trying to publish it that I was operating under the wrong handle. (My students really don't need comments from some stranger named Zeno.)

The solution arose rather naturally. My school district has (big surprise!) standardized on Microsoft Office products, so all of our computers default to Internet Explorer. On my campus computer, therefore, I became accustomed to accessing the college's website using IE. When I finally prevailed upon our microcomputer support people to give me installation rights on my own office computer (not a particularly easy task, by the way), I promptly installed Firefox. While beginning to use it to log in to my favorite sites (like the aforementioned ScienceBlogs, for example), I paused to consider whether to use my real-life persona or my blog identity. Soon I realized it was easy to let Firefox be Zeno's browser while retaining IE as the real-life math professor's browser.

I set up a similar configuration at home. These days it's not unusual for me to have two different browser windows simultaneously open on my desktop. Google Reader tracks my favorite blogs in Firefox while IE keeps an eye on my college pages. Depending on which browser I'm using at the moment, I'm either real-life me or Internet me. I am such a power user!

Um. Not really. A genuine power user would configure different personalities within the same browser program and toggle back and forth at need, but I've never taken the time to learn how to do that. This is as much a story of “good enough for now” as it is a story of browser bigamy. It reminds me of the glory days of Lotus 1-2-3 (remember that?). One of the officers of my local computer club revealed that he didn't have a word processing program. He was using the 1-2-3 spreadsheet to do the job. He'd create wide cells, format them as text, enable word-wrapping, and type each paragraph of his document into different cells. He was very proud of himself, even though it sounded like a cumbersome and jury-rigged system. But what the heck. It worked, and he was comfortable with it. My computer-club colleague and I aren't quite Rube Goldbergs, but we have our delusions of adequacy.

Speaking of which, now it's time for me to pop over to my IE window. I just graded an exam and discovered that one of my chronic underachievers didn't bother to show up to take it. Zeno can't drop him from the class roster, but real-life math professor can!

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A twitter-pated pioneer

The first tweet?

I have been wending my way through some of the Jeeves oeuvre of P. G. Wodehouse. The comic misadventures of the feckless Bertie Wooster and his unflappable gentleman's gentleman Jeeves are quite engaging. I was startled, however, to come across a curious concatenation of prose in the early pages of The Code of the Woosters.

Bertie is dismayed upon returning home to his flat to discover that a pile of telegrams awaits him. He has learned from sad experience that such missives are a reliable harbinger of difficulties with his wastrel upper-crust friends or demands from his daunting aunts. Jeeves enters to find his young master brooding:

“Are you ill, sir?” he enquired solicitously.
I sank into a c. and passed an agitated h. over the b.
“Not ill, Jeeves, but all of a twitter. Read these.”

Imagine my reaction upon reading these lines. Bertie is in “twitter” mode and has lapsed into obscurely abbreviating his prose. The Code of the Woosters dates from 1938, so this is a most remarkable and quite prescient anticipation of today's trendy tweeters.

Of course, I buckled down and began to decode Bertie's hidden message. The “c” could easily stand for coma or catalepsy, but couch makes for a less sensational reading. Then Bertie passes an “h. over the b.” He notes that the “h” is “agitated.” Passing a haddock over a brazier would serve, since that would undoubtedly agitate a haddock that was not quite dead. But perhaps we should content ourselves with imagining that Bertram Wooster was merely passing an agitated hand over his brow.

Right-ho. That's the ticket.

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Internet service preventer

Zapped by the Death Star

My day began. It was still dark, but that's winter for you. I tend to wake up rather slowly, so I dragged myself to my computer to check my e-mail. Hmm. Nothing since 1:30 in the morning. Slightly unusual.

Then I noticed the error messages from my e-mail program. They indicated that both my personal and school in-boxes could not be accessed. I looked at the modem.

Rats. The Internet light was out. I rebooted my computer and watched the modem lights start to blink as the operating system reloaded and began polling the computer's peripherals. I relaunched Firefox, which splashed my home page on the screen very nicely, but I soon saw that it was just the cached version. No new information was being downloaded. The modem lights were flickering between red and green. It wasn't settling down to the nice steady green I was used to.

Time for breakfast. Let the modem fuss with its DSL access while I scan the morning newspapers and take on some fuel.

When I returned, my Internet connection was still on the fritz. I powered down the modem, powered it back up, and rebooted the computer again. The very Christmasy red-and-green light show returned, but no DSL.

I called the AT&T support line. A very friendly recorded voice told me the number I was calling from. “Is your call related to service on this phone number?” I replied in the affirmative and entered the maze of twisty little passages, all alike, that constitutes AT&T's automated help system. By answering several questions, I eventually managed to get the system to understand that the problem involved my DSL service.

“I need to run some tests on your DSL line,” it said. “Please wait. This may take a few minutes.” I muttered to myself that “DSL line” was surely a redundancy—like “ATM machine” or “PIN number.” The voice ignored me, of course. A different voice thanked me for my patience and various commercial messages assured me that AT&T could sell me services that were much better than anything I currently had from them. I believed the voices.

“I have finished the tests,” announced the original friendly recorded voice at last. Despite our long-established friendship—or at least working relationship—it could not be troubled to tell me what was wrong with my line. Instead it informed me that one in five connection problems could be resolved by powering down the modem and rebooting my system. Had I done that recently?

Yes.

It suggested I try it again. Grudgingly, I did. With mechanical patience, the disembodied voice waited for me while various commercial messages assured me that AT&T could sell me services that were much better than anything I currently had from them. But I was already quite sure of that.

And it was still no-go. No green Internet light. My life as a denizen of the computer world was in jeopardy.

The recordings suggested visiting a local AT&T store or rebooting my computer. (I did that already! More than once!) It suggested that after visiting a local AT&T store and/or rebooting my computer, I could call back the help line in 24 hours if the problem persisted. Considering the length of time I had been on the line, I wondered if calling back in 23 hours would be considered a trifle hasty.

I hung up the phone and immediately redialed. (Actually, I hit the Redial button on a phone that doesn't even have a dial. Modern life is weird.) The whole process started again, but this time I mashed the zero key for Operator and was rewarded with the digital miracle of a live human voice.

The young woman ascertained that I was having a DSL problem and ran some line tests. She asked me if I had reset the modem and rebooted the computer.

Oh my yes.

She got her test results. She was getting a null response from my modem. She asked which of the display lights were lit up. I looked at the modem again and did a double-take.

Whoa! None of them.

Not even the power light?

Not even that. They're dark. All of them. No red. No green. Nothing.

My modem had gone completely dead. Stone cold. Perhaps the problem was now identified.

The young woman suggested I switch the power cord to a different power source. I did. Still no lights. I reported the same back to her, wondering whether she had put me down as one of those goofballs who don't even notice when they're unplugged. But there were lights earlier. I swear! (The modem had died while waiting in AT&T's emergency room.)

The young woman asked for my Zip code and gave me the addresses of the two nearest AT&T stores, suggesting I take the modem and its power adapter to one of them for testing.

I disconnected the modem from the computer, unplugged the power cord from the power strip, and conveyed the modem and power adapter to the nearer of the two AT&T shops. The assistants looked at my modem with goggle eyes and said, “Oh, we only do cell phones here!”

Uh, thanks.

I went to the second AT&T store. It was a much bigger facility. I took the modem and power adapter up to the counter and explained the situation to a company rep. She carried my distressed equipment to the inner sanctum where they keep their technicians sequestered. A few minutes later she came back out.

“Your modem is fine. The power adapter has failed.”

I felt a sense of relief. Just the power adapter!

“Okay, good. How much is a replacement adapter.”

“Oh, we don't carry those. Power adapters are only sold in a bundle with a modem. Would you like to see our latest modems?”

“You're kidding!”

“Sorry. We don't carry separate power adapters.”

“Thank you for your help. I think it's time for a visit to Radio Shack.”

“Oh, that's probably a good idea,” she admitted.

Soon I had a Radio Shack replacement power adapter, matched to the specs of the original device. Instead of spending $100, I had spent under $20. (I later discovered that the AT&T on-line shop carries the adapter as a separate replacement item for a list price of $10, but the company's fancy service center in my town can't be troubled to have it in inventory.)

Back home, I reconnected the old modem with the new power adapter and was soon rewarded with bright green lights. Hurray! Problem over!

No.

AT&T had reset my password after my service call. After all, my modem had failed and it would be necessary for me to log in as a new user with a new modem and initiate my service anew. When I opened my browser, it informed me that additional log-in information was required before I could access my Internet service. It switched me to an automatic log-in system on the AT&T support page that offered a swift and sure re-initiation process—which failed multiple times. (Perhaps it was upset when it discovered I was using the same old modem.)

I tried one more time, choosing the “manual” mode over the “automatic.” It had me punch in the access code on the bottom of my modem. It asked me for my new password. Did I have one? Was it in the support e-mail that the on-line technician had told me she was sending me (that I couldn't access until after I was logged in)? I dug out my steno pad, where I had been scribbling notes all during the on-line support sessions. (This is one of my very best habits.)

Aha!

In the midst of all the hassles, the young woman had had me write down a six-character network access code. Was that it? I wasn't starting a new account, so I had not worried too much about it at the time. I didn't really expect to need it. But I tried it.

Log-on successful

It was only six hours after the original discovery that my connection was down. Life was good again.

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A date with Microsoft

which will live in infamy

Is Bill Gates to blame? I don't know. But the heavy hand of Microsoft Word continues to plague me.

My office computer was recently upgraded (good!), which means I have a system which has reverted to all of Microsoft's defaults (bad!). I had subdued Word 2003 to my grudging satisfaction, but my new copy of Word 2007 has all of the bad habits back in force. The examples are many.

For instance, someone at Microsoft decided that its users really need the copyright symbol more often than they need to enclose the letter “c” in parentheses. Thus any attempt to write “(c)” instantly auto-corrects to “©”—a symbol I need approximately never. I am much more likely to (a) type in a list of items, (b) avoid Microsoft's intrusively clumsy outlining function, and (c) get a copyright symbol when I least want it. Naturally, I go into the auto-correct defaults and rip out the preset substitution for “(c).”

Even worse, though, in my estimation, is Microsoft's insistence on foisting superscripted ordinals on the world (which appears to have happily embraced them). Word won't let you write “1st” without turning it into “1^st.” Ick. Whose bright idea was that?

The Associated Press Style Guide offers straightforward advice about dates: “Always use Arabic figures, without st, nd, rd or th.” Sounds good to me. Those are understood, aren't they? After all, when we look at a date like December 25, do you say “December twenty-five” or “December twenty-fifth”? I think most of us provide the ordinals automatically.

Unfortunately, my more literal-minded colleagues insist on the ordinal endings and—thanks to the default use of Word as their Outlook text editor—I get lots of e-mail sprinkled with dates written in superscripted ordinal form. Oh, good. Then, as is often the case, if formatting is lost in bouncing the message through various e-mail clients and servers, you get default plain-text messages with extra lines embedded to accommodate the ordinal superscripts. And for what? To accommodate an unnecessary formatting flourish, courtesy of someone's decision up in Redmond.

I can't be too harsh on geeks and nerds because that would be to accuse myself, but we do have some excessively soft spots for pointless gimmicks. When I first began to receive letters printed on monospaced dot-matrix printers with right-justified margins, I considered it to be a sign of the Apocalypse. Are you old enough to remember those? The only way to right-justify a monospaced text is to pad the lines with whole spaces to make the right margin come out even. Weird rivers of white space ran through the text as these interpolations were made. People were doing it simply because they could, ignoring the fact that such text was ugly and more difficult to read than ragged-right documents.

Just because you can, doesn't mean you should.

Speaking of things I can do ... a few more forays into Word's default settings and I will have ripped the guts out of the stylistic peculiarities that drive me nuts. When it comes to breaking in a new copy of Word, that's always one of the things I do 1st.

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The Norwegian blue diskette

This is ex-data

“I knew he was trouble the moment I saw him walk in. It's a kind of sixth sense that you develop when you're in tech support.”

Lawrence and I were sitting in a Sacramento restaurant to fuel up the hour before a computer club meeting. I was a mini-bureaucrat in one of the state's mini-bureaucracies and Lawrence worked for a university. It was 1986 and we had converged on the capital city from different directions for some user group fun. A motley crew of regulars and semi-regulars would convene each month for burgers and sandwiches before taking in the featured speaker of the month and playing the usual “can-you-top-this?” game during the Q&A. Tale-swapping before the meetings was another regular feature and Lawrence had the floor.

I was not immediately impressed with Lawrence's story. Wasn't nearly everyone who walked into a tech-support office an occasion of trouble?

“But you must be used to that, Lawrence.” I said. “Don't you get weird problems all the time when you work tech support? And it must be even worse doing tech support at a university. Lots more opportunity for wacky cock-ups by clever people doing stupid things.”

Lawrence grimaced.

“Well, yeah,” he admitted. “That was certainly the case with this guy. He was a teaching assistant in the economics department and he had a data problem.”

A diskette problem, to be specific. In the high-spirited early days of personal computing, the Apple II and the IBM PC had established the 5¼-inch floppy diskette as the standard digital medium. By the time of Lawrence's incident, the newer 3½-inch was catching on, popularized by the Macintosh and newer model PCs. That's what the hapless grad student had in his hand when he visited the tech-support office.

“Here,” he told Lawrence, handing him the diskette. “I need you to recover the data from this PC disk.”

Lawrence took the diskette and looked it over. There was no obvious damage to it. He carried it over to a desktop computer that sported an array of different disk drives, inserted it into a 3½-inch drive and typed a command to list the disk's directory.

Error message.

That was only to be expected. Lawrence ran Norton Utilities on it. He tried to scan the diskette's sectors for recoverable data. After several minutes with several different diagnostic software tools, Lawrence ejected the diskette and handed it back to the teaching assistant.

“This,” he declared, “is a dead diskette. The directory is nonexistent and the bytes on it are indistinguishable from gibberish. Sorry. I couldn't recover anything at all. That happens sometimes when a disk really gets scrambled.”

The grad student was aghast.

“You don't understand,” the TA said. “You have to fix the disk. It has the gradebook for Economics 101 on it. I need the grades for the professor.”

“Sorry, but perhaps you don't understand,” rejoined Lawrence. “The data has passed on. It is no more. I can't recover what's not there. You are simply going to have to dig up your backup copy.”

A moment of silence became uncomfortably prolonged. Finally the student spoke.

“Um. This is the only copy.”

Lawrence gave him a weary look.

“Okay. Then you have no digital copy. You're going to have to re-enter all the scores from the last time you printed them out and recreate the gradebook from scratch.”

Now the grad student looked completely devastated.

“But there is no print-out! I was using the disk to prepare a grade list to post in the classroom before finals. The professor wanted to let students know their current grades going into finals week. That's when the disk crashed and I got a read-error from the computer. We didn't put up any previous grade reports. There's no other disk and there's no print-out. That's why you have to fix this disk. You just have to!”

Lawrence regarded the graduate student assistant with long-suffering patience.

“This is tech support. We do technical work. We don't perform miracles. I can't recover what no longer exists.”

The TA left Lawrence's office with his head bowed and shoulders slumped, the useless diskette clutched in one hand. A moment later he heard the sudden sound of the diskette's plastic case shattering against the concrete wall of the corridor and the slam of the door behind the departing TA.

“Rather dramatic,” I said to Lawrence as he finished his story. Other people at the table were grinning at its conclusion.

“Shortly thereafter I got a call from the Econ 101 professor complaining that I had failed to help his TA. I had to explain all over to him that you can't get data from a scrambled diskette. He was particularly upset because there was only one week left in the quarter and all the scores from the previous eight or nine weeks had been on the diskette.”

“So what did they do for grades?”

“That I don't know. No one told me. It I were to guess, though, I'd bet there were a lot of students who got surprisingly good grades in that section of Econ 101.”

I thought about it a second.

“Yeah, I wouldn't take that bet. I think you're right. It was the professor's safest option. Generous grades would prevent any student from filing a complaint and causing the department chair to adjudicate the dispute and ask for the grade records. We could have a bunch of econ students out there who got passing grades they never earned.”

And later they all went to work in the financial sector.

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LC, R.I.P.

The old order passes

LC knew that he was dying.

We're all dying, of course, but LC had the constant reminder of the oxygen tanks. His lungs were dying faster than the rest of him, but they were going to take him along on their journey into the darkness. LC had no good way to overrule them.

LC had weighed his options and done the math. By husbanding his strength and taking it easy, he could look forward to a few more years of fairly comfortable living, the oxygen tanks notwithstanding. By risking a lung transplant, he might last a little longer. But maybe not. And the regimen of anti-rejection medication would compromise his immune system and put him at risk of being carried off by some opportunistic infection. He conferred with his wife and they agreed. LC would play out the hand dealt to him.

It worked for a few years. He faded gradually, with periods of stability, as his unpredictably progressive condition eroded his lung function in fits and starts. When the end came, though, it came suddenly and without much warning. He stopped breathing and stopped living in the middle of 2008.

I became friends with LC back in the eighties, when home computers were new and exciting and fun. That was the time when personal computer owners would gather together in their Apple clubs, PC user groups, and Mac organizations. LC was one of the few “computer consultants” I knew for whom the label was not just a euphemism for “under-employed nerd.” He was actually making a living at it and not simply cruising on his wife's income from her job in the financial sector.

Many of us geeks and nerds were envious—especially the poseurs who had made their own business cards from heavy paper they'd run through their dot-matrix printers. LC was a genuine professional and we looked up to him.

I had occasion to work with LC in both volunteer and professional capacities. He was a pillar of our computer club who combined both expertise and affability in a package that was all too uncommon within our ranks. I relished the time we spent together because his badinage was not limited to the unsubtle geek-speak of the day. LC was the soul of wit, and most excellent company.

When LC and his wife decided it was time to retire and move to southern California, they folded their tent and left without fanfare. By that time, however, we were no longer in frequent contact. The local computer club scene was a faint shadow of its past (the glory days when Bill Gates would come out in person to San Francisco or Sacramento or Berkeley) and that had been our primary area of common interest. Computers and math, that is, since we both held math degrees, but people don't normally gather to chat casually about math. He was also a rabid car fancier and enthusiastic dog lover, but I was less interested in fast cars or furry pets.

It was easy to stay in touch, though, and we kept up an e-mail correspondence that faded in and out over the years. LC was privy to the identity of the pseudonymous Zeno and would sometimes send me gentle private messages about various typos or other egregious mistakes in my posts. He also brought my attention to the circle puzzle, which we agreed was delightfully misleading.

In March, LC informed me circumstances had taken a turn for the worse:

Although I'm feeling fine, my lungs are giving out at a fairly rapid rate. I can walk no more than 50' without having to stop for breath, even with my oxygen set to the maximum flow I can carry (6 lpm). I am now enrolled in an in-home hospice program, although I'm much healthier (or at least more ambulatory) than most of their patients. They don't know quite how to deal with me. For example, I insisted on switching oxygen vendors because the one they normally deal with doesn't carry the size tanks I like to carry around in a backpack when my wife and I go out to lunch, meetings, movies, etc.

We aren't in denial; we're simply living each day as if there were a bunch of them lying ahead.

---

I sent him some lame words of encouragement. He wrote back saying that he was still checking out my blog periodically:

I've begun making it a habit to check your blog every week or two, although I don't generally read anyone else's (aside from infrequently skimming the Daily Kos).

I consistently come away in awe of how eloquently you write, and how you make choosing exactly the right word seem so effortless. You also seem to find subject matter in a wide variety of places, and you link contemporary and long-past events in unexpected ways.

I recognize that high-end novelists can craft words carefully, but I've always assumed they did so rather slowly, with many rewrites and edits. I cannot imagine someone tossing off beautiful prose like yours as casually—and presumably quickly—as you do, especially not as an uncompensated hobby.

I consider myself a decent writer and a first-rate editor, but reading your stuff makes me want to throw away my Crayolas. Thanks for pointing me to your musings.

---

That left me glowing with pride, since I had a high opinion of LC's prose style and regarded kind words from him as coin of the realm. I sent back my effusive thanks. Then I quickly excerpted his second paragraph and posted it in the blog's sidebar under Testimonials. LC soon noticed:

I see I've gotten my own 15 minutes of fame. I can now claim the distinction of having been cited in a blog testimonial without ever having written line one of my own blog. Does that make me a meta-blogger?

---

No question about it.

The last message I received from him was in May, when he asked me whether John Allen Paulos's Irreligion was worth reading. I suggested he spend his time on more profitable material.

And that was it. The next e-mail was from his wife, reporting he had died quite quickly and without much warning. Or, to look at it another way, with years of warning, but no specificity. She closed her message with these words:

We've known for 4 years that he was terminal, so have had time to plan, do fun things, retire early, and just enjoy each other. Not everyone has such a peaceful ending.

---

So here's to the end of 2008, the year of LC's departure, and to the good friend that he always was.

And is.

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Thinking outside the cell

Yin meets yang

He wasn't one of my students, but he knew who I was.

“Hey, Mr. Z, you're a computer guy, right?”

Well, kind of. At least, I was on the college's information technology committee. It was 1990 or so and computers were increasingly percolating into the campus.

“Yeah, I guess so. What can I do for you?”

“I have a problem with my computer and maybe you can help me. Do you use a Mac or a PC?”

“PC.”

“Damn. Okay, sorry to bother you.”

As anyone knows, of course, personal computing is divided between the two great religious sects: Apple and Windows. Or Hatfields and McCoys. Montagues and Capulets? It's difficult sometimes for me to remember, partly because I don't have much patience with sectarian wars or family feuds. The gap cannot be bridged.

“No, no,” I said. “Go ahead and tell me your problem anyway. Who knows? Maybe I can help you.”

He was using the Wingz spreadsheet program on his Macintosh. Although largely forgotten now, Wingz was a powerful spreadsheet from Informix that eventually lost out to Microsoft's Excel (as did all of the other spreadsheets in the world).

“I have a six-page spreadsheet in Wingz but it won't print except for the first page. I've tried printing the whole thing and get only page one. I've tried printing just page two and nothing comes out.”

“Can you edit pages other than the first?”

“No problem. I can change stuff and save the changes, but nothing I do prints out anything except the first page. I used to be able to print it all, but something happened and I'm really stuck now.”

He had saved and reloaded the file. He had rebooted the system. He had done all of the usual jiggery-pokery to get things going again, but he was still stuck.

“Does Wingz have import/export options?” I asked.

“Yeah. Definitely.”

“Good. Can you save your spreadsheet as a Lotus 1-2-3 file?”

“I think so. Yeah, I'm pretty sure.”

“Okay. Save your file as a Lotus 1-2-3 file using the export feature. Then use the import feature to bring it back in. See if the conversion process clears up the printing problem you're having.”

He seemed just a little skeptical, but he said he'd try my idea.

A day later the student caught up with me again in front of the math department building.

“Hey, Mr. Z! It worked!”

“Great! Thanks for letting me know how it turned out. I guess some gimmicks work across platforms, eh?”

Knowledge. More portable than you might think.

Computers. Weird and demon-possessed no matter what the logo.

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CPE1704TKS

Thermonuclear war

If you recognized the title of this post, congratulations. You are a true übernerd, a geek among geeks. It's the launch code from the movie WarGames, which Boing Boing reminds me was the greatest geek movie ever and was originally released twenty-five years ago. Did you miss the silver anniversary celebrations in May? So did I, but Wired magazine offers a nostalgic retrospective for all of us who miss the days of 300-baud dial-up modems and 8-inch diskettes.

WarGames was a cautionary tale about artificial intelligence and human stupidity. The sermon was a timely one, albeit delivered in a candy coating of teen angst, love, and adventure with lead roles played by Matthew Broderick and Ally Sheedy. In 1983 the president of the United States actually believed it was possible that Bible prophecy might require him to play a leading role in the battle of Armageddon. Certainly launching a nuclear war would be an excellent way to set off the Apocalypse—in accordance with God's divine plan (and love and mercy and all that). We tended to avoid thinking about it too much back then because it was difficult to function if you were shuddering all day.

I didn't own my own computer yet when WarGames came out, but I already knew about modems and punch cards (almost—but not quite—obsolete then) and computer terminals. The local university had a connection to the ARPAnet, the Internet precursor sponsored by the Defense Department, and my nerdiest friends were on it daily. Although I had my doubts about WOPR (War Operation Plan Response), the computer that could control the entire United States nuclear arsenal, the scenario seemed realistic enough. Yes, it was science fiction, but not beyond the limits of credulity. Suspension of disbelief was all too easy.

That is, until the grand finale. That's the scene in the command bunker where WOPR begins to crack the secret ten-character launch code so that it can follow a teenager's inadvertent command to play out a thermonuclear war. Fortunately for the dramatic impact of the movie, WOPR flashed its progress in code-breaking on the large screens in the command center. Ten-character alphanumeric strings flashed past the eyes as WOPR searched for the launch key. The audience in the movie theater was rapt.

I, however, got a sinking feeling in my stomach. Damn!

WOPR was being allowed to riffle through the ten-character strings without any limitations. There was no one-attempt-per-second rule. No three-tries-and-you're-out. WOPR was jamming through the ten-character strings without hindrance. With 26 characters in the alphabet (uppercase only it seemed) and 10 numerals, WOPR has 36¹⁰ possibilities to check. That's between three and four quadrillion. WOPR was presumably a state-of-the-art military supercomputer capable of sophisticated war game simulation. I imagine it would have had massively parallel computing architecture. If it could crunch billions of possible codes per second, WOPR would crack the launch security barrier within perhaps a year or so by simple brute force. If it could crunch trillions per second, then perhaps hours or minutes. Not very secure.

Even back in 1983 the IBM Personal Computer boasted a microprocessor clocked at 4.77 MHz. Sure, that was just a microchip, but it indicated the low end of the computing power of the day. Yes, I was mildly disgruntled at the ease with which WOPR would be able to crack the code. Not very reassuring or realistic.

But then things got worse. Dramatically worse. Suddenly the first character of the launch code was frozen on the display screen: C. WOPR had figured out the first character. People in the command room were horrified. Then: P. Oh, no! WOPR was getting closer!

Now I was really disgusted. If you were allowed to figure out the code one character at a time, then I could do it myself, in a couple of minutes, without any massively parallel computing power. It's boring, but it's easy. You do it like this, beginning with the first character:

“Is it an A?”
“Is it a B?”
“Is it a C?”

Bingo!

Then on to the second character:

“Is it an A?”
“Is it a B?”
“Is it a C?”

Yes, this one would take longer. If you make it all the way through the alphabet, then rattle off the ten numerals, one after the other.

In a few minutes you'd have the whole thing. Thermonuclear war. Boom!

No, it didn't actually ruin the movie for me, but I was rather disgruntled. To make matters worse, none of my friends cared. Sure, the nerdy ones merely agreed that it was a dumb mistake—but what did you expect from Hollywood, anyway? The less nerdy ones simply pointed out that it made the ending more exciting. Yeah, I got that.

It was probably only the math geeks like me that were really irritated. But we don't count.

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