If Looks Could Kill
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vintagecomputerstories.blogspot.com
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Back at that time, I had dreams of actually owning a 8566, but at the time they cost $60k and it seemed impossible.
I picked one up about five years ago for $2k. It STILL has the best performing AFE of anything ever made. All the modern equipment uses signal processing, but that's cheating.
Lots of us did dumb/jerk things when we were younger; that makes it understandable, not okay. And would the salesperson with the now (for all practical purposes) broken demo unit agree that there was no harm?
As far as I'm concerned this was (1) a harmless prank and (2) a significant impulse to the sales person to up their knowledge of the device.
Obviously, your salespeople should be good at handling your knives.
But a knife salesman will never be as good as a chef, because chefs have hours a day, every day working with the tools of their trade.
And if you're at a trade show selling chef's knives, and there are no chefs in attendance, you're probably at the wrong trade show.
I would say it's entirely normal for a certain fraction of trade show attendees to know the products on display better than the salespeople demonstrating them.
I've worked booths. If something like this would happen to me I would definitely want to know more about that person, if only because he might be a potential recruit or a representative of an existing customer.
Personally, as long as a powercycle took care of the issue I really don't see the problem, if you do then that's fine by me. Breaking things is bad, afaics nothing got broken here.
The actions of OP were a 'Red Flag' not a 'Recruiting Signal'.
So either you accept the risks, staff your booths with competent people or you stay away from tradeshows. What point is there to have a salesperson there who does not understand what they are selling? At a minimum you'd have to study up on the device to be able to demonstrate its capabilities. If you can't do that then you have no place in that booth.
The fact that apparently even Bill Gates would mess with the systems at tradeshows (in much the same way, in fact) speaks volumes. This kind of behavior would have been very much expected in the tradeshow environment of the 80's.
In fact, if you went home afterwards and your gear still worked and wasn't stolen (either by the visitors or the nightwatch) that counted as a win.
This is essentially bigotry, endemic among arrogant groups of people with limited social skills, narrow understanding (and therefore respect for) subjects beyond their purview, but who might have developed some strength of understanding in their niche.
"What point is there to have a salesperson there who does not understand what they are selling?"
It's ridiculous to assume that a salesperson might have to have the same level of knowledge that an Engineer may have, and betrays a total lack of understanding of how organizations work, levels of expertise required.
Imagine if Engineers were required to have the knowledge and skills to have to actually 'sell' the devices they make, after all, why shouldn't they be expected to know how to 'have a conversation' and 'collect money'? My god.
You don't demonstrate spectrum analyzers, especially programmable ones if you don't know how to use them in anger.
I went to a music fair a while ago (ok, a long while ago meanwhile) to watch some gear demonstrated, the people manning the booths were musicians, and they were competent. That's the sort of interaction you strive for when you pick the people to run a booth at a tradeshow.
Otherwise the answer to every question about the device is going to end up with 'I don't know'. And that's potentially a lost sale right there.
Going deep on an aspect of the datasheet abd abusing it doesn't mean one understands a thing on the device (in its proper use)
Any competent user of that particular spectrum analyzer would have tried that first.
Why did the company not send an actual engineer to the trade show as well? I've done plenty of trade shows as a customer and there's almost always an engineer on-hand to assist with more technical questions and issues with the demo device.
Even assuming the prior claim, the company still screwed up not buying another plane ticket for an engineer.
Also, you could brick the device in a couple seconds with a hammer too. Should the sales guy have take down training too?
If thats an unrealistic argument, you failed to realize you were the only one in the room who couldnt see the hammer in your hands.
We have a different idea of what sales people should be able to do.
> Their job is to communicate what the machine does and how to do it.
How is this possible without knowing the ins and outs of a device?
> Also, you could brick the device in a couple seconds with a hammer too.
You could, but that's not what this discussion is about so I have no idea why you would bring it up. The device wasn't bricked.
> Should the sales guy have take down training too?
That's a straman of your own making, I will leave the demolition to you.
> If thats an unrealistic argument, you fail to realize youre the only one in the room who couldnt see the hammer in your hands.
You've lost me.
BTW, you are pouring out level-headed good sense all over this sub-thread and I'm loving it. Thank you. How are you so patient? :)
Also seems like many of these people haven't been to an engineering conference with demo gear out. And seem to be overlooking that this was 30-40 years ago, talking about equipment that'd cost $150k in today's money. That was an engineer or two worth of annual salary for the time period.
I'd damn well expect a sales person selling me a piece of gear like that at a field-specific conference to know how to use it and be able to reset the thing to factory spec in a pinch. Which seems to be exactly what the sales person ended up doing.
Sales people don't have a requirement to know systems to that depth.
The initial interaction was 'harmless fun' but re-instituting it and walking away was materially bad.
It’s only harmless if the prankster turns around and fixes the demo.
I remember some years ago there were people going around trade shows with universal remote controls turning off the screens. As far as I remember most posters thought that wasn’t a very nice thing to do. And that really is almost completely harmless.
Turning off screens with universal remote controls... hm... imagine what you could do with one of those 3 Watt IR guns they use in laser arenas and a highrise building. During the worldcup soccer... Never mind.
Also, there's random passers by as in "one table over at Starbucks" and random passers by as in "took the trouble to come to a tech conference". It is true that the latter are more likely to take these things lightly.
FWIW I worked the booth on a CAD/CAM show in Utrecht one memorable week in the 80's and the number of master mechanics that tried to get the toolbit to run into the chuck was rather larger than expected. Good that I took care of that in the software. But this mentality, of putting stuff through its paces and to show off what you can do with it is exactly why you have trade shows in the first place, to interact with people and to let people interact with your gear to see what they are up to and to strike up conversations. Not all of these pay off.
But sometimes the kid in the greasy jeans and the t-shirt is the guy that will land you the big contract, as opposed to the guy in the suit who passes by your booth just for the swag.
OP entering a funky command is not unexpected. But then purposely antagonizing the sales rep was a d*ck move in my book. If OP had just shown the guy "Hey here's what I did and what it does" that would be perfectly fine (important distinction, OP knew more than the sales guy compared to your case). But if the sales person was legitimately panicking that's not very polite, to put it mildly.
I ran.
I hope that in the salesman's place I'd have had the calm to say, "What that really necessary?" and let it go at that. On the one hand, the splatter pattern does not suggest a leak, and he could explain what happened and get points for being cool about it. On the other hand, if there is one high school boy (by calendar or by mental age) who doesn't know the trick, then somebody else could get splattered.
ever considered the stress you induced in the sales guy?
> When the display did not change, the sales guy yelled at me; "WHAT DID YOU DO?!?!?"
At this point OP could have explained what they did, and explain why what the salesperson tried didn't work, and what should be done to fix it. They did not, instead they:
> So after watching him panic for a moment
Watched him panic, then showed that they could fix it (probably ego tripping), and then to rub it in even further, put it back on and walked away. Depending on the experience or seniority of the sales person this might have caused the sales person problems, a lot of stress, ruined a presentation, and real-life consequences, all of which OP disregarded.
There are pranks, and then there are pranks. This was unnecessarily cruel.
Firato, the annual CAD/CAM show for the metal working industry, The Hannover Messe (which used to be the largest IT show in Europe) the building equipment trade shows. Put enough gear in front of enough people (especially nerds) and pranks will happen.
As far as I can see this was a harmless prank because a powercycle fixed the issue. If he had reprogrammed it to the point that it was bricked for the duration of the trade show that would be a different matter.
I don't agree that this is a good reason that doing such a prank is harmless. The sales person might not have been prepared. They may have been having a bad day already. They may not be confident that power cycling would have solved the issue and thus may have been extremely stressed out going forward, ruining an (important?) presentation.
Probably I'm reading too much into a casual retelling now, but from what I can read: The fact the sales person was panicking should've been an indicator for OP to help him out. At that point OP should've empathised with the sales person instead of make things worse.
It's not because "Oh you should know how to fix this" may be true, that it's not a dick move to throw a fellow human in distress under the bus.
But: they should have been. If you don't know the gear you are demoing you are a minder, not a sales person.
> They may not be confident that power cycling would have solved the issue and thus may have been extremely stressed out going forward, ruining an (important?) presentation.
Important presentations don't happen at the front of a booth, they happen in the back behind the partition.
> The fact the sales person was panicking should've been an indicator for OP to help him out. At that point OP should've empathised with the sales person instead of make things worse.
Fair enough. But: suits that don't know their stuff have no place on a tradeshow floor.
I recall walking up to a guy at a Tek booth and asking him about their new storage scopes, he proceeded to take the thing apart on the spot and show me what the guts looked like resulting in a very long term relationship. That's the kind of person you want to man a booth displaying spectrum analyzers, not someone who apparently doesn't even know how to program it and what bits get stored in which part of the machine.
> It's not because "Oh you should know how to fix this" may be true, that it's not a dick move to throw a fellow human in distress under the bus.
I think that's exaggerating a bit. Throwing a fellow human being in distress under the bus is a far cry from "I put my name on your device and you will have to powercycle it to get rid of that".
But one conclusion I have from this thread is that Hacker News has lots its way, and that Hackers are not really welcome here anymore. Hackers showing up (empty) suits is about as old as it gets.
Food for thought.
I can imagine all kinds of scenarios where what you say is just not true or irrelevant and out of the control of the sales person, yet the harm of the prank still falls upon the sales person.
Maybe the sales person replaced someone who got sick at the last minute. Maybe the sales person's incompetent manager put them there without giving them time to prepare. Maybe the person whose job it was to prepare the sales person was bad at _their_ job, or didn't have sufficient time, etc. Maybe their incompetent manager isn't as forgiving as you are and will fire them because of this incident. Maybe power-cycling the device caused the presenters settings they needed for the presentation to be wiped as well. Maybe this is a junior sales person who hoped for a promotion after this presentation.
> But one conclusion I have from this thread is that Hacker News has lost its way
My conclusion is that a lot of people lack empathy or the imagination to think beyond their own experience. But I guess that's not really surprising in this sector which apparently still lacks a lot of self-reflection around the common social problems associated with it. I'm just happy there's enough people here that do have empathy.
I just use the bits from the OPs story as a way to place the person on my scale of technical competence.
> Maybe the sales person replaced someone who got sick at the last minute. Maybe the sales person's incompetent manager put them there without giving them time to prepare. Maybe the person whose job it was to prepare the sales person was bad at _their_ job, or didn't have sufficient time, etc. Maybe their incompetent manager isn't as forgiving as you are and will fire them because of this incident. Maybe power-cycling the device caused the presenters settings they needed for the presentation to be wiped as well. Maybe this is a junior sales person who hoped for a promotion after this presentation.
I think these are assumptions. Maybe they did. Or maybe they just powercycled the device and it all came back.
Tradeshows are 'hostile territory', you know this going in. If you've never staffed a booth at a tradeshow then I will forgive you but really, if this is the worst that happened there then they got extremely lucky.
I've had people 'test' our systems to see if they could break them. And the fact that they could not was proof that we had done a proper job designing them, which in turn led to interesting conversations and some sales. This is what a tradeshow is for. It's not for people to stand around static displays or recipe style demos without the ability to improvise.
Tradeshows are 'hands on' which is why the gear is exposed in the first place. And some of those hands will be more capable than yours, which is the moment where you make your living as a salesperson.
> My conclusion is that a lot of people lack empathy or the imagination to think beyond their own experience.
No, it's just that the experience factor is a two way street. If you don't have relevant experience then maybe you should not be so quick to judge.
I've seen the OP derided now as a sociopath, as a bad human being overall and whatever else people are slinging at him. You can take it from me as someone who has staffed the booths at tradeshows that on a scale of 1 to 10 this was a 'meh'.
> But I guess that's not really surprising in this sector which apparently still lacks a lot of self-reflection around the common social problems associated with it.
Ah ok, that is what this is about. Well, guess what, it is possible to have a conversation about a tradeshow prank without drawing in the problems of the entire industry.
> I'm just happy there's enough people here that do have empathy.
OP pulled a prank 20 years ago, which temporarily destabilized a piece of gear.
We're now discussing their promotion chances, their ostensibly important presentation on a piece of gear that they have no problem allowing other people to mess with, their chances of getting fired by their incompetent (why would their manager be incompetent) manager, their lack of time to prepare and so on.
It's an over-reaction.
They're possible reasons that could explain the part in the Op's story which you might have missed where the sales person was panicking and yelling in distress. Your argument basically goes "well, they should have been competent enough to be able to deal with it" basically saying it's their own fault and they deserved it.
My point is that this is not a good argument to disregard the feelings of the sales person. One reason is because it's not clear that the incompetence of the sales person is his own fault, and what I'm listing are possible reasons why that might be the case.
But even if it were within the control of the sales person, I'm also of the opinion that his mistake of not being competent enough shouldn't mean his feelings on the situation aren't valid, and that it wasn't somehow a dick move.
All we know is that the sales person was stressed about what the OP did, and that OP did nothing to help him out, and whatever the reason for this stress may be, or whatever consequences that might or might not have happened, by not helping him out, OP was being a jerk.
> OP pulled a prank 20 years ago, which temporarily destabilized a piece of gear. We're now discussing ...
This I agree with, I think we're trying to extract too much context from a very casual retelling, and going in circles anyway.
I think you are conflating hackers with lack of empathy/being a dick.
I mean, "is a hacker" DOES seem like a good predictor for "is a dick" (in my experience at least), so you might be right that HN isn't all that fond of hackers nowadays.
I'm sad that this is the case for you. But to counter your anecdata, the hackers that I know are as a rule quite nice and well behaved.
If today's standards indicate that someone's past behavior was dick-ish, then the fact that the standards have shifted does NOT imply that the past behavior was somehow "just fine" because... We didn't expect better of each other?
By that logic, abusive racist parentage back in the 50's is unassailable acceptable, because as you say - we're judging it by today's standards.
Acceptability in the past is no indication of an actions morality or ethical... ness.
... Words are hard.
Besides, what's with this tendency to escalate way beyond the topic at hand? We're talking about professional pranks and suddenly...racism?
So no, this apparently was not "expected" because otherwise they would also just have had a chuckle and wouldn't have reacted like that. And regardless of whether that means the sales person was in the wrong job or not, the fact that that person was in trouble, and OP did nothing to help, means that OP was being a jerk.
Maybe HN is finally maturing.
Presenting a control freak attitude around public interaction hardly seems like it would win over many customers, so this kind of thing is par for the course and reacting well to the unexpected (including pranks) is part of the skillset.
> At this point OP could have explained what they did [...]
The sales guy could also have been less accusative and instead embrace their curiosity as a customer... It was an opportunity to invite the onlookers who were already interested in what the author had coaxed the display into doing to learn more about the machine.
I can imagine a younger version of myself also reacting a bit negatively to such an exclamation after having a harmless investigation of a machine. Unfortunately it tends to be the reaction of ignorant and uninquisitive people.
Leave it up to engineers to expect everyone (else) to be the paragon of virtue rational homo sapiens sapiens with all the wisdom and maturity.
So i guess we are in agreement :D The sales person was neither wise or rational. They were acting on the emotion of a singular thought, selling shit.
A good prank is when the two parties can laugh about it together when it’s done.
If someone is just interfering with another person’s job and then smugly walking away, it’s not really a prank. They’re just being a jerk for the purpose of smug personal satisfaction at the expense of someone else.
That’s the difference. This may have been relatively easily fixed with a power cycle, but having done a lot of long days in tradeshow booths I can empathize with the poor guy in the booth who had to deal with someone deliberately interfering with his job and stressing him out. Obviously it turned out okay, but having attendees deliberately break your live trade show demos for laughs sucks.
Hm, that's now how I have the definition of a prank in my dictionary. To me it is a practical joke which usually has two required components, a prankster and the person the prank is being played on. Audience optional. To assume that they both have the same sense of humor seems to be a recipe for disappointment.
This is everyday life at tradeshows. Seriously. I've had people trying to destroy 100's of thousands of $ for kicks to see if the gear was as solid as we claimed it was. (it was).
As tradeshow pranks come this really does not register.
> at the expense of someone else
That's a prerequisite for a prank, it is quite literally played on someone else by definition, without that it isn't really a prank.
Whether you can see the humor of it or not depends on your personal make-up. People ring the doorbell here occasionally. I have a pretty badly injured right leg. So I go down a couple of flights of stairs to open the door.
Every now and then this includes neighborhood kids who will be in hiding at the end of the driveway. Usually their giggling gives the game away. Needless to say, their sense of humor is different than mine on this subject. That does not mean that I don't think it isn't a successful prank from their perspective, in fact the fact that they know this probably adds to the spice.
But then I think 'they're just kids' and leave it at that.
All the 'holier than thou' and concern trolling in this thread is completely over the top, in real life people pull pranks, some laugh, some don't. But it's not enough to go judge people to the degree that is done here.
In fact there's a common saying "It's just a prank bro" (1) which is used when people do questionable things as "pranks", almost always causing the other person to get worried. And (un)fun fact, courts have not taken kindly to these "pranks" (2, 3).
Side note, if you are interested you could put up a note with a message saying that you have an injured leg and take longer to come to the door. It might help delivery folks, and may also reduce/stop children from ringing the bell.
1. knowyourmeme.com/memes/its-just-a-prank 2. https://www.legaldefense.com/blog/2021/april/when-is-it-not-... 3. https://www.boydbuckingham.com/2018/04/whats-funnier-than-a-...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Tappan_Morris
Here we venerate such people.
And as computer related pranks go, this one was pretty mild and required some pretty intimate knowledge of the device. If I had been in that booth I would have engaged the person to see what else they know about it and why.
At the very least i would hope we have better morality arguments than simple appeals to authority.
To be clear, i object to the notion that its wrong to criticize/debate the behaviour and ethics of others. I'm not really objecting to the original post about the trade show prank.
That's got to be the mother of all strawmen. No, obviously, I do not.
But in this particular case it is about something that is very much the sort of thing that your average hacker would do given the opportunity. Hacker used in the 'old school' sense of: technically inclined person who likes to tinker with stuff and use it in ways unforeseen by the original creators.
It's what we live for.
> To be clear, i object to the notion that its wrong to criticize/debate the behaviour and ethics of others.
I'm fine with debate. I'm not ok with off the cuff judgments. Essentially the OP simply knew more about the device than the trade show staff (which, unfortunately isn't all that rare), they used the exposed user interface to do the sort of thing that it was supposed to be able to do because that capability was purposefully built in to it.
That they put it to a novel use is what makes it interesting.
Sure. i don't disagree. I think that's rather orthogonal though.
I'm objecting to the notion that we should avoid lines of debate, not because they are wrong, but because they are "chilling". Uncomfortable truths usually are (without neccesarily claiming that this is one).
I don't think I can do it justice in this comment, but I do encourage you to try to read about it and understand what this sort of mischief meant to people. You obviously understand something about its downsides, especially from the perspective of the broader culture / "the suits," but I do encourage you to try to understand something about its many virtues.
Whilst appreciate the hacking, and the salesman could ask. Still I am not sure the original hp hacking is great.
But the removal of wait 6502 is appreciated. The creator or the author is not the only authority in the creator world.
It depends.
Was a great week. I still have a copy of the email that Cliff Stoll sent around, a couple of days later. When the email servers had stopped twitching...
Just a minor point: Did he actually serve jail time? The Wikipedia article you link to says he got probation
It looks like you are correct, gaffe on my part, thanks for the correction.
If I was a manager with purchasing power I would have viewed it as proof that the machine was programmable and wasn’t just a “toaster” that had been built to do one thing and only one thing. It’s not like he made the machine generate garbage noise, displaying set text on the fly wasn’t a commodity back then as far as I know
(edit) I just realized I'm drunk and this has nothing whatsoever to do with your post. Just a memory that seemed vaguely relevant. Disregard.
That's because it was almost 30 years ago, not 40 ;)
I worked in a computer store, the number of pranks that people got up to with the gear there was insane and some of them were quite a bit more harmful than this one. I really don't see the problem. As long as you can reboot the device no harm done. Once people start flashing your systems or rewriting boot loaders we're in different territory.
If you want to verify it for yourself the manual is here:
https://www.google.com/search?q=HP8566+spectrum+analyzer+ope...
I guess I could have prevented a lot of HN grief if I had clarified that a AC power cycle absolutely clears all display memory and completely eradicates anything that I had put there.
I'm really surprised at the venom and all the extrapolation here.
Obviously, nobody should be judged by the stupid pranks they pulled decades ago, it's like telling my neighborhood kids that they are terrible people for ringing my doorbell.
By the way, awesome piece of gear. I never owned one but did work with one at a physics institute in Amsterdam on Sundays when the place was deserted.
As for tradeshow pranks... never mind. ;)
Oh, and just in case some pedantic HN reader notices that the manual you linked comes up for the 8566B, which did not hit the market until 1985, and that was less than 40 years ago, I had actually read the manual for the 8566A which was released in 1978. I think the HP event was in '83 at the Hyatt Regency Long Beach.
Also, it sounds like a power cycle cleared up the issue so no big problems.
I don't know that a power cycle cleared the issue up, a reset definitely didn't. OP just said the salesperson power-cycled it, not that that fixed it.
I agree, why not have an technical guy there who knows how to operate the thing and can support the sales guy? If the company is sending only sales guys with no in-depth technical knowledge to a trade show, it's fully understandable and well-deserved if this sort of thing happens.
> why should he know every last intricacy of the machine?
If I am buying an expensive piece of hardware you better believe I will ask questions about the intricacies and if I don't get answers I will not be buying.
is this the kind of culture you want? no one can ever share bad things theyve done, ever? lets all lie and say we're sinless?
you "feel bad" for how "extremely inappropriate" that was? how tiny is your worldview that this is the cause you think needs correcting?
maybe add something to the conversation instead of calling someone shitty for a decades old action. how are people suppossed to recover from real problems if this is how you treat some meaningless, damageless 5 minute prank?
shovelling embarassment and guilt is the most unhealthy and unproductive forum environment possible.
That's good to know, but there are lots of folks here who defend the poster's actions to varying degrees, which I find odd. It feels like the poster is more mature (now) than some other commenters.
And well, probably many do not care as sales guys are not much respected here.
(and I have my bias too, but I do not like generalisations too much, in the sense if this idiot sales guy could not fix his machine, bad for him, no harm done to real people)
Sales guys that desire to close deals should know their stuff.
OPs story ended with him walking away, leaving a state of mess.
Indeed funny in a way and maybe even warranted, depending on the sales guy. I cannot judge that. I have not been there.
But it is not correct to judge it harmless, when a real person suffered potential real harm.
Yes, and that's a much scarier prospect for the sales guy today than it was 40 years ago.
Seriously, I've been on tons of trade shows, both in the booth and as a visitor, I'd have definitely struck up a conversation with the guy to see where and how he learned so much about the device. That also would have all but guaranteed getting my device back in pristine working order and a pointer to some information about it that I apparently had missed.
So no, this was not about showing device capabilities. Nor about striking conversation. This was about feeling good and superior for making someone frustrated.
(And no, which is not even same as not caring about other peoples feelings, this is about being happy about their feelings being negative.)
Could the prankster have done better? Sure, no doubt, but it's not as bad as people make it out to be. Could the salesperson have done better? Yes, also no doubt, having been there this was simply a missed opportunity.
Perhaps I'm too young, but I've literally never know any such a salesperson. They're there to be charismatic and friendly, and show the features for which they've been handed a script.
Their job is to drive interest, and address very, VERY high level concerns. They're not experts, else they'd (by and large) be doing something other than sales, yes?
(To be fair, it's possible that we've just eliminated reasonable expectations of salespeople, but that's not clear to me yet)
But plenty of companies sent minders and order takers, technically incompetent, they might be able to do a scripted demo but likely would not know the first thing about the actual uses of such a device.
This was about 30-40 years ago, so it's far more in the time frame where you'd have technically competent sales folk, as you'd be pitching this gear to other engineers at this trade show.
When you're at a trade show for the very field that equipment is designed for and someone is trying to pitch you a piece of equipment that's nearly double the annual salary of an entry level engineer, I think you'd be far more likely to see a salesperson knowledgeable about their gear.
Let's have a bit of perspective here.
Does that word have any meaning anymore? The extent of this was having to restart it and being annoyed.
It’s about as inappropriate as your concern trolling.
I mean, we let "literally" become a contranym, and broke an awful lot of conversations and literatary comprehension, yea?
I wouldn't call it completely harmless but like... meh, it would be funny if someone did that tbh
https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Stolen_From_Appl...
They don't do that any more on Apple Silicon machines, and the entire OS is free to download from their CDN, completely unencrypted. Still, though, the SMC on M1 machines (which is now part of the M1 chip itself, and completely different from the one on Intel boxes) continues to hold those very same keys, and they're still "secret" and omitted when you enumerate them. macOS no longer even reads them, but you can dump them with the debug tooling I wrote for Asahi Linux a few weeks ago.
$ python tools/smccli.py
m1n1 base: 0x100046dc000
Fetching ADT (0x00070000 bytes)...
[...]
[smcep] Starting up
Have fun!
>>> smc.smcep.read("OSK0", 16) + smc.smcep.read("OSK1", 16)
> 20:0x4f534b3000102010 (TYPE=0x10, UNK=0x0, ID=0x2, SIZE=0x10, KEY=0x4f534b30)
< 20:0x202000
> 20:0x4f534b3100103010 (TYPE=0x10, UNK=0x0, ID=0x3, SIZE=0x10, KEY=0x4f534b31)
< 20:0x203000
b'ourhardworkbythesewordsguardedpleasedontsteal(c)AppleComputerInc'edit: also, hello marcan! tyvm for your work :D
From Sega v. Accolade - https://openjurist.org/977/f2d/1510
>We hold that when there is no other method of access to the computer that is known or readily available to rival cartridge manufacturers, the use of the initialization code by a rival does not violate the [Lanham Trademark] Act even though that use triggers a misleading trademark display.
I seem to remember a similar case for the Gameboy ROM that needed to contain an image of the Nintendo trademark to boot, but couldn't find a good online reference. Lexmark tried to pull a similar stunt by claiming the ROM code in their cartridge chips was executable code in a secret language, but courts again said it was an access control code first, and thus functional not creative.
If the comparison fails, the logo was still displayed scrolling down and making the bing sound, but the Gameboy now just halts. Everyone who had one in their youth knows the black block scrolling down with no cartridge inserted, and various variants of corrupted logos if contact was bad or the cartridge broken.
This also means the Gameboy has no “OS” whatsoever, it’s all done by the games. But the system is too simple to need one anyway.
That’s also why it’s so good for writing your first emulator.
The world was a lot more reasonable before the DMCA.
My guess is that these methods involved some modchip-style tomfoolery like reset glitching or forcing values onto the bus, and could have been defeated by Sega in a future revision of the console.
But yes, the courts (or at least the 9th Circuit) have looked down on these attempts to use copyright and trademark as methods of preventing access. Of course now they have DMCA anticircumvention provisions to help out instead anyhow.
ModernVintageGamer knows his stuff well.
There's just one catch. The desktop environment requires GPU acceleration to even start, and your two options are emulating the proprietary Apple GPU, or emulating the paravirtualized Metal GPU they developed for VMs. Neither is likely to be particularly easy... it's why I tell people to not expect to be able to run a macOS VM on Linux on an M1 Mac, unless they want to write a whole Metal implementation. A plain kernel in single user mode? Sure. macOS desktop? Good luck :-).
For macOS on macOS on Apple hardware, Apple have their paravirt GPU support on both sides so it basically "just works" with minimal work from the third-party hypervisors that build on those frameworks.
That basically enforces in hardware what has always been the commercial position of OSX: open kernel, closed (and ruthlessly guarded) desktop libraries.
....hmm, now I think about that I realize it wouldn't have many non-tinkering oriented use cases. Right now I can only think of out-of-band firewalling.
The hypervisor I wrote for research purposes passes through all the hardware (except the UART), which is easier than trying to do it on top of Linux. But it also doesn't try to be a secure hypervisor or anything like that (it would be trivial for the guest to take over).
Your karma check for today:
There once was was a user that whined
his existing OS was so blind,
he'd do better to pirate
an OS that ran great
but found his hardware declined.
Please don't steal Mac OS!
Really, that's way uncool.
(C) Apple Computer, Inc.
Rather than just copy those characters into their ROMs, the clone companies would add "NOT IBM" to get around any copyright claim - with the letters "IBM" in the same memory location as the originals of course. I discovered this when hacking on an Elonex PC - if anyone remembers those.
Imagine running into that problem during that era. No stack overflow, no Google. Just "MICROSOFT!" and confusion.
Chances are, someone who actually needed to do "WAIT 6502, x", which is a pretty bespoke statement especially if there is no widely documented device or (interrupt-modified) system variable behind it[1], would be able to figure out the easter egg. And then probably race to publish it in a magazine somehow, so that its existence could be repeated many many times in the press over the decades, which is pretty much what happened.
[1] If that were the case then the easter egg couldn't be there almost by definition.
https://www.pagetable.com/?p=43
Bill Gates showed up in the comments :-)
His name links to his page
But if you're not, then I'll tell you that there's really nothing left of Auschwitz III (Monowitz). It's all demolished and it is a rural neighborhood now. Only a few scattered remnants, like this one-man concrete shelter for an SS guard: https://goo.gl/maps/ThX17MZKURGsAnbLA
I enjoy a lot when old folks set up YT channels to tell interesting stories from the 70-90s, the stereotypical YouTube are young people or people that just talk about current stuff.
Recently I found the channel of the legendary Hip Hop producer DJ Premier, he uploads a series called "So Wassup? DJ Premier's Salute to the Floppy Disk" where he told stories of how his 90s songs come to life, so many good stories from that, recommended! Here is the playlist https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LJj47po2m-w&list=PLWDrXC9_8K...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Plummer_(programmer)
...on this exact topic including a follow up where Bill answers his email about it.
Story:
Answer from Bill Gates on it:
I will be sad when this will not be possible anymore because the devices became too closed.
Thank you Leonard!
One product I worked on (ahem, no names) we had written an easter egg and hooked it up and everything, then we got cold feet. Not because of any silly rules, but because we realized it truly would have been bad for the product and the company if the egg had caused something to go haywire. We looked at each other, then unanimously decided to remove it. Masking the true purpose of that check-in was actually much harder than hiding the egg to begin with. :-)
"I'm a pro-easter egg ideologue and will tolerate no software that does not contain such silliness, nor should any other rational, stable, intelligent person!"
There, now it's your turn.
But unless I know your position on Easter eggs then I cannot accurately determine to hate you or not.
Q.E.D.
But having them in heavily used security critical programs like curl is just asking for a heartbleed/log4j/etc type incident.
Of course it can be abused if the only thing being delivered is a hard copy. I'm a bit surprised that the original source code wasn't delivered and the customer built it themselves. But assemblers often ran on mainframes, and that wasn't cheap.
That microreboot paper is in my top-k list.
https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=1826342037496418991...
Or were you thinking about persisting consistent state for failure recovery after a power failure?
What's your top-k list?
Armando Fox's crash-only software paper is also very inspiring.
Anyway, I don't have a formal top-10 (k) list of papers I think are interesting. These two papers definitely changed the way I think and to me that was the profound self-aware meta-effect. I realized that papers can change your mind, so that is my primary criteria for interestingness. The results are amazing too, in certain fields, like Astrophysics/Biology they are answering the big questions. But the little stuff down here, these facts are staring us right in the face all the time. The new mental model or device that allowed us to see that new fact is the real innovation in human cognition. The x-rays allowed us to see inside, but the act of seeing inside enabled us to realize what other things can we "see inside of". In a way, ML is a digital x-ray, enabling us to "see inside of" things we wouldn't think about even asking.
So on the top-k list, anything by Hofstadter. Esp "Analogy as the Core of Cognition" and the papers by https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=Z4y_Z3sAAAAJ and all the videos by Robert Sapolsky. Omissions are not a sleight. :)
If the computer was just sitting at the basic prompt it wasn't doing anything anyway.
There were so many ways in which this interaction could have gone. He could have a side chat with the author, talked about other instances where this did work etc. But no, he had to try to assert dominance in this really weird way, and when it didn't work, it made him mad.
They stuck a trojan in customers' code, not refected on the source code they were obliged to provide. And, delivered the source only as a listing, to make it harder to catch.
Depending on the contract, it might have been out-and-out fraud.