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Quotation of the Day for August 5, 2013"... Bryant also played a role in the droll story of how passwords came to Yorktown. Yes, there was a time when our computers required no password! My older son's math teacher was himself learning to program, and he introduced programming to his students. Having failed to make a certain program work, he asked my son to consult an expert-me! Begged to help, Bryant entered my account, wrote the program in no time, and printed a letter-size sheet for my son and his teacher. "A few months later, our computing center manager stopped me in the hall. "I am amazed. Of the substantial computer time available in the research division, you alone are using about half. I thought you were a very theoretical person." "I am equally amazed because weeks ago I gave up programming for myself." "So how come you are such a big user?" Monitoring revealed that I was billed for a mass of tiny programs run by high school students all over the surrounding Westchester County. At least one ingenious student or teacher had realized that simply typing my name in a box connected the user to the day's biggest computer-at no charge. "At that point, the computing center staff had to assign passwords. So I can boast-if that's the right term-of having been at the origin of the police intrusion that this change represented. Of course passwords must have originated in many places, and IBM Research's turn would have come very soon." - Benoit Mandelbrot, mathematician, in his memoir The Fractalist: Memoir of a Scientific Maverick. Submitted by: Terry Labach Aug. 1, 2013  |
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