New APPS

My Mom taught in a prison in the mid 1980s, which was a weird era in lots of ways.

The movie War Games had come out in 1983, and inmates as a result had very strange views about what computers could and couldn't do. Even though none of the prison computers at that point were even hooked up to ARPANET, about once a week an inmate would sneak off and get a computer and desperately try to wreak as much havoc as Mathew Broderick does in the movie, just typing pages and pages of nonsense, usually in the hope that early release could be secured but sometimes to try to launch thermonuclear warheads. It really was a very strange time to be incarcerated, alive, and computer illiterate. One could just type nearly random symbols and the machine was supposed to make proper sense of it.

Sadly, I just remembered all this stuff because I'm grading logic finals today.  The twenty-teens are apparently also a weird era.