Re: Where did you learn your skills?
Quote:
Originally posted here by Katja
And I mean your skills that involve computer security, of course. :)
Started messing with analog computers back in 19-mumble-mumble, high school. Ya know. patch cords. Make a circuit. Display on the O-Scope.
Moved up to helping a friend with his Fortran homework in college. That was the old Fortran: coding sheets, keypunch, card trays, then hope and pray it runs.
Learned to make circuit cards for some of the old Univac computers, the ones that generated the targeting instructions for Polaris and Poseidon (MIRV) missiles. Got out of that business, heh heh, y'all are still alive!
Fortran coding again, in college. BASIC without a computer. Then I bought a KayPro II.
GW-BASIC, Z-80 assembler, FORTH and Turbo Pascal. Hardware hacked my KayPro to increase power and upgrade floppy drives. Reprogrammed CP/M WordStar 3.3 to be a killer word processing app.
VAX, PDP-11. Did some "white hat" hacking. My friend was in the IT dept at the college, and I compared notes with him when I found problems. Did you know that if the login app on the VAX was done using the interpretted language, you could hack into the OS with SU priv just by pressing the <Enter> key repeatedly after putting in phoney ID and password? PRIME's, BTW, had zip security, and interesting stuff inside.
... huge blur of the last 20+ years ...
Here I am!
It's a long, strange trip.