Old Hackers Never Die, They Just Get Deleted[1]

My first job in a computerized environment that required a password actually interpreted the BACKSPACE key as a character during login; so, if you miskeyed your password, hit the backspace and continued, login would fail.

(That was at Merchants Service Bureau; they used to be on the top floor of the Old Kent Bank building that used to be on Front Street and Leonard. It's not there anymore. Merchants Service Bureau supplied customer credit information to merchants. I worked for Compulit in the basement of that building. Compulit is/was a legal consulting company that used computers to sift through documents that were opened by court order for one reason or another. We worked on green screen dumb terminals hooked up to a mainframe.)

Now, there were some very interesting menu options on our work stations that we were told never to touch. Of course, that meant I had to touch them, and I produced a very interesting screen full of odd characters; whatever I'd tapped into was binary, and long. I had no idea what I was did, but they did, and the bureau's secret police were in our basement office in short order and I was publicly flogged.

Interestingly, they weren't quite sure how much I understood about what I'd done and seen, so they flogged me with some deference, which is an altogether different experience than a humiliating flogging.

With all the audit trails and regulations today, that could never happen again, now could it.

To this day, if I miskey my password, I start over. Yes, I do use the backspace, but I remove all characters and start at the beginning. Some habits are not logical, they are simply programming.

[1]
Which only means you get removed from file allocation tables and all sorts of other digital nastiness. Oh, the analogical possibilities.