Re: Bah!
It's nice to see people remember MAXIMOP fondly -- I'm one of the original authors.
Yes, we did overwrite passwords that way; but another lovely little thing we did when the terminal devices were all Teletypes was the "Chug". If you "printed" a "delete" character (ASCII code point 127) the Teletype would move the print head but atually print nothing on the paper. We did this every time your program ended a time-slot with no other output so you knew the system was still running for you. In one of our terminal rooms you'd hear sequences of these "chug"s coming from around the room and then repeat. We didn't panic until they stopped...
OTOH a few years later we couldn't tell the difference between real Teletypes and "glass teletypes" and overwrote the passwords on the "glass teletypes" as well. We justified this apparrent inefficiency by what later became known as "shoulder surfing"...
Incidentally, MAXIMOP ran on ICL 1900 series machines, but is still run occasionally on the ICL 2900 at the National Museum of Computing at Bletchley Park using the 2900 in a mode where it emulates the 1900. They can't do it too often because of the electricity costs...
Biting the hand that feeds IT
