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Flashback to the 1980s, when this IT pilot fish is fresh out of college and working for a vendor that makes turnkey business systems for lumberyards.
"The server was a DEC PDP-8 minicomputer, and applications were written in an interpreted assembly language," says fish. "Despite being very tedious to program in, this low-level language gave us programmers superpowers like being able to take control over another terminal.
"One week it was pretty slow workwise, so I started playing around with that.
"Each dumb terminal was connected to a serial port on the PDP-8. An instruction allowed me to launch a program on any of 64 serial ports. I didn't want to take over someone's port while they were actually working, so I launched a small program to look for a port that was not actively in use.
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