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Skaperen
August 11th, 2018, 05:07 AM
this thought came to me while i was reading this post (https://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2398251) where it was said that a password was forgotten. when i read that i realized that i still remember an 8 letter passphrase i used to encrypt my personal tape storage on some IBM mainframes i was primary sysadmin for 38 years ago. i wish i had those tapes today and a way to read them. the decrypt program was the first file on each tape not encrypted.

what is the oldest password you can still remember today, even if it is useless now?

TheFu
August 11th, 2018, 10:34 AM
There was a root password on a DEC Alpha from 1993 that I still remember.

makitso
August 11th, 2018, 01:23 PM
On my phone, I used a sequence of 7 numbers to make international calls in the late 1980's. Funny, but I still use that password today to protect jpilot private entries :-)

Paddy Landau
August 11th, 2018, 07:09 PM
When I first started with computers, there was a rant in some magazine (long forgotten now) about how we shouldn't have those ridiculous passwords. Naturally, back then, the idea of data theft was nothing more than a twinkle in some renegade researcher's eye.

At that point, I always used the password y. Yup, just y.

It didn't take me long to cotton on that theft and mischief were growing deals, and I realised that I'd better start using decent passwords. Luckily, I learned the easy way, not the hard way.

lisati
August 11th, 2018, 09:24 PM
There are one or two I can remember using on an IBM Series/1 machine at university bank in 1980. Those were the days, when Pascal was gaining some attention as a good programming language to learn.

PaulW2U
August 12th, 2018, 09:41 AM
Many years ago, in the pre-Windows era, one of my former employers bought a system to record customer data and do some basic accounting functions.

I don't remember my password on the system but my manager, who would have had some higher level of access, used a password of 007.

Q. Why such a simple password?
A. Passwords were limited to a maximum of three characters.

How things have changed. :D

Skaperen
August 12th, 2018, 09:16 PM
the 3 character limits on 16-bit computers were probably from the ability to squeeze 3 characters (from a set of 40) into 16-bits. a single case of 26 letters, 10 digits, a 4 specials, was the max. that was used on an IBM model 1130 i often used. i heard it was used in some early PDP-11 systems. of course we have hashing these days and the only limits are getting password to the hashing code, so limits like 256 or 512 are no surprise. only the hash and seed are stored now, or a public key, so it's easier.

Skaperen
August 12th, 2018, 09:18 PM
i remember my phone number from 1976. i remember my neighbor's phone number from 1966.

deltamind
August 21st, 2018, 11:43 AM
1976,wow! I can barely remember birth years and you remember old numbers.

Skaperen
August 21st, 2018, 11:36 PM
there are some people with the disability of remembering everything in every day (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperthymesia) of their life. fortunately i am not one of them. and i can only remember a few digits of Pi ... 3.14159265358979 and that number has been around a fairly long time. a friend knows 100 digits of it (or at least he did when i met him in college).