[rld-tv01]

When I was a IBM assembler programmer for the City of Tucson Arizona around 1976 the city was using the PDP-8s for the police and fire department. They were also installing PDP-8s to run a new traffic light management system being installed. A couple friends and I were assembling a microcomputer (digital group) from a mail order kit and one of my friends invited the head traffic light engineer to help assist us. I took a comparative assembly language course at University Arizona (IBM assembler, CDC compass and DEC assembler). The University of Arizona at the time had a DEC 10 front-ending CDC Cyber 64. The CDC Cyber had what was called a pipeline process at the time including PPUs (Peripheral Processing Units) and CPUs. It didn't do time sharing well so the UofA placed a DEC10 on he front for submitting jobs to the CDC and running plotters, scanners and printers. It was at the University of Arizona that I first found out about the concept of computer hacking. Students would print out blank computer cards instead of buying them at the student union. There was the cookie monster hack where the CDC would ask for a cookie "I want a cookie". If the CDC computer operator didn't reply an answer to the cookie request the cookie monster would type out on the console and print out all the printers "gooble, gooble, gooble" and simutaneouly eat all the memory while copying itself to disks and tapes. There was another version of this code which would type "don't touch me" when the operator type on the master console then type a message and eat memory. I learned of the CDC hacks from a U of UofA computer operator who got hired by the City of Tucson as a programmer. In the CDC portion of the assembly class we learned to write code that would build dynamic code on the fly and do a hard jump and execute of the code being written.