Someone asked me tonight what text I normally use in console.log when just putting a marker in the code.

I told them 'xyzzy', which necessitated explaining where that came from. Which turns out to be my hacker origin story...

1983, at the start of 8 bit home computing. I had (and still have) a Commodore 64, and I was into text adventure games (I was into D&D roleplaying too at the time so this wasn't exactly a stretch).

Level 9 software released "Colossal Adventure" which was a remake of Colossal Cave Adventure, one of the first games written for computers. I didn't know that at the time, to me it was just a great adventure game.

I played it for a while, eventually getting to a point where to progress further, you have to use the "magic word"...

I ran back through the game hundreds of times looking for clues, and weeks passed with no progress.

I got a hold of a disassembler and started on a bigger adventure.

I dug into the code looking for the magic word. And thus started the adventure of learning assembly. The magic word wasn't stored as plain text...

For its time the game was massively advanced. It ran what amounted to a virtual machine using compressed bytecode.

It took me about four weeks to reverse engineer that, and then start wading through the gamecode to find the magic word.

In the end, the magic word (XYZZY in case you haven't guessed by now) became the first flag I captured as a hacker...

#hacking #originstory #ctf