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Code that helped end Apartheid

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358 points impish9208 | 3 comments | 18 Oct 24 13:05 UTC | HN request time: 0.013s | source
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jgrahamc ◴[18 Oct 24 13:35 UTC] No.41879323[source]▶
So when he DM’d me to say that he had “a hell of a story”—promising “one-time pads! 8-bit computers! Flight attendants smuggling floppies full of random numbers into South Africa!”—I responded.

Ha ha ha. Yes, that was literally my very short pitch to Steven about Tim Jenkin's story!

The actual DM: "I think this has the makings of a hell of a story: https://blog.jgc.org/2024/09/cracking-old-zip-file-to-help-o... If you want I can connect you with Tim Jenkin. One time pads! 8-bit computers! Flights attendants smuggling floppies full of random numbers into South Africa!"

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1. rsynnott ◴[18 Oct 24 14:16 UTC] No.41879695[source]▶
Though, you could argue it was a 16 bit computer, of course :)

(It was an 8088, essentially an 8086 with an 8 bit data bus, but 16bit registers and 20bit address bus).

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2. philistine ◴[18 Oct 24 17:09 UTC] No.41881380[source]▶
At this point in time (meaning 2024) bits for computers are a word to indicate a culture rather than the technical merits of a computer.
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3. rsynnott ◴[18 Oct 24 21:00 UTC] No.41883446[source]▶
In which case it’s definitely a 16 bit computer; it was just a cheap 8086 (the cheapness achieved through the memory bus), and it was part of the start of the 16 bit era. From the _user’s_ point of view it was basically a 16 bit computer.