I was working out of the castle on the night watch when a call came in from the chief...
Being on a night shift allowed me plenty of time to check stuff out while waiting for the automated equipment to finish a test. Inspection had a DEC **** (something) that tested wiring harnesses for various equipment we were building. I was assigned to hook them up and run the continuity/short tests.
I was a mere trained (slightly) monkey that pushed the buttons in the right sequence. As I knew nothing of big coumputers at the time, I was curious as to their inner workings.
The lab had plenty of books, and I found a BASIC manual.
After a little reading I figured out the 'basic' stuff needed and was soon writing little programs that ran on the testing computer.
I found out that out MAINFRAME (in a special room all it's own; complete with the guys in white labs coats) ALSO RAN basic.
We had dumb terminals thruout the plant that any one with a password could use to enter various types of data for record keeping.
It would sit there with it's entry page, just waiting for someone to talk to it.
If you typed in the wrong password, it would tell you so and go back to the entry page again. (I suppose you could a bunch of them; hoping to find someone elses...)
Did I mention the system wasn't too reliable? I guess the big machines we had running throut the plant would cause glitches that made stuff go goofy, show a bunch of random characters on the screen and then locking up.
Once you DID gain entry to the system; it was YOURS! (Well a LOT of it I guess.)
The * meant it was ready to run something; ANYTHING that you told it to do.
Yes, BASIC was a word it would accept, and then you could write or run a BASIC program that it had stored.
You know it took very little code to put up a FAKE entry screen?
The next person who came behind me found what LOOKED to be a normal configuration, but when they tryed to use it, it would store their password for me, and loop back for them to try again.
Now it's easy to ASSUME that you typed it wrong; so you do it again; with the same results.
But this time it jumped out of the loop, printed some random characters on the screen and then went into an infinite looping, causing a REAL hangup.
The only way out was the same way as reseting the terminal: the escape key.
This also was the way to get the REAL entry page back.
I collected some doozy passwords, but never could figger out what to do with them since I already had access anyway.
I guess I was phishing before the term was invented.