re: My issues with stranger things season 2 (spoiler thread)

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Oh dear. He didn't reprogram the computer, he flipped the main breaker and then entered a few basic commands to start the system back up. Computers were not particularly advanced back in the 80's, anyone with any computer knowledge could have pulled that off.

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Assuming BASIC programming was necessary to restart that system was like typing JCL into an Atari 400 and expecting it to do something. What he did was write four nested loops to exhaustively search a four digit password by calling a "checkPassword" subroutine, which is plausible but requires him to find a system running BASIC that's hooked into the security system and advertises the name of a subroutine that has no lockout protection, and none of it works if it isn't a simple short length PIN he's after.

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It was amazingly realistic actually. Far more so then most movies and TV shows manage to pull off.

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It at least made some sense compared to the snippets of code and exposition gibberish you see in most shows, but Bob's surety of his assumptions and ease of carrying them out were anything but "realistic."