Hmmm...once at Caltech someone got into my account on the PDP-10 and all they did, as far as I could tell, was fix some bugs in a program of mine I was having trouble with.

I never did find out who did it. I wonder if it was Walter?

I was an overly obnoxious frosh at the time and I'm certain I was quite annoying to the older students who frequented the terminal room such as Walter (I think he would have been a junior at the time).

And I'm certain Walter was aware of me, because he had once either targeted me in a prank or used me in a prank against someone else (or perhaps both--I've never been clear on who was the target). The someone else was one of the system admins, Bill. Bill really liked playing Walter's game "Empire".

So one day I was sitting at a terminal hacking away at something and I got a message via the system for sending a text message to another terminal from Bill telling me to not do what I just did again or I'd be in trouble and have my account suspended.

I had no idea what he was talking about. A while later I got another message. Bill seemed really annoyed with me. I then got summoned to his office. He was really mad. He said I keep sending him rude messages, like telling him to stop playing Empire and get his fat ass back to work.

I denied sending these messages and he was not buying it.

And then another insult from me came through while I was there in his office.

Bill then started to maybe believe me, and went to Walter's directory to look at the Empire source. Sure enough, Walter had recently added code that checked for Bill playing while I was also logged on, and would fake rude and insulting messages from me from my terminal to Bill.

And that is why I will never use a compiler from Walter if there is any way the compiler might be able to tell I'm the one using it. :-)