[soylentcola]

Not sure how this really relates to "robots raising children" though. More just having a laugh with tech that young kids sort-of understand but don't quite grasp the limits of yet.

I remember as a kid we got a Commodore 128 computer and I was teaching myself to write BASIC programs. I had two younger brothers (I was maybe 9 years old, they would've been 6 or 7) and while they generally grasped "computers", they didn't really know the difference between what they saw in movies and what our little home computer could do.

After seeing Wargames or something like that, I wrote a program that simulated dialing into "the government" and displaying menu options. Even had the Hollywood-style one character at a time by adding delays to my PRINT commands.

Basically it was just a bunch of menu options you could pick from but in the end you end up selecting an option that commands it to launch nukes or something like that. Like I said, I was a kid so my understanding of things wasn't very subtle either.

Still, it scared the shit out of my brothers before my mom told me to quit screwing with them. Hell, we didn't even have a modem hooked up to the thing... Mom was a big no-fun.

[ansible]

OMG, my friend pulled this exact prank on his younger brother and some of our other friends. He had a "hack password" command that looked like it was trying all the combinations and some other stuff.

I don't think he had a modem at the time either... though his dad did try to build an acoustic modem from plans in Circuit Cellar. I don't recall if they ever got that working.

Good times.

[soylentcola]

Well, we did have a modem (Dad had bought the computer used from a guy at work and it came with a load of cracked software on floppies and a modem) but I think my folks were worried about me getting into trouble so they kept it stashed away somewhere I couldn't access.

Looking back it was probably a good move. No "hacking" the DOD or anything but I'm sure I'd have at least ran up some phone charges once I discovered BBSes.