(Not a FreeBSD topic)
A long time ago, in my teens, I watched movie Sneakers and was very impressed by it. It was exactly how I imagined hackers at work: bare PCBs, signal probes, de-scrambling encrypted information right on the screen. I was so impressed by the latter part that I went to re-create a bit of “No more secrets” scene using the only technologies I knew back then: Turbo Pascal running on MS-DOS. It wasn’t an exact replica but it was close enough and I was quite happy with the result. The program itself hasn’t survived my numerous moves from one apartment to another and got lost along with all the floppy discs sometime in the early aughts.
Recently I re-watched the movie and turned out that it holds up pretty well and still fun to watch. I thought that it would be a fun experience to re-create my small demo and check if I still remember any of the Pascal and DOS APIs. Equipped with Pascal for PC book published in ’91, some MS-DOS guides from the internet and a Guinness 4-pack I walked a short walk down the memory lane and it was fun. The result is published on Github. The demo in action:
