geo (11/18/82)
This is a true story, no names have been changed because no-one is particularly innocent. In the fall of 1979 I attended the PCC in Philadelphia. An unconventional hack who is a friend of mine, one Roger Gregory, introduced me to a friend of his, John Draper. I used to have hair down to my waist myself, but Draper was definitely the wildest, craziest, most far-out looking person I have ever met. Draper is also known as Captain Crunch, and he was apparently recognized among those who know about such things as one of the most well-known phone phreax (i.e. phone freaks) having gone to prison twice for flagrantly violating the laws against such things. (While Draper was in prison, as part of his rehabilitation programme, so he could hold a job and not be a burden on society, they taught him computer programming, but that is another story.) Anyway, later in the conference, I ran into Draper, and he asked me where Roger was. When I told him I didn't know, he told me to tell Roger that he and some friends were going to "execute a 9A". Being a polite Canadian I said "Pardon me?" To which he replied, "Tell Roger we have gone to execute a hexadecimal 9A." After I told him I didn't have the faintest clue of what he was talking about he explained very pedantically that on his favourite microprocessor there is an instruction which test the highest order bit of the accumulator, that its opcode was 9A, and that its mnemonic was... ...GETHI 9A, and that its mnemonic was GETHI