You may have seen those dreaded words…”reset password” and almost cried. I did. When you have exhausted all your children’s birth years, spent your graduation dates, sacrificed the last four digits of your zip code, what other numerals can you easily remember–if any of the above?
If you reset your password with something similar to what you used before, how does that inanimate machine know to tell you not to repeat yourself?
To paraphrase Rudyard Kipling, “…if you can make a heap of all your rejected passwords, and risk a new one you can’t remember, you’ll be where I am now.”
When your ten-year-old great grandson points then says, “…click on that box..” and he’s correct, you know you wasted your time learning a computer language called “Fortran”.
The year was 1968 when I first punched IBM cards, submitted my box of cards to the University of Texas computer, and watched anxiously until a stream of paper rolled out of the printer:
Two words emerged—“critical error”–followed by rows of mathematical diagnostics.
I hung the folded sheets on my graduate school cubicle. And labeled:
“The day I joined the computer revolution was a ‘critical error’.”
