I was living in an unheated basement storeroom delivering pizzas to make a living and
writing the code that was to become the calculator. By this time I had driven my
car to Ann Arbor MI in 1992 to attend
MacHack and used the calculator in the hack contest.
I had included a help system in the calculator and had rigged it so that as I moved
the mouse in a certain way to cause the cursor to move towards the scroll bar the scroll
bar took off and moved away from the cursor until it got to the edge of the window and
then jumped out onto the desktop.
A response from the audience: "You're dangerous"
Some fellow advertized on the BMUG bulleting board for someone to do virtual reality
programming. I talked to him on the phone or by email and was given the task to create a
cube in VR space and rotate it.
What resulted is as follows:
So to approximate what the app does I opened 5 windows, selected the 3D cube from the
pallate in each one and clicked in the window to place a 3D image in the window and
clicked on the multiple rotate button once in the second window, twice in the third
window and so on as shown below:
When I tried to open a sixth window I got a window allocation error
So I closed the 5 windows and opened 5 more, selected the 3D cube from the pallete in each one
and clicked on the multiple rotate button as before, 5 times in the 6th window and started to
click 6 times in the seventh window and the app crashed
To check for crash I clicked in another of the windows
So I force quit the app and relaunched it. This time I opened 5 windows, in each of the
windows I clicked on the cube in the pallate and in the window and selected the first window and
clicked the multiple rotate button 5 times corresponding to the 6th frame in an animation that
would...
Moving on, this time the app crashed while clicking the multiple rotate button in the fourth
window. This app was written on a machine running Macintosh System 7 in 1997 on PPC and runs
under Classic on G4 and G5 Macs.
Where is this going or where could it go? Other things are more important. Finding buffer overflows in the Macintosh OS. Apple has migrated to the Intel processor, providing the hackers with a territory they are familiar with after years of bringing the Windows users to their knees, the intel instruction set.