Simulating the PIN cracking scene in Terminator 2 @bertrandom

Bertrand Fan was thinking about that scene from Terminator 2 recently which led to googling, “What’s that laptop in Terminator 2?” It’s an Atari Portfolio, the world’s first palmtop computer. It was released in June 1989.

The next thing I wondered was, “How difficult would it be to write that program?” Not a program that actually cracks PIN numbers from debit cards, I don’t think you can actually do that with a serial cable and some aluminum foil wrapped around a debit card, but a program that can simulate the output of the palmtop in that scene.

It’s pretty involved, installing Turbo Pascal in a MSDOS-like operating environment.

See all the steps in the blog post here.