Self-Destruct Activated

I was really reluctant to get into computers, even though they looked really cool. The computer in our study/computer lab at dear old Concord High was just like you see in old movies — switches, blinking lights, tape readers (not magnetic tape — paper tape). And, like every computer in every movie and Star Trek episode I’d ever seen, I expected it would probably explode.

The guy who showed me the computer and taught me how to have the computer print out my name on the teletype terminal played into it. I almost ran from the room when my program didn’t work first time.

I always was a little in awe of computers. I expected them to be smarter than they ever were. I thought the REM statements that I typed in from the old computer book of programs did things (they are comments, it turns out, and you can leave them out). Even when I went to university and had a real mainframe on the other side of the screen, I thought the “debug” command would debug my program for me.

Star Trek computers were super smart, talked to you, and would still explode if you looked at them sideways. But even those times when they seemed to work, it would be used to do the computer’s most essential task: blowing up the starship.

I would love to shake the hand of the Starfleet computer programmer who went to work one day and wrote the self-destruct code. In today’s world, if you want to scuttle a ship, you have to place charges and stuff, it’s a whole procedure. Here, a couple of people stare into a camera and recite their absolutely non-guessable passwords, and the ship goes boom when it’s dramatically ready.

That said, if there were any vehicle in today’s world that actually had a self-destruct code, it would be a car, a certain electric car, and you are already nodding your heads. You know they have one.

One response to “Self-Destruct Activated”

Nimgimli

October 28, 2025

One wing up my high school was a big square with a courtyard in the center that we weren’t allowed to go into. But as is typical there were 2 sets of doors to get to it. Our “computer room” was the space between two of these doors.

We didn’t have an actual computer, just a paper teletype with an acoustic modem. You had to manually dial the host machines (which was at SUNY Stony Brook), listen for the screech of the modem, then the handset of the telephone would be jammed into a couple of suction cups at the back of the teletype. One presumably had a microphone inside, the other a speaker.

There was one rich kid at school who had a PDP-8 in his basement because of his father’s work and he was the envy of everyone who jammed into that hot sweaty foyer fighting for time on the 1 teletype. Sometimes literal fights would break out. Fisticuffs over who gets to use it!

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