I think it was actually a method for determining the combination from
scratch, based on carefully poking at the buttons in certain ways. In
fact, I still *have* that post; on the other hand, this isn't helpful,
since I still have a very very large number of posts. I tend to not
delete things that seem "interesting" in one of a thousand ways.
At the U of Manitoba, when your mailbox got close to a megabyte in size,
the system would confiscate the oldest 500 or 600 kilobytes and send you
a message basically saying "we've got your mail, we'll delete it in 7
days, we suggest you reclaim the file and call it 'oldmail' and put it in
your regular directory".
So this happened to me, over and over again, mostly due to this list, and
I started to accumulate and download these files of confiscated mail. I
believe I was up to "oldmail73" when I moved. Which equals 35 megabytes
of ASCII.
"One day I'll go through all of it..."
The great thing about electronic text is that I theoretically *could* find
the above post with something like "grep oldmail* Simplex" (since Simplex
is the brand name of those locks and is probably used in no other post),
if only I knew where all the oldmail files were. Many are probably
"temporarily" stored to floppy disks in unknown physical locations, and
there ain't no "grep" for physical objects in the real world.
-- Evan Kirchhoff, kirchh@umich.edu