Technology Legends: Myths and Their Debunking

In previous issues of the magazine we have already told you some blood-chilling legends from the world of technology. Now it’s time to present you with new tales, heard directly from technological old-timers.

XEROX’s head of security never left his post. Where else was he supposed to go? He never had any children before his 35th birthday, he had no wife – smart and beautiful. The only entertainment in his non-working life was to treat his alcoholic brother from alcoholism and to convince his wife that everything would be all right. 

And on that day he was as usual carrying out his combat task steadfastly – he yawned tiredly and occasionally looked at the monitors through the newspaper. But just as the security chief reached for a doughnut, which was lying on top of a glass of cold coffee, the figure of Steve Jobs in a long trench coat suddenly appeared in front of him. While the brave boss was frantically remembering whether the company had a panic button, Steve Jobs deftly picked up the cup of coffee, poured the drink in the guard’s face and ran down the corridor. The head of the security service, not having remembered the existence of the panic button, wiped the remains of coffee from his face and immediately ran after the Apple company founder. 

“Why did you come here, Stevey,” he shouted as he ran out of one more office, ”What did you want?” Running through the next door, the security chief dropped his flashlight in surprise and splashed his hands, “Oh, yeah! The GUI and the mouse are pilfered, you Dog!”

The story that Apple stole the user interface from Xerox PARC is as old as the world and pops up every time the company releases a new product. Old-timers of this story literally savor the details, telling that Steve Jobs plagiarized the code and general functionality of the Xerox PARC GUI for Macintosh. And they are sure to remind the creator of Apple of his legendary phrase: “Good artists borrow, bad artists steal”.

The story goes like this: Apple CEO Steve Jobs saw the Xerox PARC at a trade show and then stole the PARC GUI implementation without permission to create a GUI for the Apple Lisa and Macintosh.

In fact, Apple was given permission to attend Xerox PARC. In the late 1970s, Apple was preparing to issue stock, and the industrial giant Xerox was interested in buying Apple’s share. Consequently, in 1979, Steve Jobs and several top Apple employees visited Xerox’s R&D center called Palo Alto Research Company (PARC). In exchange for the opportunity to invest in Apple stock before its public offering, Xerox allowed Steve Jobs a glimpse into one of the most advanced technology centers where the best minds were working on innovations that Xerox could use to develop new products. 

One such development was the Xerox Star computer, which utilized several revolutionary ideas. Among them there was a graphical interface and a mouse that became an essential part of any computer. 

Eventually, in 1981, Xerox introduced the Xerox Star, a machine equipped for offices for $16,595. A good deal. And users had to buy several of these computers at a time, so that later they could combine them into a local network. Less than two years later, Steve Jobs introduced the Lisa computer for $9,995, and a year later the Macintosh was introduced for $2,500. In addition, Apple provided compensation in exchange for various Xerox PARC ideas, including the GUI.

After coincidences like that, you can believe anything. But wait. 

It’s not right to say that Steve Jobs simply copied Xerox’s solution. There are significant differences between Apple’s interface and Xerox PARC. Apple had to invent its own architecture, resources and files to keep window placement and localization separate from code, definition routines, system extensions and configurations for drag-n-drop (a mechanism for moving data within the UI), desktop accessories, control panels, and more. 

Apple took the basic concepts demonstrated at Xerox PARC and invented the architecture that is used in modern computers today.

Did Xerox succeed in proving in court that they are the original inventors of the Apple Mac interface? No. The U.S. federal court rejected Xerox’s claims to copyright Apple’s interfaces.

By the way, Apple liked to joke about its competitors, and employees of the corporation even created easter eggs in their products to rib other companies. 

For example, the British multimedia corporation Apple Corps, founded by The Beatles, got it. Because of similar names, the company, which was founded by Steve Jobs, was banned from the music business by the court.

But it didn’t really want to enter the music business.

The proceedings resumed when Apple computers added sound recording capability in the mid-1980s. “Xylophone”. Apple Corps lawyers deemed the name “too musical”. 

In response, Apple employees jokingly suggested a new name for the buzzer – “Let It Beep”, similar to The Beatles’ hit song “Let It Be”. The lawyers objected again, to which Steve Jobs replied, “So sue me”. Eventually the name was changed to the consonant Sosumi, which is supposedly of Japanese origin.

But that’s another story. 

In a scary-scary city, in a scary-scary street, stood a scary-scary building. The building was so scary that even the wind, flying moths, and not at all timid bats avoided it. On the dilapidated floor of this building sat a man and, swaying from side to side, said “Do you know who sank the Titanic? I did. Do you know who shut down Futurama? I did. Do you know who invented the perpetual motion machine? I did.”

The man’s voice was echoing off the damp walls, and an empty vial labeled “Truth Serum” was rolling across the cold floor.

To begin with, truth serum has nothing to do with serums or truth. 

It all started with a slick obstetrician who, back in 1900, anesthetized his female patients with a mixture of scopolamine, a plant alkaloid, and morphine, the panacea of the time. Dr. House, that was the name of the doctor – Robert Ernest House, noticed that after such injections, the women became talkative and willingly shared details of their personal lives (you bet, after morphine!) and even told the truth. Dr. House explained this effect by the fact that under the influence of the drug women simply did not have the strength to make up lies. 

Dr. House liked the effect of the tongue-loosening mixture so much that he decided to test the alkaloid together with the opioid on psychiatric patients, and then began to cooperate with the criminological services. He personally injected the drug into suspects, shared reports, made speeches throughout the country, and the press was happy to spread the news about the success of the phenomenal mixture of truth. 

And it never occurred to anyone to check whether expectant mothers in labor, mentally ill patients, and then suspects were really telling the truth.

It was decided to check the truth serum for authenticity only in 1990. Doctors experimented with another substance, amobarbital, which was used to awaken patients’ hidden memories of childhood traumas. Predictably, the results of the use of barbiturates were disastrous – patients one by one began to declare themselves persons of royal blood, demanded to execute the entire staff or take to the control guillotine into the office of the chief. 

And they used various “truth serums” for almost a millennium! Sodium pentothal, a barbiturate that helped with post-traumatic stress disorder. Amytal, which has relaxing properties. Hallucination-inducing mescaline. Some people were given LSD to loosen their tongues, and some were injected with cannabis under the guise of a serum. 

Nowadays it is enough to go to any bar to see those who are already voluntarily dabbling with “truth serums”. It took a century to prove that opioids, as well as alkaloids and barbiturates act differently on each person, depending on their threshold of excitability. And it is almost impossible to know exactly how tongue-lashing serum will affect a particular person without careful research. Someone will lose his tongue, someone will forget his name, and someone will declare himself a king with all the consequences. 

The interrogations must have been interesting at that time. It was indeed prestigious to be a suspect. Or a woman in labor. Or mentally ill.

A Harvard student once had an argument with a professor in his department. Feeling that he was right, he took a firm step toward the dormitory with the express intention of doing something nasty to the professor. The student went into his room, turned on his computer and started typing https://www.4chan on the keyboard. At that moment a butterfly flew into the room through the open window. It circled in the dim light of the monitor, flew around the small table, collected all the dust from the windowsill, and then sat on the student’s face and sucked the life out of him.

Indeed, a completely unremarkable butterfly made a lot of huss in 2012-2014. At the mere mention of “Cicada 3301,” conspiracy theorists start rubbing their hands together, treasure hunters dreamily roll their eyes, cryptographers become terribly proud, and annoyed programmers hastily leave their workplaces. 

All kinds of speculation went around the mysterious messages from the mysterious community with the number 3301. And it all started with a simple entry on the popular website 4chan.

“Hello. We are looking for individuals with high intelligence. To that end, we have developed a test.

There is a hidden message in this image. Find it and it will show you how to find us. We look forward to the few of you who will manage to go all the way.

Good luck,

3301”

Persons of high intelligence instantly reacted to the message addressed to them and began searching among the butterfly’s wings for the hidden message. When else would there be a chance to show their genius abilities and become exactly those “few”? By the most amazing coincidence, there were enough talents with a high IQ level in the network, and the message from the mysterious community went viral. 

For a long time, no one realized what “hidden message” was disguised in that picture. It turned out that the “hidden message” was hidden using digital steganography, and in order to find it, it was necessary to open the JPEG file in a very ordinary TXT editor. The few who were able to perform this simple operation saw the text file which read “Tiberius Claudius Caesar says, ‘lxxt>33m2mqkyv2gsq3q=j02ntk’”.

After this step, columns of people of high intelligence rowed away, giving way to persons skilled in cryptography, who immediately grasped a direct reference to the “Caesar cipher,” one of the oldest and simplest encryption systems, which involves simply shifting the characters of the alphabet by a given number of characters. The clue to the number of characters was contained in the name Tiberius Claudius Caesar. Emperor Claudius, a scholar and senator proclaimed ruler of the Roman Empire after the assassination of Caligula, who had become quite annoying, was the fourth in this position. A four-character offset gave the web address https://i.imgur.com/m9sYK.jpg, which, when accessed, revealed an image of a duck with the caption, “Oops, looks like you can’t guess how to get the message out”.  No more, no less.

Even venerable cryptographers were lost at this step. It turned out that the text about the false trail was a false trail itself and a hint at the same time. The phrase “looks like you can’t GUESS how to get the message OUT” referred to the OutGuess utility. This steganographic software was designed to hide data in the most redundant bits of file content, and was routinely included in Linux Debian and Arch Linux software repositories during the years in question.

Picture after picture, the tasks became more sophisticated and tricky. In search of answers to the questions, people with high intellect had to run around the city to find the coveted poster with an image of the cicada and a QR code for the next puzzle, to guess phone numbers, which gave further instructions. To solve complex mathematical theories, to refer to philosophy and ancient literature. And the game, invented either by a psychopath or by a genius, was gaining momentum, drawing more and more people into its womb. 

The mystery and unpredictability of the secret organization captured thousands of minds around the world. In the network there even appeared a community “Unlocking the Cicada” and the process of solving the game went into cooperative mode. The creators of “Cicada” didn’t like it at all and in one of the riddles they reported, “Guys, we want the best, not the followers.” 

“So, what was everyone working so hard for?” you may ask. For nothing. Just for the sake of it. 

Some liked solving puzzles, the others liked coming up with puzzles. And then everyone wanted to see how it would end. 

As usual, all mysteries give rise to a lot of legends. Cicada 3301 was credited with ties to the US National Security Agency, the CIA, MI6 and even the Freemasons. Some have claimed that Cicada 3301 uses puzzles to recruit the smartest people into intelligence or high-tech organizations. Some speculated that Cicada 3301 was a project related to the development of artificial intelligence. According to this theory, the riddles were tests created and analyzed by the superintelligence itself to improve its thinking and skills of interacting with people. Cicada was assigned a connection to the darknet, and some believed that the organization was selecting people for a closed club for intellectuals. 

Everything would be fine, but not a single person who was able to pass all the subtly intricate puzzles to the end, never found an invitation to the elite club, did not get access to secret resources, did not participate in the creation of a new global order or have high government awards. Persons who, according to the idea of the creators of “the most mysterious game of the Internet” should have been proud of their successes, instead were reluctant to give interviews, preferring to keep all information about themselves secret. Is this how winners behave? More likely, this is how those who lost at the very beginning, dreaming of membership in an elitist club or a job in high positions, would behave. 

All of Cicada 3301’s secret puzzles involved solving cryptographic problems such as permutation ciphers, cracking RSA keys, or using a well-known tool to extract code from an image. The puzzle creator used tor servers and published his messages on twitter, reddit and 4chan. Not a very complicated scheme. 

But in order to give it a special ambiguous flavor, it was necessary to set up several temporary phone numbers, where you had to call in order to find out the clues and put up ads in public places. But, as well, anyone can do this, as long as they have access to Google and a few internet friends to help.

Cicada 3301 used a lot of prime numbers in its puzzles because prime numbers are in cicada cycles. It’s a good explanation, but it doesn’t take a secret team of geniuses to figure it out. The math part of the puzzles wasn’t difficult either. There were a lot of understatements in the open clues, and some of the tasks indicated that you had to guess an impossible hash code. In short, “go somewhere I don’t know where, fetch a thing I don’t know which.”

The creators of Cicada just kept repeating the same thing, sending people from one website to another. Eventually all the clues went deep underground, leaving all participants with the idea that they had found someone who had passed the screening. Most likely, everyone received a failure notice, and there were no winners because there was nothing to win. 

To be fair, it should be added that the thing was interesting. After all, the creators of the global puzzle managed to pull people away from boring journeys on public transportation, from thoughts of hateful work and cold pasta. And the game may have given some people suitcases of worldly wisdom.

“Help me, Professor, I can’t take it anymore,” an exhausted thin girl collapsed on the couch and undid the top button of her blouse. “I have nightmares all the time. Moreover, in these dreams I do things completely out of character: I walk on the ceiling and kill monsters, argue with my colleagues, who in my dreams look like toothy sharks, I trip people up, swear like a cobbler and endlessly visit the same maze.”

The professor carefully wrote down every word of the girl, put the notebook aside and tapped the wooden back of his chair three times. Then he turned off the lights in the room, and put a bandage of thick cloth around his neck. The girl noticed how his eyes got bloodshot, his skin had turned greenish, and wolf hair appeared under his shirt.

“The nightmare is repeating! My dreams were harbingers!” The girl shrieked and rushed away.

Who told you that having nightmares is bad? “We don’t care about our dreams to the extent that dreams care about us.”

Scientists conducted a comparative study in 1991 that showed that people experience positive emotions more often in real life, while fear, anxiety, unrelated emotions and sensations occur more often in dreams. In fact, two-thirds of the emotions that arise in dreams are negative. A 1996 study by the Swiss Sleep Laboratory suggests that negative emotions appear twice as often in dreams as positive ones. An analysis of more than 1,400 dream reports conducted by Tufts University showed that fear is the most predominant emotion in dreams, followed by helplessness, anxiety and guilt.

Of course, dreams also manifest positive emotions. A Norwegian study of 2001 reports that people who took part in the experiment, most often called the feeling of elation and joy after sleep. The test subjects were much more likely to experience surprise in their sleep, while anger, rage, anxiety and fear manifested in sleep in only 10 cases. 

However, the prevalence of negative emotions led scientists to suppose that during the REM phase (REM phase of rapid eye movement sleep, in which the brain is more active), emotional experiences, especially stressful or self-esteem threatening ones, are integrated. This assumption also corresponds to the evidence that dreaming during the REM phase is a kind of autonomous process of processing information that relates to survival. As we fall asleep, we relive the emotions we haven’t worked through during the day. The brain refuses to “let the situation go”, and sleep becomes the only place where we can express ourselves from the heart – to say what we did not dare to say, to do what we would never do. When we dream, it’s as if we are renewing our self-image. 

Of course, there are nights when dreaming doesn’t have much to do because life holds no surprises during this period, but for the most part, we go to bed with the baggage of some unresolved emotional issues. It may be a minor blow to self-esteem or a serious upset over some event. It could be anxiety before an important meeting or a vivid memory of a joyful moment. These are the emotions that have to be processed overnight in order to face the new day with new strength. 

When a person enters the REM phase of sleep, the brain’s emotional memory system is activated and begins to construct the dream – recent memories are superimposed on earlier memories, and it is all connected by feeling, not logic. In a dream, a person ceases to control his thoughts, so destructive emotions of guilt and shame are replaced by real emotions. This is just the most opportune moment for the brain to bring up from the depths of consciousness all the forgotten, but not fully lived, situations. 

Therefore, if you are often visited by nightmares, rejoice. If you see good dreams, rejoice too. Even if you do not have dreams, rejoice.

Once a programmer with nerves of steel saw a blue square. It wouldn’t seem unusual – an ordinary azure quadrilateral, but for the brave programmer the blue square became a symbol of all-consuming horror. In the blue square he saw broken hopes, an interrupted cycle of life of all people on the Earth, negative devaluation and mortgage pressing on his whole gut. 

Legend has it that the blue square was drawn by Bill Gates himself. He did not like the slow and mediocre work of testers. So he decided to take a brush, blue paint and express all his feelings in the square as a sign of protest. 

However, this time too, something went wrong for the head of Microsoft.

These days, the blue screen of death is a relatively rare phenomenon. It was different in the old days. Very different. Just a quarter of a century ago, since the very first Windows 1.0 was released in 1985, Windows was notorious for its rare instability and tendency to crash at the drop of a hat. Because of that on every pole you could see homemade ads, where the service to reinstall Windows took the most honorable place. 

Because of the tendency to fall for no reason, the concept of “reinstalling Windows” acquired additional meanings. Often it was implied that girls under the pretext of this action simply invited favorite IT specialists or at least a little computer literate guys home, hoping for some romance. Oh what times!

“Once Windows-95 and Windows-98 met on the street. Windows-95 said, ‘Shall we go to a restaurant or hang out here?’”

In general, Windows crashed regularly, and it even gained some folklore. But the blue screen was not the only reason users didn’t like Windows. The list of complaints to Bill Gates’ brainchild was and still is quite large. The software giant never managed to release a product without significant bugs in its code. Hackers are constantly finding holes in it, drivers can refuse to work correctly for no reason, and software is not perfectly compatible. There are bugs even in the most basic components, including Explorer and Control Panel, where new surprises appear from time to time. The developers keep promising that Windows 11 will be devoid of all the flaws, which means that thousands of ancient peripherals will not be able to break the new operating system. Alas, the bugs are still not eradicated, and some experts assure that every year the OS becomes more and more complicated, so it is simply impossible to finally patch all the holes. And this, unfortunately, is not a tale at all. 

So who actually invented the blue screen of death?

On April 20, 1998, the founder of Microsoft together with his assistant Chris Capossela held a presentation of Windows 98. Microsoft’s founder and CEO took one of the main seats at COMDEX, where they demonstrated the incredible capabilities of the new operating system to the audience. 

To be fair, the new operating system Windows 98 was indeed a breakthrough compared to Windows 95, so hundreds of investors, experts and journalists looked with interest at the new features, which right before their eyes were made a reality. One of the features of the new OS that had to be demonstrated to the audience was Plug and Play technology, a technology for quickly identifying and configuring devices in computers and other technical devices. 

So, Chris Capossela plugged in the scanner, Windows 98 started loading software, suddenly at some point something went wrong, and as a result the Blue Screen of Death (BSoD), which is still an integral part of the desktop OS, appeared on the display.

The presentation did not go according to the plan, the attendees greeted the blue screen with loud laughter. Chris Capossela tried to troubleshoot the problem, but his attempts were futile. Then he simply smiled and said that despite the unfortunate hiccup, Microsoft was still moving “right ahead.” 

Bill Gates, who was present on the stage, didn’t press his subordinate and made a joke about how he and Chris Capossela just wanted to show the reason why Windows 98 wasn’t ready yet, and they succeeded to do it.

Much water has flown down the bridge since then, but Chris Capossela continues to be a high-ranking Microsoft employee, serving as Executive Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer. Windows 98 went to press exactly one month after the unfortunate incident, and official disk sales began in June 1998. 

We can only guess whether Bill Gates really honored his testers and whether he can draw. In the meantime, we can recall some funny anecdotes from that time.

“What do Spider-Man and Windows 98 have in common?

They’re always rebooting.” “Microsoft Windows has a number of irreparable advantages.” “Hello, three months ago I installed Windows. There has not been a single crash in the entire time I have been using it. Can you tell me what I’m doing wrong?” “Microsoft programmers are the worst off. The poor guys have no one to scold in case of trouble.”

According to a legend, a secret community of mathematicians liked to hold their meetings in an impenetrable forest. For this purpose, they noticed a hut, and every Tuesday of every month, every time at 2 o’clock gathered in it to calculate something. Stanislav Ulam, a mathematician, was a mathematician, so he was eager to make new discoveries, so he made his way through the thicket to the coveted meetings. 

This time the meeting was boring and Stanislav, armed with a pencil, began to draw on paper a grid for a chess game. This activity also seemed boring to him, so in each cell the mathematician decided to write numbers in a spiral – 3 14 15 92 65 35 89 79 32 38 46 26 43 38 32 79 50 28 84 19 71 69 39 93 75 10 58 20 9  49 44 59 23 07 81 64 06 28 62 08 99 86 28 03 48 25……

After that he decided to circle all the prime numbers, the ones that are not divisible by any numbers except itself and one, when suddenly, right in the middle of the sheet a portal to another dimension opened. The more Stanislaw Ulam gazed into the abyss that opened, the more the abyss gazed into him.

All of this, of course, is nothing more than beautiful fiction, although “Ulam’s Tablecloth” is real. It was created when the Polish mathematician Stanislaw Martin Ulam got bored at a meeting and started writing all the values of the number π in a spiral in every cell of his notebook. What was his surprise and horror when the circles began to line up along straight lines, and an interesting gap actually formed in the middle of the sheet!

At first there was no mystery in the number π. Anyone who went to school will unmistakably chalk out that the number π is the ratio of the length of a circle to its diameter, serves to draw a circle, and equals 3.14. And all those fairy tales about portals and other dimensions are nothing more than creative fantasies of restless physicists. 

The number π was really discovered in order to unmistakably draw any circle. By the way, some scientists believe that the number π was discovered by Babylonian magicians. At least the Babylonians determined π to be equal to 3.125 and with this value began to build the Tower of Babel. The project failed. It is unknown whether there was a magical providence or the inhabitants of Babylon were mistaken in calculations. 

Following the Babylonian architects, the Egyptians began to deduce the number π. They defined it as equal to 3.16, but they did not dare to build anything with such value.

In the 3rd century BC, the Greek mathematician Archimedes made the first scientific attempt to calculate the number π. It turned out that a good approximation gives the number 22/7 ≈ 3.14286. And again, no magic! By the way, later the number 22/7 was called “Archimedes’ number”.

For simple household use, the well-learned knowledge that the number π equals 3.14 is already enough. But indefatigable mathematicians continue calculating new decimal signs of the number, and as it turned out, it is very very uneasy to do it. The thing is that the number π cannot be easily calculated by long division – the number is not only irrational, but also transcendental, going beyond the limits, so it is not calculated by simple equations.

And if it is so complicated, then why calculate it at all? 

First, for very accurate calculations of some satellite orbit it is desirable to have more of these signs, or you may not be able to take off from the spaceport. For building bridges and giant structures, you also need precision. And secondly, the number π has its own scientific value. 

And that’s where the real hell begins. 

The more scientists discover the signs of the number π, the more amazed they are that in the decimal part of the number π there are no repetitions, as in a regular periodic fraction, and the number of digits after the decimal point is infinite. So it turns out that in the decimal tail of the number π you can find any conceived sequence of digits. Any sequence of digits in the decimal places of the number π will be found sooner or later. Any!

The values of the number π have your phone number and your date of birth. The π number values have credit card numbers and the lucky combination for any lottery. There are future purchase amounts and all your lucky and unlucky days. It has both the past and the future.

If you encrypt all the letters with numbers, then in the decimal expansion of the number π you can find all the world literature and science, recipes for cooking sprats and all the holy books of all religions. And this is a strict scientific fact. Nay, in the signs of the number π there are hidden works that have not yet been written and works that no longer exist. It’s all due to the fact that the sequence is infinite and combinations in number π do not repeat, consequently it contains all combinations of figures, and it is already proved. The question is how to see it all.

The English mathematician Augustus de Morgan once called the number π “the mysterious number 3.14159…, which climbs through the door, through the window and through the roof”. 

Mathematicians have done all kinds of things to understand the logic of the number sequence! Experienced cryptographers turned to all kinds of the gods of encryption to decipher the messages that are embedded in the numbers. 

Both of the groups very accurately express their assumptions that since there are no repetitions in the sequence of signs of the number π, it means that the sequence of signs obeys the chaos theory. More precisely, the number π is chaos written in digits. Moreover, this chaos can be represented graphically, and there is an assumption that this chaos is reasonable.

Para-para-pam, boom!

And if before the emergence of the word “chaos”, the number π was considered exclusively mathematical, now physicists, who know better than anyone that extraordinary claims require extraordinary proofs, have joined in the unraveling of the mysterious number.

They ventured a guess that the number π is constantly growing with different meanings, because life itself is constantly changing, space is constantly changing, light is constantly changing. And particles and light, we also know from the school program, are always inseparably connected. 

Particles and light have one thing in common – they are “lazy”, so they are always looking for the shortest possible way. It is closely related to the way light is reflected and refracted. And this way is not always the shortest one in the expression of distance, but it is always the shortest way in the expression of time. 

So maybe the number π doesn’t reveal its secrets to us because we can’t see them yet? We consider this number relative to the speed of light that we observe, but what if there is another speed of light that has not yet been identified or measured? Could it be that the number π has a second, alternative way that obeys light and time, and that is why scientists are getting more and more new values for this mysterious number time after time? 

And while scientists all over the world carefully entangle themselves in a spiral in search of the solution of the transcendental number, the number π inspires mankind to search for new words, to study new disciplines and even to write music. 

And, of course, to invent new legends.