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Why couldn't the amulet have been hidden by Aunt Alice, who understands modern key exchange algorithms?
this post was submitted on 19 Dec 2023
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I remember a book I read in elementary school (in the Cam Jansen series, IIRC) where the main conflict was a mean older brother put a password on the new family computer (a huge deal in the early 90s), and the younger hires the kid detective to find the password. The password is “hot dog”, ultimately determined because the desktop BG was a picture of ketchup and mustard.
I recall being not super satisfied with that ending.
I can imagine you going *"Why didn't they just hit [Esc] to bypass the password prompt, open a DOS prompt and delete the password files in C:\Windows.pwl?"
(Yes, that was actually a thing you could do on early 90's Windows 3.0)
You didn't even need to do that. You could hold down the shift key to bypass some passwords, and just click cancel on others.
Early Windows had awful security.