> > I take it this was "fool the dorm machines so you get free laundry"?
>=20
> Yeah.  They put in new Maytag machines that took these fancy plastic tick=
ets
> instead of coins.  That was a pain, since now you needed change for the
> ticket vending machine, and find a vending machine that wasn't out of
> tickets.
>=20
> The tickets were transparent red plastic with wide black lines on them.
> They looked high tech and were just asking to be hacked.  Once I looked i=
nto
> it, it was surprisingly easy to hack them.  I suspected that some of the
> black lines were conductive and others were just decoys.  This was proven
> with a little ohmmeter probing.  Then it was a small matter of cutting
> cardboard to the right size and drawing the conductive pattern with a #1
> pencil.  It worked the first time I tried it.
>=20
> The cardboard was thinner than the tickets though, and sometimes caused
> jams.  That's where Bill's micrometer came in.  Once we knew the thicknes=
s
> of the real tickets, it wasn't hard to come up with a way to emulate it,
> which in this case was two computer punch cards glued together.

Ya' know, I reckon life must have been a bundle of laughs with Olin around =
at university. Between this, the lark at the radio station (I still have th=
at archived Olin), and goodness knows what else, there was obviously a lot =
of fun to be had.

I am always amazed at the 'high tech' solutions that prove to be very low t=
ech (a bit like DVD region code locking etc). Did the machine swallow the c=
ard, or did it damage it in some way that you couldn't re-use it?


--=20
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--=20
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