Lance McDonald is an Australian video game developer with a particular passion for coding in BASIC. He made an entire video game, Black Annnex, in almost pure QBASIC.
So it’s safe to say he knows his stuff. But the real question here is – does Bob from Stranger Things? In that episode, in that scene – just how legit was it? Lance knows.
Enter the best twitter thread I’ve seen in quite some time.
This article has been retimed to coincide with the third season of Stranger Things this week.
Let’s critique Bob’s BASIC pic.twitter.com/gjWtpCWcEz
— Lance McDonghard (@manfightdragon) November 16, 2017
To start with, this is a man who DIMs his variables. That’s a solid guy to have on your team right there. Immediately a good dude.
— Lance McDonghard (@manfightdragon) November 16, 2017
DIM is totally optional, he could just throw that variable at the system and let it go nuts with whatever default variable type it’s set to, but on. He knows what he wants, and he wants an INTEGER.
— Lance McDonghard (@manfightdragon) November 16, 2017
Next up he just goes straight into a BEAUTIFULLY indented 4-deep FOR loop, i j k and l. All lowercase. A modern man. Stylish. Good. He’s got this.
— Lance McDonghard (@manfightdragon) November 16, 2017
FourDigitPassword is back. We know this is an integer, and he’s gonna use some function we’ve never heard of called getFourDigits. That lowercase “g” in “get” tells us he didn’t make that function off-screen. Some API here? No one knows.
— Lance McDonghard (@manfightdragon) November 16, 2017
What could getFourDigits be? I imagine it’s some proprietary stuff they’re using at Hopkins’ Lab here, probably generates some 4 digit integer, I guess. Love the use of () around the parameters, that’s a genuine BASIC FUNCTION there.
— Lance McDonghard (@manfightdragon) November 16, 2017
Okay so he’s got an IF … THEN next, but what is this other function? checkPasswordMatch. That lowercase “c”, Hopkins uses Camel Case for their internal stuff I guess, whereas Bob is more of a Pascal Case guy. No sweat.
— Lance McDonghard (@manfightdragon) November 16, 2017
He’s got an = TRUE in there, but he hasn’t defined TRUE as a CONST anywhere. No problem, it’s probably already defined in whatever environment they’re using here. Impossible to know what it is, though!
— Lance McDonghard (@manfightdragon) November 16, 2017
GOTO 140. Yeah no problem, if the password he’s dug out of the RAM or whatever matches the Hopkins password checking function, output the password to the screen. Makes sense, solid, no sweat. Easy.
— Lance McDonghard (@manfightdragon) November 16, 2017
But Bob… BOB… WHAT IS THIS? You can’t just throw an “END” there. You can’t end an IF BLOCK like that! Surely no environment would accept that! You gotta use “END IF”! You expect me to believe you can end and IF BLOCK with “END”?
— Lance McDonghard (@manfightdragon) November 16, 2017
We’ll just have to take his word for it. He knows this system. We don’t. Keep going man.
— Lance McDonghard (@manfightdragon) November 16, 2017
Oh baby. This is the good stuff. His indentation is so beautiful that his NEXT statements are already self explanatory, but he goes so far as to append the variable names to the end of the NEXTs? Art. Sure, they COULD be required by this system, but…
— Lance McDonghard (@manfightdragon) November 16, 2017
I believe that either way, Bob is a man who throws out a full “NEXT j” when a “NEXT” would have been perfectly valid syntax.
— Lance McDonghard (@manfightdragon) November 16, 2017
Alright so we’re back outside our deep next of FOR NEXTs and we’re outputting whatever password it ended up finding. Impossible to know if it is the correct password, or the FOR statements just finished their loops, but he’s gonna have to trust it.
— Lance McDonghard (@manfightdragon) November 16, 2017
AND HE THROWS OUT AN “END” JUST TO BE SURE. Not confident letting the interpreter decide how this is going down. He knows what he wants, and he wants an END. Done. He”s got this shit on lock. Bob. Jesus. So perfect. So good.
— Lance McDonghard (@manfightdragon) November 16, 2017
At the end of the day, it’s a solid bit of password brute force software. He knew there’d be a BASIC interpreter on whatever terminal they had there, hell, he founded the town’s AV company, he probably sold it to them.
— Lance McDonghard (@manfightdragon) November 16, 2017
It sounded crazy when he blurted out “DO YOU KNOW BASIC?!” but he already knew exactly how he was gonna handle this. He nailed it. Heroics.
— Lance McDonghard (@manfightdragon) November 16, 2017
And what spurred on this critique/worship?
“I was just annoyed at how many people are like ‘THIS IS THE DUMBEST SCENE IN STRANGER THINGS YOU CANT RESET A BREAKER WITH BASIC CODE’ like as if this was some CSI; Cyber level shit,” Lance told me.
“He’s just writing a brute force password retriever on an interpreter that would be on EVERY computer in that era that he probably sold the company and already knew how to use like jeez it’s a good scene.”
If you’re keen to hear more of Lance’s retro tech insights, you might want to check out his YouTube channel here.
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