Back when SIM cards were relatively new (and credit-card sized) ca 1997 or so, the vision was that you would plug your SIM card into a landline phone to be able to make/receive calls there. I was working for Motorola at the time and I remember coming up with a couple ideas that I never shared with anyone because I didn’t know who/how.
The first was essentially the iPhone but with a palm pilot type touch screen, the other was a PCMCIA card (which were also much larger back then) that you could put your SIM card into and plug into your laptop to be able to make calls or send/receive faxes on the computer.
The main benefit for me to just know and primarily use mermaid is that it integrates with markdown in Azure DevOps and GitHub seamlessly. No need for a text to image build step or similar.
no, it was a thing back in the 90's (and likely earlier.)
The goal was to write a program that was "impossible to read". Some of the winners are seriously creative. And it's very much just smat kids and their machines...
I remember one back in the day which wasn't obfuscated at all. It was clearly a simple utility. Except that it didn't do what you thought it did, it did something completely different. (alas I can't remember the details...)
There are a number of blog posts online and StackOverflow questions explaining IOCCC entries, and they generally seem to be built/obfuscated by hand. It's an art and it's far from trivial, which is one of the reasons why the contest exists :)
That's definitely a thing. Additionally, humans are surprisingly friendly in all the wrong ways when it comes to physical security (tailgating, "forgotten ID/credentials", etc.).