I have a magic number.
It’s been a number that I invented as part of an experience with a scientific calculator when I was in the 8th grade (circa 1994-1995). The calculator I possessed had the ability to convert between different number bases, specifically between decimal, binary, octal, and hexadecimal. Being the child I was I saw potential with using the calculators hexadecimal alphabet and writing letters and numbers together.
An example would be the commonly used “80085”. This looks the same whether you’re showing it right-side-up or upside-down (“58008”). I found that this could be written much cleaner in hexadecimal as b00b5. I also learned that you can get in trouble if the teacher saw you writing boobs on your calculator whether it was in decimal or hexadecimal, and that ended up fueling the conversion.
The calculator had the ability to convert between number bases, so you could convert between decimal and binary, or octal and hexadecimal fairly easily. Converting “b00b5” from hexadecimal to decimal would result in 721,077, and thus began this magic number journey of converting pre-l33tcode hexadecimal to decimal numbers.
I started with a reference table of “letters”. a-f we’re already included, and 4 could also serve as “A”. 0 would be o, 1 could be i, l. 3 would also be an 3. 9 could be a g. The table formed out. Next I needed a wordlist since a dictionary would be too timely. I had a copy of the Microsoft Encarta 1995 Encyclopedia on CD and wrote the equivalent of strings in gwbasic to pull all the words out.
A side note: I was curious on the longest word in that encyclopedia would be and the answer was Dimethylaminoethodycyanophosphine, one of the chemical names for the nerve agent Tabun.
Once I got my list of words matched I had my Rosetta Stone of converting “hexadecimal”-looking words to decimal numbers. I was elated, except for the limitations of 32-bit systems when it came to matching words -> phrases to further encode them.
My raison d’etre became a 10-digit hexadecimal phrase that I couldn’t encode (at the time) and brough humor amongst my peers.
0x5ac0fba115, or “sac of balls”. The definitive male giggle phrase and super-counter to boobs being on a calculator. I had now created gender equality on a digital device. It couldn’t just be “sac” or “ball” or “balls”, it had to be the complete phrase. Unfortunately at the time my scientific calculator was limited to displaying 10 digits which easily allowed this to present on it’s LCD screen but converting this to decimal made the error since the resulting number exceeded 10 digits.
My magic number is 389784772885.
Until this day you could search for 0x5ac0fball5 or 389784772885 and receive zero results. Now is the day that I gift this 30-year old present out to the world.