The Logic Bomb
Heard the old joke about the Washington speech writer at odds with his boss? It’s a favorite story among journalists and other wordsmiths.
The aide was tired of drudge work for a dumb, lazy but electable congressman who didn’t even read the immortal prose ahead of time.
One day the politician, a square-jawed, movie-actorish man, was mellifluously speaking on the House floor. As usual, he was fresh to the material. But his rendition overwhelmed everyone, from the pols to the pages, to the tourists in the galleries. He knew he was on his way to the White House.
With actorlike polish he intonated through the third page, including the last sentence:
“And now, let the words ring out, loud and clear, to all corners of the earth—to our friends, to our foes, across every ocean, every mountain. You purblind piece of excrement, I quit, and you’re on your own.”
The fourth page, of course, was blank.
Malicious programmers must nod and wink when they hear the story.
For the speech writer had just the right kind of temperament to hide a logic bomb—a computer glitch that explodes, so to speak, only under certain conditions.
The conditions in the Washington joke were clear. The congressman mustn’t read the speech to himself beforehand—something inevitable. He was dependably lazy. Nor must he understand the speech; no problem, certainly, for he was dumb about everything all the time. Above all, however, if this bomb were to “kill,” he must be embarrassable. And that’s why the bomb in a sense just maimed him—because, like most politicians, he never blushed.
In a real-life story told by Parker, a payroll programmer hid a bomb to erase the entire personnel file if he ever got fired—that is, if his own name ever vanished from it.