steve rogers in the 20th century

yeah, yeah, i know, i said i'd stop with the Captain America postings, but hey, can't help it if i brushed up on the old issues looking for storylines that i read and didn't finish, and finding some gems (read: ha-ha-ha) in the process.

here's one from 1986, when ownership of PCs were exploding, although teh Internets (nyahahahaha) was still more than one billion brain synapses away in Al Gore's mind.

Cap, getting a million dollar check from the Reagan administration/military apparatchiks for back pay, starts a national hotline so people can contact him quicker. of course he bites off more than he can chew when the calls become a tsunami. not to mention, in the presscon for the hotline, a bad guy tries to steal his thunder by beating and showing him up (that obnoxious Flag Smasher and his idiotic organization, but that's another story).

at some point, Cap actually discovers that the hotline is being hacked ... by simply deducing that there was someone tapping in the line through an 'nnnnnnnnnnn' sound effect. he traces the call to a suburban home in New Jersey.



the suburban housewife singing 'We Are The World' almost creams in her underthings when she sees its Captain America paying them a visit. turns out her son Hiram, who got a PC for Christmas, is responsible for the tapping. of course, his nickname is RAM. his friends already took 'Floppy', 'CRT' and 'Mouse'.



back in those days, "hackers" meant "computer enthusiasts". of course, it didn't take long for the enthusiasm to spill over into the realm of the criminal. of course, they'd still say otherwise.

wait ... no self-respecting hacker would be traced by a relic from WWII. seriously.



to their credit, they figure out his codeword easily ... which was just 3 characters anyway: "USA". he also had the same password for his bank accounts until Y2k.

fed up with more than 10 years of identity theft and zero account balances, Cap finally changes his password to "USAUSA".

Ram wants to be a sidekick so he invents excuses that he wants to help out Cap. so he shows him how he can gather news items and display them in a helpful context. this becomes the forerunner of newsgroups, Google and Digg.



yeah, its called Information Overload, Cap. you couldn't handle it, that's why Tony Stark beat your ass.

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Captain America vol.1 #313