My_first_pa88word01

This post was picked as a WOW post by BlogAdda in the Write-Over-the-Weekend initiative ! :-)

Were you able to understand the words in today’s blog post heading? If yes, then you definitely would have cracked my first password 13 years ago. Because it was that simple.

Source : Google Images

My parents bought our first computer during my teenage years while growing up in the Middle East. When I look back now it feels like a long time ago and maybe that’s the reason why I fail to recollect if we had any passwords on our computer system then. What with all the amazement and happiness to own a personal computer at home in the 1990s and with the sole purpose to only play computer games all day, who amongst me or baby bro would bother to set a password? Answer – Neither of us.

In 2000, when I moved to India for my higher studies, my maternal grandfather got me a computer on rental basis to help me with my computer studies and project work. Since I was the sole user of the desktop, setting a password was never on my mind. This is the same time when the email trend was catching up and Hotmail, Yahoo turned out to be the best of the lot choices for my friends. I decided to go with Hotmail and thus began my tryst with the web world.

When it came to setting a new password on my first email account, I was clueless. What was it supposed to look like ? Or what was it supposed to say ? Does it matter if all the letters are lower case or upper case ? Believe me; it was like opening a dam only to release a flood of water. Think about setting a new password; nothing but questions flood your mind. Add to it the necessity of being able to remember the password since you are going to using it all the time and you are done. You have comfortably made sure that pandemonium time is turned on.

After staring at the computer screen for a good 10-minutes, I thought of the first words that came to my mind – my nickname. Ok, now what ? Having my nickname as a password definitely seemed so simple. Anyone who has my email address and who knew me well would get into my account in a single attempt. I decided to complicate it a little. So I added my birth year at the end.

Now, wasn’t that clever ? As if adding my nickname as a password wasn't bad enough, I also added my birth year, which by the way all my friends and family know by-heart. So did I chuck the idea and choose a better one ? Nope. I had to make up my mind fast since the NEXT button on the user registration page seemed to stare at me for like forever and it also looked like it had magical powers – making me want to finalize a password in a jiffy and move on.

When BlogAdda’s WOW prompt for this weekend made me look back at my first password, it made me realize how naïve I was and how my first password turned out to be one of the worst possible passwords ever. But since it was a time when awareness of internet security was not a priority, it didn’t matter. 

So has my sense for passwords improved after so many years ? Well, let’s say from nicknames to favorite destinations, from birth years to life-changing years, from weird nothings to meaningful catch phrases, I have had it all. 

Yours' truly,

**This post is a part of Write Over the Weekend, an initiative for Indian Bloggers by BlogAdda.**