National lottery shenanigans
Back in 1995, a few months after the launch of the UK National Lottery, I was sharing my flat with a mate, Paolo.

He worked in a factory, and as was the custom at the time, they had all clubbed together and set up a lottery syndicate in the hopes of untold riches. Every week they would buy about 90 tickets between them, which Paolo would painstakingly check every Saturday night before we "were allowed" to go out to the pub.

Getting bored of waiting for this every week and realising there must be a better way, I wrote a DOS program that would check the numbers for him in a matter of seconds and flag up any wins in different coloured fonts.

As the numbers were the same every week, I stored the syndicate's entries in a 90 line text file and used this as input to the checker program.

The rest was easy. I recorded the lottery results one week, cued up the tape to where the balls started dropping (quiet at the back...) and then made an excuse to send him out of the room briefly so I could press "Play" at the right moment (after having changed the ticket input file accordingly).

Wary of a potential stabbing, I hadn't made anything match a jackpot win but there were plenty of other smaller wins that would have given the syndicate members, including Paolo, about 20 grand each.

Oh, his little face when he looked at the computer screen all lit up with various wins picked out in different colours according to the numbers of balls matched.

I had to stop him just as he was running for his car to race up to the ticket holder's house to double check the results.

Oh, how I laughed. Oh, how he hated me.

Length? About 2 flights of stairs.
(potatan, Mon 17 Dec 2007, 9:03, Reply)