I forgot my password again and now I'm locked out

One password for everything, that was my system. Then this site wanted a symbol and the next one wanted a different one. — Baby boomer, 2026

Nobody forgot a computer password until somebody invented one. At MIT in 1961, a shared machine began giving each user a private word, and it is widely credited as the first to do so. In the traditional account, a mix-up once showed everyone's password to everyone who signed on. Then came the websites, each with its own rules. A 2021 James Cook University study found that piling on rules frustrated people, and the favorite workaround was one password everywhere. In May 2022 Apple, Google and Microsoft promised passkeys, which sign you in the way you unlock your phone. No word to forget. But a site has to offer one. Every site that doesn't, you'll keep resetting.

For now: when a site offers a passkey, take it; when it doesn't, let a password manager make and remember the password, and turn on two-step sign-in.

The full file

The leak, as the people there told it, went like this. The text editor kept its working copy under the same file name every time, and one afternoon an administrator's slip put the password file where the greeting belonged. A man named Bill Mathews saw the list on his screen and crashed the machine to stop it. The fellow who later wrote the story down spent that Friday evening changing people's passwords. Good came of it: the mess is credited with the idea of scrambling stored passwords, so a stolen file is no use. Slow way to learn it.

In 2014 Fernando Corbató, who designed the system, said passwords had become a kind of nightmare. He had about 150 of them over the years and could not remember them all. The man credited with the idea couldn't keep up either. You're in good company.

Relates to No. 09320.