Good 'ol Turbo Pascal. I wrote an encrypt/decrypt program in TP and a friend of mine and I used to pass encoded messages back and forth on 3.5" floppy disks.

Good 'ol Turbo Pascal. I wrote an encrypt/decrypt program in TP and a friend of mine and I used to pass encoded messages back and forth on 3.5" floppy disks. To the subject at hand...I think it's a question of motivation. "Easy" was never part of the seduction; I wanted to make games, freak my folks out by making the screen flash and beep when they turned the computer on, hack the computers at school to lock out Walt the dickhead computer teacher guy, etc. "Fun" was always the motivation; "easy" never part of it because easy is...sorta boring. "Easy" has value, to be certain: IMO it's a signal that it's time to automate that task. For example, I used to hack Apache vhosts files by hand. Now it's easy, and we've automated it (and the rest of the LAMP stack setup, for that matter).