🏚️

Halfway House

Week 26

It's week 26 - you're at the halfway house of all 52 yearly challenges, though this "house" is more of an escape room. You discover an old computer in front of a locked door - to your surprise, after plugging it in, it slowly flickers on and presents you with a terminal - there is simply an option to send messages and view older messages

When experimenting, you notice the phrase "abc" gives you different outputs, as though they have created their own internal encryption/encoding - 5 are shown below:

Simply typing "z" gives results such as:

Likewise, "Program Fifty Two" gives you outputs such as these

Or "hello world":

There are some old messages on the terminal timestamped as being from 1986 such as this one below labelled "passphrase" - can you decode it and hence presumably unlock the door to escape?

Hints

Hints will be released at the start of each of the following days - e.g. the start of day 3 is 48 hours after the challenge starts