How do I sign up to that random phrase thing anyway?

I'd pay extra.

Some years ago, I worked for a branch of a big global corporation. We had this office automation system taking up a tiny portion of a huge mainframe (mini really) whose primary purpose was accounting and inventory management.

Anyway, we had internal email, and we must have been one of the first corporations to hook up to the fledgling internet in order to be able to extend our email capabilities to our HO in London. The implementation was smooth, mostly because the software actually worked. We were gobsmacked. And chuffed.

The point of this, is that we knew we'd also opened email channels to everyone else on the internet. In those days that really only meant your mates who were doing Information Science degrees at Varsity. Yeah. Right. Hackers.

So, to protect ourselves from industrial espionage being carried out from up the hill, we beefed up our password regime with an off the shelf random password generator, which forced a change every 30 days. You could of course, choose your own. This was about the extent of the defenses available to us at the time.

And ohmigod, this package also worked as it said it would. truly, computers were coming of age. Best of all, the "users" loved it, because it spurned gobbldygook impossible to remember things like )F6G7b3d^7(, and presented two words of between 6 and 8 letters long, with a space between them.

FERRARI SCONES

One drawback, was that while these two words were allegedly drawn completely at random from an extensive dictionary, some extremely amusing combinations occured with alarming frequency, and the word SAUSAGE was anecdotally appearing far more often than mere chance would surely allow.

Our users were sharing their passwords, posting the funnier ones in the in house magazine.

Our fearsome and dour IT Manager did put a stop to that promptly. Our password generator remained many years, until operating systems caught up. People enjoyed using it. I should have made a note of who what the programme was called, maybe they're still making useful stuff.