My First Hack

by fobg

I went to the book store to look in the computer section for anything interesting, found the The Best of 2600, and had to buy it.  It was thick and filled with interesting anecdotes through and through.  I wish I could have contributed to it, but here is the story from 1972 of my first hacking experience.

I went to school at Gunn High in Palo Alto.  It was a fairly new school, with a college campus layout.  My favorite subject was math.  As part of the math department, they had a computer class using a Teletype and a 300 baud modem with an account at Stanford University.  All the classes were 45 minutes long and during computer class, which was small, maybe 10 students at the most, all geeks, we would head to the computer room and get some hands on time writing programs.

There was only one Teletype and modem connection, so we would all collaborate on one program and take turns typing it in.  The door to the computer lab wasn't locked, but there was a lock on the rotary phone dial that the teacher would unlock and dial the connection number on.  He made it clear that it cost $50 per hour for the time on the Stanford PDP-11, so we should get as much typing in as possible each day.

One day, a particularly bright student/geek/hacker asked me if I wanted to help him work on a private program when the teacher wasn't there.  I jumped at the chance, thinking he must have a key to the dial lock and permission from the teacher.  We went to the lab when the teacher was in a math class and the lock was in place, as always.

My friend picked up the receiver and, without unlocking the dial (we all knew the number because we watched it being dialed many times), he began dialing the number by pressing the hook button in rapid succession with a slightly longer pause between each number.  Like "click, click, click, pause, click, click, pause, etc." for 32X-XXXX.

  The other side connected and started the modem phase.  In no time, we were connected.  Hey, this is great.  I could do that.  We had at it until just before the math class ended, took that paper readout from the Teletype, put the phone back, and left. I loved programming, and the idea of connecting any time was to much to resist.  I could do this by myself, I thought, and I did.

The language was basic but it was all as high tech as you could get.

Since the teacher had more than one math class, and my friend had overlapping classes, no one would find out I was working alone.  I'm now a hacker with just me at the keyboard.  Heavenly, to say the least.

After about a week of me alone and with my hacker friend, the teacher got a bill that was $750 over what he expected.  He must have checked the phone bill for the times the connection was being used without him in the room.  Pretty consistent with when he was in a math class.

One day, I was happily typing away at my usual "everyone is gone" time, when in walked the teacher.  I was caught.  Doom and gloom time.

He demanded to know how I was able to dial without unlocking the dial.  Being just a scared kid caught red-handed, I sang like a bird and ratted on my friend as well.  I thought I was going to get kicked out of computer class as punishment, and it broke my heart to think about it.

Quite the contrary, he laughed and just told me not to do it again because he had to justify the very high charges to the upper-ups.  From then on out, the door to the computer room was locked and, through the window, you could see the dial lock was missing, never to be needed again.  My now ex-friend wasn't too happy about it either.  Wow, caught and not punished.  My teacher was a hacker and hacked me back.

Soon after that, HP donated an HP 9100A Reverse Polish notation calculator, which was programmable and available at all hours to anyone.

I think my teacher must have had some friends at Stanford and HP that heard the story and liked it enough to get us an "upgrade."  I began reading every math book in the lab and was soon programming the 9100A to do my math homework.

Then, like it was Christmas, we got a pen plotter that you could control with the calculator.  Wow, a programmable robot in 1972, pen up, move to (x, y), pen down, move to (x, y), make a line.

Connect the lines, make a drawing.  But alas, the pens cost money and, again, they could only be used for computer labs.  The teacher had some little plastic magnetic strips for storage, and some were pre-programmed and some were blank for the students to store programs on so we didn't have to retype a program in each time.  He was particularly proud of one pre-programmed card that wrote numbers and letters for labeling things.  Pen up, move to (x, y), pen down, write a letter, pen up, move over (x), etc.

As I got better at programming, and using the plotter, I wrote a program that would make polygons.

You told it how many sides you wanted and a radius and it would draw it, centered on the page.  My teacher was impressed because now he could use it to show students that a circle was just a polygon made with one point per side.  Three sides: triangle.  Four sides: square.  Ten sides: decagon.  20 sided, 30 sided, 100 sided.

The more sides, the more it looked like a circle.  He could make circles, arcs, pie shapes, and, by connecting them together, draw just about anything.  He wanted that program, so I let him have a copy.

Next thing I knew, I was in the lab by myself "playing" on the computer, which I did with almost all of my free time, and in walked the teacher.  He gave me several plotter pens (for my personal use), a copy of the letter printing program, and several blank storage cards.  Was it Christmas again?

I went from a sure flunk out to a sure "A" because of hacking.

I've been writing programs ever since and have made a good career as a computer diagnostic engineer and staff programmer.  Never needed bailout money to pay off my mortgage.  I paid my house off early to save the interest and I don't gamble and hope for a change of luck, all because I can "do the math."  I saw math and said, "math is good."  Do good to others and others will do good to you.

By the way, the book store was the same one I wrote about in a letter, about how they only had a few copies of 2600 and they were always behind a bigger magazine.  Now I go in and, every time I check the rack, there are 10 to 15 copies of 2600 and you couldn't fit a bigger mag over them or it would topple over and hit the floor.  I think they got a message somehow that 2600 is a good thing because it makes them more money than Harper's Bazaar, and probably 50% of the other rags in the rack.

My lesson: dare to explore the boundaries.  There is always something beyond them, and some of it is useful.