Hacker Perspective: Lone.Geek

I like to explain hacking as applied knowledge.

It is taking what you know or learned and using it to solve a problem.  So first, one must learn a system.  By learn I mean be more inquisitive, really get to know about it, and then take that knowledge and apply it to fix or make the system work the way you want it to.

It started in grade school for me; one of my teachers said "Computers are the future" and, at the time, computers were something futuristic.  Then one day my cousin came home with punch cards and told me about programming.  It sounded exciting.  One evening she took me to the high school and I got to see a computer.  A guy named Roger that lived down the street from us was there and started showing off some programs.  One program was some kind of a magic eight ball and another was a game.  Really, computers had games?  Looking back, I realized Roger was a geek - shy, quiet, and consumed with computers, a glimpse of what was to come.  Our town had an automobile factory and our school invested some of that money in a Digital PDP-11/34 system, so I guess we were lucky in that respect, being a high school with its own computer.  High school was still a while away for me, but I'd have to say the fire was lit.

Enter the Arcade

The arcade era hit like an avalanche.

One day, the store around the corner got four machines, the ice cream stand at the mall had two, the record store, the laundromat and the local pizza joint all had machines.  Every dollar I could get went to the "arcade" on Friday.  At this point, I don't think I really put it together that I was playing a program on a computer.  Then Atari released the 2600 or VCS - Video Computer System and I got one for Christmas with Missile Command.  I enjoyed the 2600 and read video game magazines with stories of kids that were actually writing video games.  Atari or a third-party was releasing a keyboard so you could start programming on your own, but I never saw it.  I'd just have to wait, but not too long.

Just before eighth grade was to begin in 1983, we were told that the school would be having computer classes.  That summer my brother was hanging around a guy named Nathan.  A funny guy, prankster, all around slacker type, at the time hardly someone you would associate as a computer user.  One day my brother was on the phone with Nathan and he was playing with his computer.  At this point I didn't know people had home computers!  He was playing sounds over the phone and my brother gave me a listen.

So cool, a home computer with a program he typed in that made sounds and played games.  I went to Mom and Dad and stated my case: "We're going to have to learn computers for school and I want a head start."

It eventually worked and I got a VIC-20 with a dataset so I could save my programs to cassette.  I bought Compute!, Compute!'s Gazette, RUN, and Commodore Power/Play.  I became proficient at the keyboard, typing every game and utility out of those magazines.  After typing lines and lines of code and running the programs, I was actually learning how to program.  Eventually I knew that Commodore inside and out.  Getting more proficient, I needed better hardware.  I got a 1541 disk drive, the 5-1/4 inch floppy that you could notch and use both sides, and a printer so I could print out programs and look for bugs in my typing.

Back in school, eighth grade began and I was taking "Computer Keyboarding," which was a quarter of typing on IBM Selectric typewriters, and three quarters of "Computer Literacy' with an Apple II.  There was no network, each student had an Apple to use, and we learned some BASIC, which I had already "mastered."  So when our first program was to make an ASCII flag using PRINT statements, I used FOR NEXT loops to cut corners.  The teacher came around and asked us to run the program and do a LIST so he could see the code.  I was proud of myself.

Could this have been my first hack?

The computer teacher started a club and this is where I met like-minded people.  Well, in some respects, we all liked computers, but had different ideas on which was best.  Mike was a Texas Instruments TI-99/4A user and Tony was an Atari 400/800 guy.  Mike was our common friend, and Tony and I started off enemies.  He was loud and obnoxious, completely the opposite of Mike and me.  By the end of eighth grade, we were friends.

By ninth grade, I was taking "Intro to Data Processing" and "BASIC 1: Intro to Data Processing" was more book study until the end, when we had to write a program and got to go into the computer lab and type them in.  We moved the class across the hall to the computer lab.  Not much had changed from the first visit with my cousin many years ago.  The card reader was there, just not used anymore.  The room was full of terminals.  You walked up a ramp because of the raised floor for the cabling to run through and sat in chairs with wheels in front of a black screen with a blinking blue cursor.  We were told to log in.  The account was like 300,1 and we were given a password.  I don't know, something came over me while sitting there.

Accounts?  The VIC didn't have an account.  So I typed in my program saved it as MYNAME.BAS and ran it.  Good to go.

So, taking a little of what I knew at the time, I tried a few commands.  Directory.  OMG!  It worked; scrolling up the screen was everybody's program!  Including the football jock that got all the teacher's attention.  I could just delete his program, but no, I pulled it up and, with my vast programming knowledge, I put REM-arks in it.  The computer just gave me the ability to attack a foe where I had the upper hand.  So he ran his program and had to do some debugging when he listed it to the screen.  What a surprise.  Needless to say, the teacher was a little upset and started asking "Who did this?" I sat tight, but I think at this point she knew.

Then the world got a little bigger with the purchase of the VICMODEM.  A 300-baud brick that plugged into the VIC and gave you access to BBSes or Bulletin Board Systems.  You had to dial up a computer, wait for the tone (which later I learned was termed the carrier), unplug the handset, and plug it into the modem.  Having my terminal already running, I'd hit return a few times and here came stuff!  At first, it was just CompuServe, not really that interesting, considering I had just seen WarGames on cable TV.  Later, I'd be enjoying the world of BBSes, participating in forums, warez leeching, and becoming an assistant sysop.

Programming

Mr. C. was a great teacher, very nice and easygoing.

BASIC 1 was a breeze, thanks to the VIC-20.  Having extra time, I'd help the upper-classmen (especially the girls) write their programs and mess around with the PDP when a seat was free.  Once Mr. C. caught me exploring the system.  All he said was that I shouldn't be doing that.  Tenth grade was BASIC 2 and COBOL 88.  COBOL is the equivalent of being waterboarded, only less fun.  I don't know if it was the teacher for that language, or the fact it was so damn wordy!

I was spending more and more time in the computer room.  Mr. C. picked a few students to go to the local university for a computer/mathematics bowl.  I got to go as team captain.  So we took my VIC-20, or by that time it may have been a Commodore 64.  This was pretty cool.  We set up the computer in a room.  Each school was in a different room.  We were given a packet of jobs that we had to write programs for and submit them to the judges.  We did pretty well at this and went back the next year.  Near the end of the school year, the senior that was typing in the attendance in the computer wanted to go out and hang with some friends and, since I was there, I volunteered to do the ten key entry of student IDs from the attendance cards.

After entering all of the cards, a job would run a sort against the database that would pull the names and create an absences sheet that would be Xeroxed and given to every teacher.  Since I could enter any number(s) without anyone double checking, it was a fun job to have.

One day I came in and the terminal was not logged in.  So I took some knowledge I had from my time playing on the PDP and started to hack out Mr. C's student account.  User 250,1. Password?  "Studnt", just like on the directory of the disk where the database was kept.  Could it be that easy?

By now, I had learned that all of the time that Mr. C was missing, he was in the teachers' lounge smoking.  Later, Mr. C. came in and asked, "Oh, did I leave that logged in?" to which I replied "Yeah" and nothing more was said.

Eleventh grade was FORTRAN and Pascal.  Mr. C. came in and told us to study for a Pascal quiz and took off.  This guy was a smoker!  A few people in the class didn't understand the concepts we were about to be quizzed on, so I started helping them.  Then the rest of the class wanted help too, so I went up to the board and started teaching.  I turned around to see Mr. C. back from his smoke waiting in the back doorway as I was finishing up my class and caught a smile from him.  I asked for any more questions and took my seat.  We took the quiz and went to the lab to work on any program that needed to be done.  Later Mr. C. came out and told the class that was the highest everyone has scored on the quiz as a class and gave me the credit for prepping them.

My senior year was boring by comparison; there were no more languages to learn.  I went to school in the morning and spent the first half of the day in the lab.  By that time, I was doing the tardy office duties for Mr. C and still running the database, just hanging out and getting the last few credits I needed for graduation.

The whole time that I was growing as a programmer and learning, my systems were growing too.  My VIC-20 was eventually upgraded to a Commodore 64 with a 1541 and 1571 disk drive and an amber monitor.  The VICMODEM was traded up to an acoustic coupler Atari 300-baud modem, then a 1200-baud Lockheed that you plugged the phone line into from the wall and used AT commands.  BBSes used a lot of my free time.  There were many variations of the hardware; gaming was still a large part of the computer's use.

The Game of Life

Out of high school, life started to take focus.  I had a kid, got married, and was working as much as I could at a grocery store.  I still had the computer bug.  I got a Commodore Colt, a PC clone to continue learning, and I went on many interviews.  But I think that the job market saw me as a kid and maybe not responsible enough to handle the job.  So I resolved myself to the idea of raising my son and working a job.  I eventually sold the Colt; it was an expensive toy, given my situation.

I went to a night school for adult continuing education in electronics and actually took classes with people who once worked for the car manufacturer from my home town because the factory shut down and they were given money to learn a new skill.  I wanted to learn to fix computers, but at that time it was mostly offers of TV and VCR repair.  I still got interviews and had a good work record, but the computer jobs still eluded me.

I started in the grocery biz as a service clerk while in school, became a cashier, then took a promotion to the office and got back to using a real computer.  In the morning you'd come in and "turn the day."  The registers didn't do that - you had to run a code.  Then you had to enter all of the sales and transmit them to the main office.  I was curious about the dial-up to the office, so I applied what I knew about terminals and modems.  I went in and changed the duplex on the connection and it echoed back the password we used to sign into corporate.  Nice, never used that info, but it was fun to figure out.

Being known as the "computer guy" even though it wasn't really part of my job, I became the go-to guy.  Nothing like being woken up at 3 am (I worked at a 24-hour store) because the registers were down and support wouldn't answer the phone.  Even though I didn't make it to college, I got the experience a bit.  I helped the people I worked with write programs for a Pascal class they had to take.  One program I wrote for a girl named Suzi caught the attention of the professor or whoever was looking at the papers.  They noted that it was an "Innovative way to solve the problem, no one else thought of.'  The program was a simple sort - well, maybe simple for me.  I still had it.

I took up fishing as a new passion.  I met some guys who canoed and waded the local river, and I got really into it.  I had fished a little bit as a kid, but not much.  Now I was a young adult who could drive and it was something to do.  Like computers, I had to know everything and eventually started tournament fishing with my father-in-law to prove my skills.  Wanting to be the best at fishing and keep up with the latest fishing "tech," I had to get on the Internet and visit all of these websites.

The Internet

After my divorce, I decided to go back to school.

So I got my A+ certification on DOS/Windows.  Since my reintroduction to computers was largely because of the Internet, I studied HTML.  My cousin had a Compaq with Windows 95 and was on the Internet, so I went to her house to see what this was.  I got hooked and had to get a PC.  I bought an Inteva (I think) that had a 133 MHz processor with Windows 98 and signed up for a dial-up account with a local provider.  That led to a 350 MHz IBM and a DSL connection at 1.5 then 3 and eventually 6 Mbps.  I was back into computers.

One day while surfing, I found this interesting quiz about relationships.  So, applying what I knew about HTML, I pulled the source code and modded the CGI script so I'd get the results emailed to me.  I put the new page up on a hosting site, emailed the link to a girl I was seeing, and waited.  She took the quiz and I got the results.  It is amazing how honest people can be on the Internet and not in a relationship.

The Game Changer

After ten years, I was out of the grocery business.

I met a PC tech who came into the store to fix our Electronic Benefit Transfer (EBT) point of sale computer; it allowed us to take food stamp cards.  I asked him if they were hiring and got an interview.  I was hired as a field tech working noon to midnight on call.  With my mornings free, I enrolled at ITT.  I wanted to continue with programming, but the classes started later in the year, so I went to networking.  I graduated with honors.  My son brought a letter home asking for volunteers to teach after school, so I offered HTML.  I taught basic HTML to 15 kids.  Of course, one kid asked me about hacking.  I told him my credo - hacking is applied knowledge; learn the system and then you can decide how to use it.  I found teaching very fun and rewarding.

The systems engineer position opened at the main office, and the guy vacating the position told my bosses I'd be a good replacement for him, having had a few computer conversations with him previously.  I interviewed and got the position.  I was brought in in the middle of a statewide Windows XP roll out.

No problem, I finished that and got settled in to office life, sitting around surfing the net, fixing the occasional PC, and doing a little programming.  I started as a contact point for the field techs.  The position eventually morphed into supporting the office systems since the guy that had that position wouldn't show up until after lunch.  People in the office preferred my deskside manner anyways.

This guy got into computers when he volunteered in the army for a project that he parlayed into this job, which amazes me because I had to help him with a lot of things, like the day corporate took down the DHCP server.  Later, our manager decided to go after more work, but our field techs were lacking some skills, so they setup an A+ and Network+ classes.  They hired a local college teacher to give classes to the techs.  I became the teacher once again, helping out the ones that couldn't pass the test.

Today I work for another company, still considered a field tech, but I have more responsibilities.  I work in an office but visit remote sites and fix networks and PC issues.

My hardware collection has grown to at least eight PCs and five laptops, and a slew of other gadgets.  I am still learning - in this field it is learn or become obsolete, like my first desktop.

I still fish too, not as much as I'd like to.  Through it all, I'm always looking at how I can apply my knowledge to make things better.