Hacker Perspective: Captain Crackham

Sometimes, hackers of a certain age may feel that they were born a generation too early.  With the abundance of silicon in every setting powered by the kind of processing grunt that was unthinkable a few short decades ago, and the proliferation of free online courses in programming (that's what we used to call coding, youngbloods), obstacles to becoming the next visionary of the digital age have never been fewer.

Like so many hackers of my generation who grew up in England, I only got into computing from such a tender age through sheer luck.  An older sibling bought a Sinclair ZX81, a monolithic piece of black plastic that connected to a flickery CRT television.  I was instantly drawn to it like a magnet.

Learning how these beautiful, mysterious, and, at first, horrifically unreliable works of art ticked was far from an easy task.  Being a child of the eighties, reference guides couldn't even befound in most local libraries, the Internet had yetto make an appearance, and schools could barely afford a single BBC Micro, never mind staff who had actually been trained to use them.  Code, however, wasn't buried away to the same extent that most proprietary junk is today.  In fact, entire programs were printed out in enthusiast magazines for the patient and studious to copy out into their beloved computers.  And of course, once you realize how the words on the pages push the pixels and bitmaps around on the screen, you can adapt and bend them to your will.

Despite barely getting a look-in himself, my brother went on to upgrade to a Sinclair ZX Spectrum 48K, a Commodore 64, and the mighty Commodore Amiga.  By this point, the gaming scene had really taken off, and copious demos and other software were given away on magazine cover disks.  These cover disks would include a menu system to access what was on them which, with a modicum of effort, could be copied, tweaked, and customized.  And so, I would busy myself compiling and adapting the best demos from across the mags onto one glorious disk, ready for my brother to enjoy with the increasingly limited time he had to spend with what was still technically his computer.  Yes, you really could fit multiple demos onto one 1.44 MB floppy.

Around the same time, Datel released the Action Replay cartridge.  This came with a hardware button that, when pressed, would instantly halt whichever game was running and give you access to a console where you could examine the code that was in memory and, better still, mess with it.  This opened up the possibilities of taking screenshots long before this functionality became baked into OSes, and altering values that were in the RAM to award extra lives or to kill timers in trial software that otherwise planned on ruining our fun.  At one point, I'd managed to mod a copy of the original Worms so that the titular stars would swear like dockers throughout every game.

Running alongside all of this was the public domain scene.  Much like the open-source scene today, public domain wares consisted of various utilities and demos put out by passionate programmers who wanted to help their fellow enthusiasts push their systems to their very limits.  The most exciting aspect of this was the demo scene.  These weren't demos in the same sense as the game demos distributed on cover disks, but more like mostly non-interactive technical demos that would package together some truly incredible audio/visual experiences that didn't so much move the benchmarks of what was thought possible with the hardware at the time as absolutely obliterate them.

These took many forms, ranging from compressing Flash by Queen onto a single floppy long before the MP3 standard was even thought of, showcasing the brilliant animated short Pugs In Space, and melting eyeballs with psychedelic proofs of concept for what our hardware was really capable of.  These latter demos were produced by several pioneers of the time, but many of the most impressive were the product of the mighty Red Sector Inc.  If you're unfamiliar with their work, I implore you to search for the "RSI Megademo" on YouTube to enjoy some of the greatest chiptunes to be committed to magnetic media.

Public domain was distributed through mail order adverts in magazines where you would pay for the cost of the disk and postage, through gatherings such as computer shows and parties, and via the good old-fashioned sneakernet.  Outside of the public domain scene, more corporate interests were trying incredibly hard to convince us that free distribution would lead to the down fall of computing itself, but we had other ideas about that.