Hacker Perspective: Major Mule ("The Luckiest Hacker")

I consider myself among the luckiest hackers ever.  This is not because of my skill set, which is not that impressive.  Instead, I consider myself lucky to have grown up at the greatest time to be a hacker.  You see, I grew up just as personal computers were taking off.  This allowed me to have access to computing power, albeit limited, that was unheard of by the analog public masses.  Nowadays, it takes some really spectacular advances to impress people with computing power, but back in the early days, most people had no idea what computers were, not to mention what small miracles they could perform!

I grew up taking apart just about anything that I could.  CBs, clock radios, cordless phones, you name it - nothing was safe from me.  If it plugged into the wall or had moving parts, I was most likely going to open it up.  Mostly, they were items that were broken or did not function the way I needed them to.  I would take them apart to either fix them or make them do I what I needed/wanted them to do.  I was lucky that the "bug" to explore hit me at an early age.

I was lucky enough to have two adult mainframe operators that lived on either side of my parents' house.  I would spend any free time I could talking to them about computers.  I learned tons from both of them.  One of them bought me my first cordless electric screwdriver that I still have today (the battery has long since died, but I keep it as a reminder of my lifelong journey of exploration).

I remember my first computer.  It was a Timex Sinclair (yes, that Timex) that hooked up to a TV set.  I was lucky to get this as my parents received it as a gift for attending a timeshare seminar and they had no idea what it was.  This led me to my first bona fide computer hack: to cut up a few cables to be able to use my tape recorder to store and load programs.  From there, it was long nights of meticulously typing in BASIC code to get the computer to do the most rudimentary of things.

It did not take long for me to realize I needed to upgrade.  Soon I got a Commodore 64 (which I still have).  I would add any peripheral I could find for it.  Luckily, they had a ton available: light pens, KoalaPads, music keyboards, tape decks, disk drives, modems (300 and 1200 baud), speed cartridges, line matrix and color printers, not to mention all types of software.  I bought all of them as fast as I could save up for them.  Most, if not all, of these peripherals I still have today.

My closest friends also bought computers, but different models.  One got a TRS-80, another one got an Apple IIe, and yet another got a weird Perkin-Elmer terminal.  It was lucky for us too, as we all got to learn and play on multiple machines and learned lots of different variants and languages.

My friends and I would spend countless hours trying to figure out how to copy the games of the era.  What is really funny about this is that often we would spend more time trying to make the copies of the game than we would spend time playing them.  Luckily, we enjoyed the challenge of making the copies more than achieving any high score.

Being on the bleeding edge of the computer revolution, I would use my hardware and software to make things "easier" for me.  In fifth grade, I convinced my math teacher that I was just using my computer to "print out" my homework and I was doing all the calculations myself.  He had no idea that the computer was doing all the work and I was just putting in the questions.  (Mr. S., if you read this, I am sorry.)  Luckily, I never got caught!

I did a report on elevators for English class that I printed, in color.  I used my C64, OKI Data color printer, and "Cut & Paste" word processor to put together the report with large pictures and illustrations.  Luckily, the teacher did not figure out that even though my report was the required minimum of six pages, it was really only about four pages of text with two pages of pictures spread out in the report.  In fact, she commented on how much the illustrations contributed to the report and gave me an "A."  Meanwhile, my classmates all spent countless hours of their time meticulously typing their papers on manual and electronic typewriters, making sure to have six pages of typed content.

My older sister had a phone line in her room.  My parents got her a cordless phone when they were just coming out.  The earliest cordless phones transmitted in the FM radio spectrum.  This meant that it was possible to listen to both sides of a phone conversation with a regular FM radio.  I used to listen to my sister's phone conversations to gather "intel" on her that I could use as leverage against her if needed.  I was lucky she never figured out how I found out all this information.

In seventh grade, each of our school classrooms got a Casio computer.  These were complete with the stupid chiclet keyboard.  None of the teachers knew how to use them, nor what they could do with them.  I had a social studies teacher who rearranged the seating chart each month so students would not be sitting with their friends the whole year.  Luckily, I convinced him to let me write a program that could automatically print out random seating charts based on the line numbers in the teacher's gradebook.  The program I wrote did this task, but I made sure that no matter how many times it ran, my number was always sitting next to my best friend's number.  For the entire school year, we got to sit together and Mr. T never figured it out.

It did not take long before I had upgraded to an AT&T PC 6300.  This was an Intel 8086 processor with a 10 MB hard drive!  No, that was not a typo, it only had a 10-megabyte hard drive and 256 kB of RAM.  I was lucky that one of my programming neighbors was able to get a great deal on this machine for me through his work.  This computer was light years ahead of the C64 and opened a whole new world for me and my hacking exploits.

The movie WarGames and its use of a war dialer always stuck with me.  Now I had a machine that I could program to do just that.  Luckily, it was not long before I found my portal to the early Internet.  A local state university had a BBS for students to share research.  This BBS was connected to universities around the country.  All of their research was posted for other academics to read and review.

In my freshman year of high school, I was in a science class that required us to author a two-page paper each week on current events in biology.  While other students would struggle to even find a topic to write on, I was handing in assignments with state-of-the-art research.  My favorite one was a week that most of my classmates wrote about a boring new discovery on the cell structure.  Meanwhile, I handed in a paper titled "Sustainable and Biological Control of Aquatic Weeds in Bodies of Freshwater," complete with source studies that were released only days earlier.  Luckily, I was able to complete these weekly assignments in less than an hour, week after week.  This freed up lots of time for me to explore more hacking exploits.

After a while, I was also able to find a dial-in number to my local high school's computer that housed the parking permit data.  I promptly issued myself a staff parking sticker.  When I finally got caught using it, I was lucky that the school deferred any punishment for my cooperation in securing the computer system.

In college, when computers were finally becoming more prevalent, I was lucky enough to upgrade to a laser printer (unheard of for most home users), and a V.32 modem that allowed me to have some pretty impressive (at the time) speed access to the burgeoning Internet.

With this speed, I was able to join email lists and IRC rooms for people who shared many of my same interests.  A group of local motorcyclists came together, and I was lucky enough to form lifelong friendships with people whom I would never have had the ability to meet otherwise.

It was through one of these friends that I was lucky enough to get some server space on the Internet so I could host a website.  Early in my college years, using the Internet for research was brand new and none of my professors understood how web pages worked.  So, when I had to author a paper with a minimum number of sources cited, I would simply add web pages to my server with scholarly sounding names and links.  I could put whatever information I wanted on the web page to support my paper's position.  I was lucky none of the professors ever challenged these so-called academic websites.

When I joined the Army Reserves, the headquarters of my first unit received a computer.  Again, no one there knew how to use it or what it could do.  Not only was I able to step up and use the computer to automate lots of tedious tasks, but I was lucky enough that the Army unit had received an AT&T PC 6300!

One of the first tasks I was asked to perform was to type up a whole list of awards that had piled up and needed to be presented.  I was able to set it up to import from a text file and generate these awards in less than a few hours.  Feeling the need to push my "hacker" luck, I decided to write myself an award for creating the system and put it on the top of the pile for my commander to sign.  When I handed him the stack (I was a lowly private and he was the company commander), I told him that I took the liberty to write up an award for myself as I was certain he would feel it was justified.  Luckily, he looked at it and signed the award and shook my hand.  That was the first award I received in the Army!

At my first civilian IT job, my co-worker and I used to take long lunches.  Luckily, our company had a legacy paper tape computing machine at another location.  This meant that we used to keep a stack of punched cards in our pockets.  If we were returning late from lunch, we would take the cards out as we walked through the door and pretend like we just spent the past hour or so trying to debug a routine at the offsite location.  No one would ever question us on that.

Decades passed, and I was lucky to make a very comfortable living using my hacking and computer skills in the corporate and government sectors.  I continue to work at a job with computers that I absolutely love and would not trade my experiences for anything.  I still hack things all the time to make them better.

One of the luckiest things about my hacking career was that I was lucky enough to have the drive to find out how things work, how I can modify them to make them better (or to make life easier for me).  I was lucky that I had friends and neighbors who shared this drive.  Not to mention I was lucky to never have to face serious consequence for my hacking exploits.

Lots of times in these pages, we see people asking how to become a hacker.  I really do not think you can become one.  You either have the hacking spirit, or you don't.  However, if you are asking that question, you more than likely have that spirit.  Now you just need to act on it.  Figure out how to change the world around you, even in the smallest of ways, to benefit you and others around you.  If you are an aspiring hacker, all you need is the drive to learn and a little luck!

See you all on the Interwebs!

Major Mule just started his second half of a century on Earth finding luck in hacking.  He started a software company that is creating an AI based product to combat gun violence in the U.S.