Hacking Before PC's: A Personal Recollection -------------------------------------------- Written by Grandpa Hackman Friday, 10 March 2006 The technology junkies of today will have a hard time fathoming it. Once there were no home computers. You find yourself asking, "What did people do all night? Gaze at the constellations?" Nah, we still had TV, I'm not going that far back. We thought TV was content. We wondered "What did people do all night before TV?" What was there to hack before new millennium tech and the veritable home computer came along? Hardware. Lots. There was once a lot of tech manufacturing going on in the USA. This was before companies thought about cheap labor in Mexico and other places. The stuff was mostly analog, but from the 60's onward came the digital walk of life. We kept hearing about pictures and text being shipped to our home computers. I thought to myself, "What? Why would I want that? I don't even have a home computer yet." In the "wonder years" back in the sixties & seventies, a mind thirsty for tech understanding didn't have many other places to go other than electronics. Computers were around but nobody had one at home. [hbc1.gif] John Draper, aka Captain Crunch One of the early beginnings of hacking was the Captain Crunch saga. Captain Crunch and his famous whistle. If it's before your time and you don't know the story, briefly he logged into "trunk level" on the telephone company phone lines with a whistle he got out of a cereal box. The "new" touch-tone control systems for Ma Bell's computers were wide open for such tom-foolery. Once at trunk level he was able to call anywhere and everywhere for free. He couldn't have cared less about the free calls, it was all about learning the ins and outs of the phone company computers. The technique was actually discovered by a blind phone phreak named Joe Engressia who had perfect pitch and could whistle the proper 2600 cycle tone himself. Captain Crunch added the just too cool whistle idea. And a lot of hassle for himself, like jail time. But holes in the system like that are far & few between. [hbc2.jpg] Old Bell System Pay Phone When I was in high school we did an early form of phone phreaking. It was back in the day of the coin operated phones with the big holes up top to drop your coins in. 25 10 5 were imprinted in the back of these holes, remember? Sigh. So anyhow, somehow we figured out that we could make the calls that cost everyone else back then a dime for one penny. With a 5/16" strip of stiff paper stock about 10" long, hey, the back cover of the phone directory worked nicely. They supplied enough to make several penny calls from each phone book. You'd stick the cardboard jimmy down the nickel slot and drop your penny in it with the shim behind. Then slowly pull the cardboard out of the slot. Sometimes you'd blow it by pulling too fast and it'd cost two pennies. And ridicule from your buddies. I can tell this story now because the statute of limitations has expired and besides, I was a minor at the time. I didn't know what I was doing. I do feel especially bad about all of those unsightly phone book covers though. I doubt if I made over 10 one cent calls, so if Ma Bell wants to send me a bill for $.90 I'll cough up. After the Captain Crunch news hit phone phreaking became very popular with the hackers. Few if any really cared about the free phone calls, it was the fact that you COULD make free phone calls with a little bit of knowledge. They made blue boxes and red boxes. Then it got easier: they just tape recorded control tones on portable tape recorders. But the really clever hack was the Radio Shack dialer conversion. They'd take one of these little handheld gadgets that were designed to rapidly dial your contacts by pushing one or two buttons on the thing, literally a portable speed dialer in a box. Hey, this was high-tech stuff back then. If you were on the road and needed to make a call there was the phone booth with your speed dialer or nothing. The phreaks would change the clock frequency on the dialer slightly and presto, trunk level tones were produced by the keypads. I think it qualifies as hacking. And it's definitely a hardware hack. More evidence to support my thesis that hardware hacking is where the evolution of the modern day hacker began. [hbc3.jpg] Steve Jobs, left and Steve Wozniac on the right Another piece of evidence I would point out would be two old school hackers you've probably heard of. Wozniak and Jobs, the founders of Apple, were a couple of hackers from the era, well Wozniak at least. Weren't they just some hardware hackers? Sure. Many of us were thinking of such things, they just did it, like Nike says. I think Forrest Gump observed "Some fruit company." [hbc4.jpg] Steve Wozniac's blue box Jobs was working at Atari as a technician. He and Wozniac attended the "Homebrew Computer Club" together. When the Captain Crunch news hit, these two fellows started making blue boxes. Of course, it wasn't long before Ma Bell put the damper on all the fun and just like today, try and use something like that and the phone police will be there shortly. Jobs took on an assignment from Atari reducing chip count on a PC board for the "Breakout" video game. Now, the truth of the story is that Jobs had no real interest in circuit design. So he got together with Wozniac and contracted with him to do the design. Atari had offered to give $100 for each chip that was reduced from the board. Wozniac reduced the chips on that board by 50, that's 5000 bucks. Skullduggery was afoot however, and Jobs told Wozniac that Atari didn't give him the $5000 that was promised (even though they did) and forced Wozniac to accept $300 for his labor. Wozniac later found out and as you might guess, their friendship suffered greatly. A year or two later Wozniac created the 1st Apple in Jobs' garage. A year after that came the Apple II and they were launched into the stratosphere. In just a few short years they were a publicly traded corporation on the NYSE. You've probably heard the Apple story many times. I'm referring to it with regards to a hacker context. Without these types of out-of-the-box hackers, progress would take much longer if it happened at all. Fortunately for all of us, these types have been and will always be there, pushing the boundaries, regardless of the sophistication of the technology surrounding them. If we lived in the imaginary Bedrock of Fred Flintstone fame, the hackers would still be there, fixing and making things with rocks and pterodactyls. From phone phreaking to PC's to IPODs, it's still the hardware hackers that actually make the hard-core physical reality base that the software-only hackers can only dream about having. [hbc5.jpg] An example of an electronics technology magazine of the era In those days before the net, the hard-core hackers kept in touch with the goings-on through trade magazines and electronics magazines. They had writers such as Don Lancaster covering the new wave stuff happening. Don wrote a couple of great books that I read, Cheap Video and Son of Cheap Video. They were about (gasp!) getting video output out of a computer - cheaply. Back in those days video was very difficult to get out of a computer, there was no just buy an AGP card & plug it in. Most home computers output data in binary, a row of lights that represented a binary number. Yikes! I have a hard enough time balancing my checkbook. Don Lancaster is still very active (and outspoken!) in the electronics/tech/many fields. He's all over Usenet, yahoo groups, etc. Probably not much known to those outside of the industry, in the early 70's there was a lot of hardware hacking going on in the musical instrument field. To a musician of this era an amplifier was not what the proverbial golden eared audiophile sought, a clean, uncolored reproducer of sound waves. The guitar players of the day (and it was all about guitar players then) viewed their amp as an instrument, part of the coloring of their sound. The favorites were the class AB push-pull tube amps, if you know what that is, it was a very common amplifier design. They weren't the cleanest amplifier. But they were sweet sounding just the same, with their own flavor that's good even if a little distortion creeps in. Way back to rockabilly times, like the "King", Elvis, the guitar boys were cranking those class AB's up into the distortion range to get "that sound." It wasn't long before the bread & butter local club players wanted to get that sound without the 747 equivalent decibel level ear damage the customers were complaining about. So in came the hackers, everywhere. Hackers all across the world were tweaking those tubes to make them scream, with better control of volume. Although the starving musician is more often than not a reality, they found the money to get their amps "walked on" to get the sound they wanted. It took a special kind of hacker to trick out those old amps. You had to understand tube theory, which was a bit odd for a young electronics enthusiast such as myself. This was a time when transistors were just taking over the reins from tubes on most fronts. Most electronics oriented people wanted to know less about tubes and more about the new solid-state that was taking over. Before you knew it, those new-fangled IC things were coming out. Because of the huge music boom of the mid-sixties to the mid-seventies, every electron path in that musical instrument chain, from guitar string to speaker was scrutinized and tinkered with. That's what it was about before the "home computer" became commonplace. Hardware was what tech was made of. A lot of this same hardware is now traded amongst collectors. Many things are going digital, never to look back. I don't mean to give the impression that I have something against that. If I can write a little code and have a computer take the place of the time-consuming process of design and production of a hardware device, I'll do it every time. But I'm still ready to pull out the soldering iron if I have to, to create something that I need if I can't get it any other way. Another major contribution to the early hacking scene was made by the bulletin board crowd. That was the closest thing that most people had to the web in those days. Some boards were very specific, with specialized information and clientele. Some were warez BBS's and porno boards. Hey, sounds familiar doesn't it? The inventors of the bulletin board were Ward Christensen and Randy Suess. They lived in Chicago where it was cold with tons of snow every winter. They spent the winter of 1977-78 coming up with the Computerized Bulletin Board System (CBBS). The next year they released it to the public and it was the 1^st Bulletin Board System. This software made a computer react in a similar manner as a server today, serving out information, files, whatever to those that were subscribed to the Board. There weren't any point and click buttons, everything was done via text commands ala the command line. It was similar to telnet today, in fact a lot of nostalgic folks still run and access Bulletin Boards on telnet today. The only modems available were 300 baud. If you don't know how slow that is, you can't imagine. Today's dialup is hundreds of times faster. I can still remember downloading my first 1 MB file. It only took a little over an hour at 1200 baud. Many folks ran bulletin boards from their home back in the eighties and it was the beginning of everyone being connected. Before that, some geeks were hooked up via modem between themselves. Other even more mainstream type of people were on Compuserve and Genie, like a dial-in AOL sort of network. Not much different than today, stock quotes and recipe exchanges but ALL text based, no pictures. However it was a tiny fraction of the people online today. The bulletin boards really spread the concept of connectedness. Most were free or inexpensive and the typical BBSer, as they were called, would stay up all night "hitting the boards." Email began to flow. It wasn't long before Bulletin Boards became social organizations, having meetings and the like, far beyond the original concept of file and information sharing. An excellent web link that really gives you the feel for the old bulletin boards of that era can be found at: http://www.apocprod.com/Video/bbs_sim.mov. CBBS was morphed into ever more sophisticated versions and competing programs came along as well. Once again the hacker progression is at work. I can imagine this result, this similar item comes close, I'll modify it to get my desired result. [hbc6.jpg] The best selling computer of all time In the early eighties I was commissioned to make a computer controlled kiln for a company doing ceramic work. You could buy the things, but at the time they were $7000. This was a small company that suddenly found itself with a very large contract. The future looked bright, but the cash on hand was grim. I found a kiln of proper size for $1500. I purchased a Commodore 64 for about $298 and purchased some components for another $100. When I was done, we had a computer-controlled kiln that did everything the "official" one did, except drain your pocketbook. The Commodore had input and output ports which I could read and control from software. I simply homemade an A/D converter and fed a thermocouple to it. The thermocouple produced a voltage corresponding to the temperature in the kiln. The A/D converter fed this data to the computer. I wrote a very simple basic program that looked at the temperature coming in from the A/D converter at intervals. On the output port of the Commodore I connected a homemade electronic power switch using a triac, the main component in a light dimmer. The basic program could then control the temperature of the kiln by turning the heating coils on and off. It worked great. There were no modifications to the Commodore, it was ready to do the job right out of the box. This kind of task was par for the course in electronics work in those days. Another company I did some work for wanted a flow solder machine for a fair sized production line. As usual, they didn't have the money to buy a new $20-30,000 machine. We found an old one that had been owned by the U.S. Navy of all things for $1000. The machine itself would have lasted just about forever, but the controls and electronics from the early fifties were on their last legs. Rip, rip, then install new high tech temp controller and thermocouple for $500, good to go for another 25 years. [hbc7.jpg] A typical flow solder machine. It would solder all joints on the pc board at one time, drastically reducing labor costs I know that flow solder machine worked for at least another seven years, probably much longer. They got a deal out of it, it only took a day or two of messing with the machine to get it right. As time went by, more and more manufacturing of electronic goods in the US went to overseas manufacture. It started in the early seventies and by the late seventies everyone everywhere in electronics could feel the pinch. The electronic jobs became scarcer. There were niche industries, such as aviation radios, which had a good political lobby. They were required to be manufactured and serviced domestically. The video game industry took off in the mid-seventies, I completely missed that myself. Then there's always the government/education areas that employ electronic technicians. The government stuff could be especially interesting. I worked at Fort Irwin where they still do the "laser tag" mock battles to train the army. It was thrown together like the Apple, no kidding. In the early eighties, someone convinced the top brass that laser tag battles and filmed and edited multimedia of these mock battles was the way to go and the National Training Center was born and thrown together almost overnight. Some of the equipment was so leading edge that it really looked as though someone in a garage had hand-assembled it, in fact I'm sure much of it was born that way. Often, you'd open an enclosure and inside would be several off the shelf items "kludged" together inside, mounted somehow, with fancy cables connecting it all up. One device I remember in particular had a handmade perf board assembly and we had no schematic for it. The technician that designed and installed it had a beef with the company and left, leaving us holding the bag. It was intricate too, and the $30,000 device that was broken depended on it to work. About 12" x 12" and chock full of IC's. That's the kind of hacker stuff I'd rather avoid. The hacking was part of the operation though. Often these kludged together assemblies weren't designed properly to begin with, or were designed with lousy life cycles so that they were literally falling apart. Your Army depended on these training devices. So we made them work, whatever it took. Baling wire and duct tape wouldn't have been out of the question had they done the job, although I can't remember using either. But there were homemade patches galore, I did a lot of them. It's a nice luxury to simply make a phone call and have a new part delivered the next morning. In the real world, it just doesn't always happen. One of the bright spots in my memory was that in spite of the demise of electronics jobs in the U.S. the surplus market thrived. You could get things that cost hundreds of dollars originally for a song. Experimentation was cheap, entertaining and sure beat the push content available at that time on the boob tube. At this time too come to think of it. There are many "histories of hacking" available on the web. They all seem to go over the same material, the phreaking, the Apple story, etc. But those of us involved in technology at the time watching all of this go down perhaps had a bit of a different perspective. These are my recollections, not some encyclopedic history of hacking. An attempt to convey to you, the reader, the interpretations, the concepts and what they meant to me. Often my interpretations were incorrect, still they were my interpretations. For example, the accomplishments in Jobs' garage weren't all that spectacular to me at the time. Not to minimize their accomplishment. It was just that I wanted to do the same thing and I know many others did too. I never found the money to throw something like that together at the time. Whatever the excuse, they did it. My direction was with the progression of it all. I was trying to check out the whole forest, not a close up of the trees. Computers were coming, there was no doubt. It was something totally new like the automobile had been half a century earlier. Many people had the skill to design one in their garage, it was simply a question of cost and that wasn't cheap in those days. In my mind, the application, the melding of this new technology in new ways never possible before were much more exciting than the computers themselves. In essence, a very important missing link in robots was upon us, the "brain." I knew, and history bears out, that automated factory processes would utilize this new technology very soon to cut costs. [hbc8.jpg] A typical plastic injection molding machine An example of an industrial process I got involved in was a molding machine monitor. Molding machines suck a lot of electricity and everyone, in those days at least, financed each machine up to it ears. So the companies wanted them to operate 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. It was difficult for them to keep tabs on each machine in a large facility. The computer revolution to the rescue. I built an S-100 bus computer from scratch almost as you would a PC these days. In those days the motherboard was simply a highway of wires (traces) that connected each card to the system. The CPU came on a card by itself. The RAM was on another card. The input/output functions on another. This tireless robot brain would watch each and every machine throughout their mundane work cycle, keeping log of key important facts. Then the supervisory personnel in the office knew as much about the molding machines as if they were spending time on the production floor, rather than in the nice air conditioned offices with the coffee machine. These were and are the applications that cause huge shifts in the order of business. But you must be able to think out of the box. It seems that nowadays people just arbitrarily order a new widget when they need a repair. While that's fine and accepted by many as the best method, it doesn't give any experience for what to do when a part is not available for whatever reason, and that still happens all the time. And more importantly, the out-of-the-box thinking process is stifled. Without the brain exercise that naturally occurs with such tasks, I fear we might be letting our hacker side get flabby.