Wasn't sure if I should put this in history or technology but it's certainly worth looking at.
So who were the first well known computer/tech hackers?
Well it all started at MIT... at a club known as the MIT Tech Model Railroad Club. Yeah, it all started with model trains, specifically the HO Gauge layout the one club was always working on. The year was 1958 and the TMRC was divided into two groups. The guys who do all the modeling and building trains and such. And the guys who made the system work to get it all functioning. It's this latter group known as the Systems and Power or S&P group that despite being at odds with the first group would go on to become the first computer hackers. Their hobbies included model railroading, what we now term as electrical and electronic engineering, and lock picking.
See before 1958 the only computer they had access to was the IBM 701, a hulking room sized behemoth running on vacuum tubes and guarded by what was referred to as the priesthood. These priests were led by a "pope" who controlled who had access to it. If you wanted your code run you needed to give it to a priest who would run it at some point that week and get the results back to you. This of course made it difficult to really experiment or tinker with it and the stuffiness around it gave IBM a bad rap in the early hacker community.
System Pictured here:
But in 1958 a new computer was moved to the floor above the 701, the TX-0 or Tixo as it was nicknamed. the Tixo was a computer originally designed to run Diagnostics for a specific military computer but was given to MIT on "long term loan" with almost no software and minimal hardware. It cost 3 million US dollars in 1950's currency, that's $32,238,529.41 USD today. It was much smaller than the 701 and didn't have IBM's "priests" controlling it. And was for all intents and purposes outdated by the TX-2. The hardware consisted of 4Kilowords of 16 bit memory functions. Had a 12in oscilloscope as a display which could give you reports in real time, and was programmed on reels of tape that were punched by a special kind of machine that sounded like a machine gun going off. It also had a primitive audio synthesizer which made tones based on the code it was running allowing the skilled to know when something wasn't running right or erroring out. This would later lead to one of the early hackers inventing a way to make it play music.
Now these early guys were a bit crazy and obsessive but they enjoyed the challenge, a whole new system to explore and find the secrets of. They spent years tinkering with the TX-0 and worked collaboratively making programs, storing them in an unlocked drawer for other people to run and improve on. This is the origin of the principle of open source, this right here!!! The rate in which these guys could code, (usually in assembly language), was phenomenal, they wrote software in a weekend that would take a corporation months to write. If you wanted a program you could just suggest it and if they found it interesting they'd write it over the weekend and have it ready by Monday.
There was always back and forth between the grad students and the S&P guys. Hell the TMRC tried to get them thrown out because it was becoming less focused on the model trains they were originally about. always fighting over who could access the system, when, what code you could write, what way to design something, it was a whirlwind of ideas and thinking that formed an endless collaborative effort.
Now as for the TMRC, the railroad was actually built upon Telephone switching relays for controlling the switching tracks and such. They'd often get these parts out of a junkyard and repurpose them. It was a hobby that was as core to the TMRC as it was the S&P group who designed, modified, and maintained it. And it inspired people to always be open minded and tinker with stuff, never ceasing to figure out new and better ways to do things, always improving, always sharing ideas so others could give their input.
in the early 1960's a new computer was given to them to tinker with, created by people who were working on the defunct TX-2 project the computer was the pride of the DEC corporation known as the PDP-1 and was effectively an improved and upgraded version of the TX-0. The S&P guys took to it like a fish to water and were immediately porting software and writing new programs to do new stuff. It was on the PDP-1 that Spacewar, the first computer game was written. Played using an Oscilloscope the game was the product of a collaborative effort based around an idea. It featured two ships orbiting around a central gravity well and with early primitive joysticks you fired at the other ship until one of you died.
PDP-1 pictured here:
The game was insanely popular, so much so that DEC shared it with the world and it was used as a demo program to show off the PDP-1 to prospective buyers and anyone who bought one got a copy of it. For the first time, computers weren't just something that did complex calculations and scientific simulations, they played Games! In this time the first chess playing program was written as well, part of the AI research that S&P was often being encouraged to look into.
One such fellow was Richard Greenblatt, a fairly unkempt and unhygenic fellow who created the MACHACK, a chess playing program that put a skilled player into checkmate on the later PDP-6 which they were given access to a few years later. the PDP-6 was of course what inspired another early hacker, this time a phone phreaker who found a way to get the PDP-1 to control a phone system by emitting specific frequencies. Of course this was eventually put a stop to but at this point half the work was already done to create an early modem!
these were the guys who founded the original hacker ethics, who came up with terms for things. This collaborative, unbridled creativity was what hackers originally represented. Others like John Drapper (captain crunch), Steve Wozniak, etc would follow in their footsteps.
Here is the code, the ethics these guys lived by.
Sharing
Openness
Decentralization
Free access to computers.
I'm going to quote Steven Levey from his book Hackers: Heroes of the computer revolution.
And before someone comes in saying "hackers are evil cyber criminals" and all that foo-bar bunk... let me give you the original definition of hack, hacker, and cracker as taken from the source, the jargon file and New Hackers Dictionary. Modern "hackers" as described by the media are Crackers and occasionally "dark side hackers" but usually the former.
Things may have changed now but that's the beginning of the original hacker ethic and ideals, and how it all got started!
So who were the first well known computer/tech hackers?
Well it all started at MIT... at a club known as the MIT Tech Model Railroad Club. Yeah, it all started with model trains, specifically the HO Gauge layout the one club was always working on. The year was 1958 and the TMRC was divided into two groups. The guys who do all the modeling and building trains and such. And the guys who made the system work to get it all functioning. It's this latter group known as the Systems and Power or S&P group that despite being at odds with the first group would go on to become the first computer hackers. Their hobbies included model railroading, what we now term as electrical and electronic engineering, and lock picking.
See before 1958 the only computer they had access to was the IBM 701, a hulking room sized behemoth running on vacuum tubes and guarded by what was referred to as the priesthood. These priests were led by a "pope" who controlled who had access to it. If you wanted your code run you needed to give it to a priest who would run it at some point that week and get the results back to you. This of course made it difficult to really experiment or tinker with it and the stuffiness around it gave IBM a bad rap in the early hacker community.
System Pictured here:
But in 1958 a new computer was moved to the floor above the 701, the TX-0 or Tixo as it was nicknamed. the Tixo was a computer originally designed to run Diagnostics for a specific military computer but was given to MIT on "long term loan" with almost no software and minimal hardware. It cost 3 million US dollars in 1950's currency, that's $32,238,529.41 USD today. It was much smaller than the 701 and didn't have IBM's "priests" controlling it. And was for all intents and purposes outdated by the TX-2. The hardware consisted of 4Kilowords of 16 bit memory functions. Had a 12in oscilloscope as a display which could give you reports in real time, and was programmed on reels of tape that were punched by a special kind of machine that sounded like a machine gun going off. It also had a primitive audio synthesizer which made tones based on the code it was running allowing the skilled to know when something wasn't running right or erroring out. This would later lead to one of the early hackers inventing a way to make it play music.
Now these early guys were a bit crazy and obsessive but they enjoyed the challenge, a whole new system to explore and find the secrets of. They spent years tinkering with the TX-0 and worked collaboratively making programs, storing them in an unlocked drawer for other people to run and improve on. This is the origin of the principle of open source, this right here!!! The rate in which these guys could code, (usually in assembly language), was phenomenal, they wrote software in a weekend that would take a corporation months to write. If you wanted a program you could just suggest it and if they found it interesting they'd write it over the weekend and have it ready by Monday.
There was always back and forth between the grad students and the S&P guys. Hell the TMRC tried to get them thrown out because it was becoming less focused on the model trains they were originally about. always fighting over who could access the system, when, what code you could write, what way to design something, it was a whirlwind of ideas and thinking that formed an endless collaborative effort.
Now as for the TMRC, the railroad was actually built upon Telephone switching relays for controlling the switching tracks and such. They'd often get these parts out of a junkyard and repurpose them. It was a hobby that was as core to the TMRC as it was the S&P group who designed, modified, and maintained it. And it inspired people to always be open minded and tinker with stuff, never ceasing to figure out new and better ways to do things, always improving, always sharing ideas so others could give their input.
in the early 1960's a new computer was given to them to tinker with, created by people who were working on the defunct TX-2 project the computer was the pride of the DEC corporation known as the PDP-1 and was effectively an improved and upgraded version of the TX-0. The S&P guys took to it like a fish to water and were immediately porting software and writing new programs to do new stuff. It was on the PDP-1 that Spacewar, the first computer game was written. Played using an Oscilloscope the game was the product of a collaborative effort based around an idea. It featured two ships orbiting around a central gravity well and with early primitive joysticks you fired at the other ship until one of you died.
PDP-1 pictured here:
The game was insanely popular, so much so that DEC shared it with the world and it was used as a demo program to show off the PDP-1 to prospective buyers and anyone who bought one got a copy of it. For the first time, computers weren't just something that did complex calculations and scientific simulations, they played Games! In this time the first chess playing program was written as well, part of the AI research that S&P was often being encouraged to look into.
One such fellow was Richard Greenblatt, a fairly unkempt and unhygenic fellow who created the MACHACK, a chess playing program that put a skilled player into checkmate on the later PDP-6 which they were given access to a few years later. the PDP-6 was of course what inspired another early hacker, this time a phone phreaker who found a way to get the PDP-1 to control a phone system by emitting specific frequencies. Of course this was eventually put a stop to but at this point half the work was already done to create an early modem!
these were the guys who founded the original hacker ethics, who came up with terms for things. This collaborative, unbridled creativity was what hackers originally represented. Others like John Drapper (captain crunch), Steve Wozniak, etc would follow in their footsteps.
Here is the code, the ethics these guys lived by.
Sharing
Openness
Decentralization
Free access to computers.
I'm going to quote Steven Levey from his book Hackers: Heroes of the computer revolution.
Quote:1. "Access to computers—and anything which might teach you something about the way the world works—should be unlimited and total. Always yield to the Hands-On Imperative!"
Levy is recounting hackers' abilities to learn and build upon pre-existing ideas and systems. He believes that access gives hackers the opportunity to take things apart, fix, or improve upon them and to learn and understand how they work. This gives them the knowledge to create new and even more interesting things. Access aids the expansion of technology.
2. "All information should be free"
Linking directly with the principle of access, information needs to be free for hackers to fix, improve, and reinvent systems. A free exchange of information allows for greater overall creativity. In the hacker viewpoint, any system could benefit from an easy flow of information, a concept known as transparency in the social sciences. As Stallman notes, "free" refers to unrestricted access; it does not refer to price.
3. "Mistrust authority—promote decentralization"
The best way to promote the free exchange of information is to have an open system that presents no boundaries between a hacker and a piece of information or an item of equipment that they need in their quest for knowledge, improvement, and time on-line. Hackers believe that bureaucracies, whether corporate, government, or university, are flawed systems.
4. "Hackers should be judged by their hacking, not bogus criteria such as degrees, age, race, sex, or position"
Inherent in the hacker ethic is a meritocratic system where superficiality is disregarded in esteem of skill. Levy articulates that criteria such as age, sex, race, position, and qualification are deemed irrelevant within the hacker community. Hacker skill is the ultimate determinant of acceptance. Such a code within the hacker community fosters the advance of hacking and software development.
5. "You can create art and beauty on a computer"
Hackers deeply appreciate innovative techniques which allow programs to perform complicated tasks with few instructions. A program's code was considered to hold a beauty of its own, having been carefully composed and artfully arranged. Learning to create programs which used the least amount of space almost became a game between the early hackers.
6. "Computers can change your life for the better"
Hackers felt that computers had enriched their lives, given their lives focus, and made their lives adventurous. Hackers regarded computers as Aladdin's lamps that they could control.
They believed that everyone in society could benefit from experiencing such power and that if everyone could interact with computers in the way that hackers did, then the hacker ethic might spread through society and computers would improve the world. The hackers succeeded in turning dreams of endless possibilities into realities. The hacker's primary object was to teach society that "the world opened up by the computer was a limitless one"
And before someone comes in saying "hackers are evil cyber criminals" and all that foo-bar bunk... let me give you the original definition of hack, hacker, and cracker as taken from the source, the jargon file and New Hackers Dictionary. Modern "hackers" as described by the media are Crackers and occasionally "dark side hackers" but usually the former.
Quote:Hack:
1. n. Originally, a quick job that produces what is needed, but not well.
2. n. An incredibly good, and perhaps very time-consuming, piece of work that produces exactly what is needed.
3. vt. To bear emotionally or physically. “I can't hack this heat!”
4. vt. To work on something (typically a program). In an immediate sense: “What are you doing?” “I'm hacking TECO.” In a general (time-extended) sense: “What do you do around here?” “I hack TECO.” More generally, “I hack foo” is roughly equivalent to “foo is my major interest (or project)”. “I hack solid-state physics.” See Hacking X for Y.
5. vt. To pull a prank on. See sense 2 and hacker (sense 5).
6. vi. To interact with a computer in a playful and exploratory rather than goal-directed way. “Whatcha up to?” “Oh, just hacking.”
7. n. Short for hacker.
8. See nethack.
9. [MIT] v. To explore the basements, roof ledges, and steam tunnels of a large, institutional building, to the dismay of Physical Plant workers and (since this is usually performed at educational institutions) the Campus Police. This activity has been found to be eerily similar to playing adventure games such as Dungeons and Dragons and Zork. See also vadding.
Constructions on this term abound. They include happy hacking (a farewell), how's hacking? (a friendly greeting among hackers) and hack, hack (a fairly content-free but friendly comment, often used as a temporary farewell). For more on this totipotent term see The Meaning of Hack. See also neat hack, real hack.
Hacker:
[originally, someone who makes furniture with an axe]
1. A person who enjoys exploring the details of programmable systems and how to stretch their capabilities, as opposed to most users, who prefer to learn only the minimum necessary. RFC1392, the Internet Users' Glossary, usefully amplifies this as: A person who delights in having an intimate understanding of the internal workings of a system, computers and computer networks in particular.
2. One who programs enthusiastically (even obsessively) or who enjoys programming rather than just theorizing about programming.
3. A person capable of appreciating hack value.
4. A person who is good at programming quickly.
5. An expert at a particular program, or one who frequently does work using it or on it; as in ‘a Unix hacker’. (Definitions 1 through 5 are correlated, and people who fit them congregate.)
6. An expert or enthusiast of any kind. One might be an astronomy hacker, for example.
7. One who enjoys the intellectual challenge of creatively overcoming or circumventing limitations.
Cracker:
One who breaks security on a system. Coined ca. 1985 by hackers in defense against journalistic misuse of hacker (q.v., sense 8). An earlier attempt to establish worm in this sense around 1981--82 on Usenet was largely a failure.
Use of both these neologisms reflects a strong revulsion against the theft and vandalism perpetrated by cracking rings. The neologism “cracker” in this sense may have been influenced not so much by the term “safe-cracker” as by the non-jargon term “cracker”, which in Middle English meant an obnoxious person (e.g., “What cracker is this same that deafs our ears / With this abundance of superfluous breath?” — Shakespeare's King John, Act II, Scene I) and in modern colloquial American English survives as a barely gentler synonym for “white trash”.
While it is expected that any real hacker will have done some playful cracking and knows many of the basic techniques, anyone past larval stage is expected to have outgrown the desire to do so except for immediate, benign, practical reasons (for example, if it's necessary to get around some security in order to get some work done).
Thus, there is far less overlap between hackerdom and crackerdom than the mundane reader misled by sensationalistic journalism might expect. Crackers tend to gather in small, tight-knit, very secretive groups that have little overlap with the huge, open poly-culture this lexicon describes; though crackers often like to describe themselves as hackers, most true hackers consider them a separate and lower form of life. An easy way for outsiders to spot the difference is that crackers use grandiose screen names that conceal their identities. Hackers never do this; they only rarely use noms de guerre at all, and when they do it is for display rather than concealment.
Ethical considerations aside, hackers figure that anyone who can't imagine a more interesting way to play with their computers than breaking into someone else's has to be pretty losing. Some other reasons crackers are looked down on are discussed in the entries on cracking and phreaking. See also samurai, dark-side hacker, and hacker ethic. For a portrait of the typical teenage cracker, see warez d00dz.
Things may have changed now but that's the beginning of the original hacker ethic and ideals, and how it all got started!
Awesome Site's I'm a part of.
-------------------------------------------------------------
-------------------------------------------------------------
Spooky's General guide to wires and cables.
We are dreamers, shapers, singers, and makers. We study the mysteries of laser and circuit, crystal and scanner, holographic demons and invocation of equations. These are the tools we employ, and we know many things.
My Items