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Info: Hacker Historie III
1980-1990: The Golden Age Of Hackers
My personal experience with computer started about 1984. Many of my friends received a computer as a Christmas or birthday present from their parents. We would gather at their house and type program listings found in computer magazines into the computer as well playing games. Most if not all of the games were pirated, that is their copyright protection had been broken, and the software was distributed on cassette tapes or disks, depending on what equipment your computer had. The network that we exchanged tips, programs and utilities through was of a peer-to-peer type. You knew someone who had friends with access to software, or someone who knew someone closer to a software source, and during time this network also grew to encompass people with different computers, skills and accesses. Payment of pirated software was unheard off; not only was it illegal but it was frowned upon as the general consensus was to swap software. Cracking computer software copyright protection often became the incentive to acquire computer skills:
It was on these meetings that a guy […] started to bring along games that his father had brought home. This was the incentive to learn assembly [in order to] remove copyright protection. The games that we then managed to hack/crack/whatever was distributed very quickly among the local network of people, and later among the channels we had to other groups in Norway and other countries (but only within Western-Europe, not that it was conscious choice). New people that came into the local network got what they wanted of what we had. After some time it was expected that one should give something back or contribute with coding or something else. I never experienced that someone expected to be paid for something.
(Norwegian informant, email correspondence 2003)
A film released in 1983 captured the societal fascination with the new computing technology prevalent in many homes at that time as well as immediately becoming a major cultural reference point for hackers. “War Games” (1983) essentially caught the zeitgeist of hackers in the early eighties. It portrayed a young hacker who without any malice evident explored computer and telephone networks. The extent of his misconduct was when he changed his school grades, and it was by pure chance that he came across a phone number that connected him to a computer that controlled the American missile defence command, NORAD (IMDB website ).
The main protagonist of “War Games” used a war dialer to find phone numbers to computers. A war dialer is a computer program that identifies phone numbers that connects to computer modem. It dials a defined range of phone numbers, and logs the successful phone numbers. In the early eighties, most computers could only be accessed by individual phone lines , and discovering a phone number that connected you to a computer became a secret knowledge. This type of secret knowledge could be distributed on a Bulletin Board System . A BBS is a computer, or a program, that is dedicated to the sharing and exchange of messages and files. A BBS may cater to a specific subject or be more general (Walleij, 1998).
The dissemination secret knowledge previously featured in YIPL and TAP, were now available as text files at secret BBS’s. In order to get the phone number to the BBS, as well as the password, you had to prove your ability to the hacker underground, which operated on the mentor principle; unless you could find someone who inducted you into the inner circle of a hacker group, you were left outside. By 1985 it was assumed to be 5,000 BBS’s in the USA, and by 1990 that number had grown to 30,000. Most systems enabled its users to use “handles”, or nicknames, to ensure their anonymity (Sterling, 1992).
At this time the first hacker groups started to appear. Many of the first groups were formed by phone phreakers who migrated to network computers as the telephone corporations not only replaced their analogue switching technology with computerized telephone switches but utilised automated blue boxes scanning devices to deter further telephone fraud. Following the release of “War Games”, the media quickly focused on this new generation of hackers, berating their assumed criminal activities but at the same time portraying the hacker as a groundbreaking pioneer on the new computing frontier. The media rhetoric assumed a Wild West analogy that to a large degree pertained to American values and ideals concerning the sovereign rights of the individual and the ingenuity of economic entrepreneurs (Ross, 1990)(Chandler, 1996). The Milwaukee group 414, Kevin Mitnick and Master of Destruction all became household names in the public arena as well as becoming part of the hacker culture (Walleij, 1998).
Simultaneously other computer users that utilized hacking methods for non-hacking purposes began to appear. The destructive and criminal activities of crackers, pirates and virus creators led to a hardened governmental stance on “hacker” activities, prompting federal and state investigations, arrests and harsher sentencing (Sterling, 1992). Hacking had become synonymous with computer criminality and electronic terrorism (Chandler, 1996). Operation Sundevil in 1990, a huge Secret Service raid on several BBS’s suspected of harbouring information on credit card and phone number frauds, signified a change of attitude towards hacking and hackers. The Electronic Frontier Foundation was formed at this time to protect the online civil liberties as well as to give juridical assistance to individuals it deemed wrongly accused or convicted of electronic crime (Sterling, 1992).
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