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History of Hacking
1900-1950: Radio and Electronics Amateurs
“Electricity, especially Wireless, are positively the strongest home-magnets today. His workshop, his small Electric laboratory or his Wireless Den are the most powerful home attractions for the 20th Century Boy.”
(Electro Importing Catalog 14, 2nd Edition, 1914:144)
The foundations for hacker culture, and its fascination of interpersonal communication and technology, can be traced back to the early 20’th century when the first radio and electronics enthusiasts made their own radio transmission and receiving equipment, and communicated by Morse code. The first technical instructions appeared in Amateur Work (Hertzian Waves of November, 1901), and Scientific American Supplement (How to Construct An Efficient Wireless Telegraph Apparatus at Small Cost of February 15, 1902).
The radio amateurs became the first virtual community, limited by technology yet existing beyond geography, where many of these early amateurs were adolescent males and gained their knowledge from radio amateur magazines (Modern Electrics, The Electrical Experimenter and Radio Amateur News) and other radio operators. Initially the press hailed the adolescents as boy-inventor heroes ingeniously mastering the ether, but as the number of radio enthusiasts grew steadily - especially in the more industrialized US northeast - their sheer numbers caused a lot of interference with commercial or US navy airwaves (Douglas, 1987). When the rescue operation of the Titanic on April 15, 1912 supposedly became disrupted due to radio interference, a national radio legislation was introduced that reduced the available wavelengths to 200 meters This regulation of amateur radio with its obligatory certification and courses meant that many previous amateurs were excluded for economical and practical reasons. Radio and electronic amateurs continued to thrive during the 20’Th century as the kits became more sophisticated, cheaper and more available (White, 2003)
1950 – 1970: From MIT to Yippies
MIT are one of the most prominent and advanced technical research universities in USA. Somewhat surprisingly maybe, the origin of the term “hack” can be traced back to pranks performed by unknown students at the MIT campus. These were practical jokes which were characterized by humor and finesse such as covering the MIT dome with reflective foil or – at the top of the same dome – place a police car replica complete with blinking lights, a policeman dummy and a box of doughnuts (Peterson, 2003).
The term eventually migrated to the first computer research environments where it became a synonym for intense, creative and innovative sessions of computer programming. One of the foremost recruitment places for this first generation of hackers was the Tech Model Railroad Club of MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology). This was the place were electrical engineering students and teachers met in their spare time in the fifties and sixties . Their huge model train set was expanded upon with increasing technological finesse and one of its monumental achievements was the construction of a control system made out of telephone switches.
[…] This control system was an attraction to the sort of people who liked logic problems and switching circuits and the same kind of people who were attracted to computers when they first became available
(Andy Miller, fieldwork interview spring 2000)
The control system consisted of sophisticated phone equipment that had been acquired by one of its members that also were in charge of the campus phone system. Using the control system enabled its users to simultaneously control several trains on different parts of the track. The hack at TMRC became synonymous with innovation, style and technical virtuosity and members who put the most time in the construction process were called “hackers” (Levy, 1984). When Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC), a leading computer manufacturer in the USA, donated one of its first digital computers to the MIT, many of the TMRC members, who were students, started using the computer for their own student research projects. These projects were characterized by playfulness, technical virtuosity and intellectual challenges. The students – or hackers - would spend many days working non-stop on projects that weren’t on any teaching curriculum such as programming a assembly program (an program that translates assembly language to machine language) for the PDP-1 during a weekend or making the first computer game called “Spacewar”:
[You’d] have a little rocket ship and a sun. One version of it had a real time diagram of the solar system were all the stars were and so fort. The sun had gravity; if you fired a projectile from your rocket it would curve inwards towards the sun because of the gravity and so fort. It had all these high-tech features and it was considered an intellectual challenge, I think, to add these.
(McNamara, fieldwork interview spring 2000)
A hack was viewed as something benign, something that would help you and others gain knowledge as well as being aesthetically pleasing in terms of its technological sophistication. They were not meant to penetrate existing systems or do any harm:
So I guess the point of all this is to say that computer hacks in those days were very innocent sort of pranks. That was not intended to - or in general design - break into anyone system or to do any harm or anything. The computers weren’t networked and everything was fairly simple and transparent.
(Alan Kotok, fieldwork interview spring 2000)
The first hackers also developed a working ethos – a hacker ethic- that two decades later was put into book form by Steven Levy (1984). The working ethos can be seen as existing in the absence of administrative structures and not being constrained by any division of labor (Hannemyr, 1997). The hacker work ethos emphasized hands-on teaching, sharing of resources and free access to information. Progress and innovation often evolved or came about through non-curriculum experimentation or “hacking” as it was named. In “Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Underground”, Levy distils the following points:
As the academic and commercial research came under corporate-style management during the sixties, much of the hacker culture disappeared. “Scientific Management”, an invention by the engineer Frederick Winslow Taylor, aimed at taking the control of the work activity away from the workers. This was done by increased standardization and work specialization. Taylor meant that this was the only way management could have the desired control over productivity and quality. For computer programmers, this meant that programming now had to go through standards, reviews, structured walkthroughs and “miscellaneous productivity metrics” (Hannemyr, 1997). Suddenly rigorous labor division made the free intellectual roaming of hackers impossible.
In the late sixties another kind of hacking came into being, the hacking of telephone networks, or phone phreaking as it was called. This was a name for a number of techniques that basically enabled you to use the telephone for free. Phone phreaking utilized technical information that was readily available in libraries or technical magazines. But most, if not all, of the information on telephone systems security, was so technical and obscure that most people wouldn’t know how to use it.
Well I think there was a view that telephone systems security was mostly security by obscurity, that’s the assumption that people wouldn’t know well enough about it to exploit [it]. So you get a bunch of MIT students who for whom understanding how things work is a major goal in life […] so how this system works will be learned and [it’s] weaknesses will be exploited!
(Alan Kotok, fieldwork interview spring 2000)
Captain Crunch gained worldwide notoriety after an Esquire article highlighted his elite phone phreaker skills (Rosenbaum, 1971). He gained his nickname when utilizing a children’s whistle found in the “Cap’n Crunch” breakfast cereal box. Given to him by blind friends – that constituted a substantial percentage of the phone phreaking community – he used the whistle to access AT&T long distance switching equipment. The whistle emitted a tone with the frequency of exactly 2600 Hz. This was exactly the same note that AT&T and other long-distance companies used to indicate available long-distance lines. Thus, used in conjunction with a Blue Box , Captain Crunch could make long distance calls to his girlfriend from Los Angeles to New York. He also connected two telephones in the same room to each other, across the globe, hearing his own voice with a 20 second delay (ibid).
During the early seventies, dissemination of subversive technological techniques such as phone phreaking starts appearing in an underground leaflet called Youth International Party Line. Founded by Abbie Hoffman – author of “Steal This Book!” - YIPL brandished a neo-anarchist, anti-establishment and anti-war agenda, publishing detailed instructions on how to exploit telephone networks systems as well as other governmental and corporate infrastructures. YIPL was the technological manifest of Yippies, hippies with a revolutionary agenda, that during sixties and seventies ”carried out a loud and lively policy of surrealistic subversion and outrageous political mischief” (Sterling, 1994:43), including tossing hundreds of dollars to the trading floor of the New York Stock Exchange - causing general mayhem as the brokers scrambled for the money - and gathering hundreds of meditating demonstrators attempting to levitate the Pentagon .
The subversive activities of YIPL and the Yippies diminished as the Vietnam War wound down to an end, and in 1973 a new phone phreaking leaflet appeared. TAP, or Technological American Party , published more sophisticated telephone systems exploiting articles as well as formula for explosives, pirate radios and how to illegally alter gas or electric meters but playing down the political agenda (Taylor, 2001). An important turning point was TAP’s decision not to publish the plans for the Hydrogen bomb as this would destroy the phone system which its readers so enthusiastically exploited/explored (Ross, 1990).
The "newsletter for the exchange of anti-Big Brother technical information" ceased its publication in 1984, but in the same year “2600 :The Hackers Quarterly” took over, its editor taking on the pseudonym of Emmanuel Goldstein the name of the protagonist that battles the totalitarian regime of Big Brother’s Oceania in George Orwell’s 1984 (Sterling, 1992). “2600” catered both to the phreaking and emerging hacker culture of the eighties.
Computers to the people
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