Approaching Zero, Paul Mungo [good summer reads TXT] 📗
- Author: Paul Mungo
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tapes and recorders, and the use of diskettes, as well as the simple operating
system that Woz had built into the computer, encouraged other companies to
write software for the new machines.
This last development more than anything else boosted the
Apple II out of the hobbyist ghetto. The new Apple spawned a plethora of
software: word-processing packages, graphics and arts programs, accounting
systems, and computer games. The launch two years later of the VisiCalc spread
sheet, a business forecasting program, made the Apple particularly attractive
to corporate users.
Even Captain Crunch wrote software for the Apple II. At the time, in 1979, he
was incarcerated in Northampton State Prison in Pennsylvania for a second
phreaking offense. While on a rehabilitation course that allowed him access to
a computer he developed a program called EasyWriter, one of the first word-processing packages, which for a short time became the secondbest-selling
program in America. Draper went on to write other applications, marketed under
the “Captain Software” label.
The Apple II filled a niche in the market, one that traditional computer
manufacturers hadn’t realized was there. The Apple was small and light, it was
easy to use and could perform useful functions. A new purchaser could go home,
take the components out of their boxes, plug them in, load the software, then
sit down and write a book, plot a company’s cash flow, or play a game.
By any standards Apple’s subsequent growth was phenomenal. In its first year of
operation, 1977, it sold $2.5 million worth of computers. The next year sales
grew to $15 million, then in 1979 to $70 million. In 1980 the company broke
through the $100 million mark, with sales of $117 million. The figures
continued to rise, bounding to $335 million in 1981 and $583 million in 1982.
Along the way the founders of Apple became millionaires, and in 1980, when the
company went public, Jobs became worth $165 million and Wozniak $88 million.
The story of Apple, though, isn’t just the story of two young men who made an
enviable amount of money. What Jobs and Wozniak began with their invention was
a revolution. Bigger than Berkeley’s Free Speech Movement and “the summer of
love” in Haight-Asbury, the technological revolution represented by the
personal computer has brought a real change to society. It gave people access
to data, programs, and computing power they had never had before. In an early
promotional video for Apple, an earnest employee says, “We build a device that
gives people the same power over information that large corporations and the
government have over people.”
The statement deliberately echoes the “power to the people” anthem of the
sixties, but while much of the political radicals’ time was spent merely
posturing, the technological revolutionaries were delivering a product that
brought the power of information to the masses. That the technological pioneers
became rich and that the funky little companies they founded turned into
massive corporations is perhaps testament to capitalism’s capacity to direct
change, or to coopt a revolution.
Apple was joined in the PC market by hundreds of other companies, including
“Big Blue” itself—IBM. When the giant computer manufacturer launched its own
PC in 1981, it expected to sell 250,000 units over five years. Again, the
popular hunger for computing power was underestimated. In a short while, IBM
was selling 250,000 units a month. Penetration of personal computers has now
reached between 15 and 35 percent of all homes in the major industrialized
countries. There are said to be 50 to 90 million PCs in use in homes and
offices throughout the world, and the number is still rising.
And though the PC revolution would probably have happened without Wozniak and
Jobs, it may not have happened as quickly. It’s worth remembering that the
catalyst for all this was a magazine article about phreaking.
Computers are more than just boxes that sit on desks. Within the machines and
the programs that run them is a sort of mathematical precision that is
breathtaking in the simplicity of its basic premise. Computers work,
essentially, by routing commands, represented by electrical impulses, through a
series of gates that can only be open or closed—nothing else. Open or closed;
on or off. The two functions are represented symbolically as 1 (open/ on) or 0
(closed/off). The route the pulse takes through the gates determines the
function. It is technology at its purest: utter simplicity generating infinite
complexity.
The revolution that occurred was over the control of the power represented by
this mathematical precision. And the argument is still going on, although it is
now concerned not with the control of computers but with the control of
information. Computers need not be isolated: with a modem—the boxlike machine
that converts computer commands to tones that can be carried over the phone
lines—they can be hooked up to vast networks of mainframe computers run by
industry, government, universities, and research centers. These networks, all
linked by telephone lines, form a part of a cohesive international web that has
been nicknamed Worldnet. Worldnet is not a real organization: it is the name
given to the international agglomeration of computers, workstations, and
networks, a mix sometimes called information technology. Access to Worldnet is
limited to those who work for the appropriate organizations, who have the
correct passwords, and who are cleared to receive the material available on the
network.
For quite obvious reasons, the companies and organizations that control the
data on these networks want to restrict access, to limit the number of people
wandering through their systems and rifling through their electronic filing
cabinets. But there is a counterargument: the power of information, the
idealists say, should be made available to as many people as possible, and the
revolution wrought by PCs won’t be complete until the data and research
available on computer networks can be accessed by all.
This argument has become the philosophical justification for hacking—although
in practice, hacking usually operates on a much more mundane level. Hacking,
like phreaking, is inspired by simple curiosity about what makes the system
tick. But hackers are often much more interested in accessing a computer just
to see if it can be done than in actually reading the information they might
find, just as phreakers became more interested in the
phone company than in making free calls. The curiosity that impelled phreakers
is the same one that fuels hackers; the two groups merged neatly into one
high-tech subculture.
Hacking, these days, means the unauthorized access of computers or computer
systems. Back in the sixties it meant writing the best, fastest, and cleverest
computer programs. The original hackers were a bunch of technological wizards
at MIT, all considered among the brightest in their field, who worked together
writing programs for the new computer systems then being developed. Their
habits were eccentric: they often worked all night or for thirty-six hours
straight, then disappeared for two days. Dress codes and ordinary standards
were overlooked: they were a disheveled, anarchic bunch. But they were there to
push back the frontiers of computing, to explore areas of the new technology
that no one had seen before, to test the limits of computer science.
In the early eighties, the computer underground, like the computer industry
itself, was centered in the United - States. But technology flows quickly
across boundaries, as do fads and trends, and the ethos of the technological
counterculture became another slice of Americana that, like Hollywood movies
and Coca-Cola, was embraced internationally.
Although the United States nurtured the computer underground, the conditions
that spawned it existed in other countries as well. There were plenty of young
men all over the world who would become obsessed with PC technology and the
vistas it offered, and many who would be attracted to the new society, with its
special jargon and rituals. The renegade spirit that created the computer
underground in the first place exists worldwide.
In 1984, the British branch of the technological counterculture probably began
with a small group that used to meet on an ad hoc basis in a Chinese restaurant
in North London. The group had a floating membership, but usually numbered
about a dozen; its meetings were an excuse to eat and drink, and to exchange
hacker lore and gossip.
Steve Gold, then a junior accountant with the Regional Health Authority in
Sheffield and a part-time computer journalist, was twenty-five, and as one of
the oldest of the group, had been active when phone phreaking first came to
England. Gold liked to tell
stories about Captain Crunch, the legendary emissary from America who had
carried the fad across the Atlantic.
The Captain can take most of the credit for exporting his hobby to Great
Britain during his holiday there in 1970. Because the U.S. and British
telephone systems were entirely different, MF-ers were of no use in England—
except, of course, to reduce charges on calls originating in America. The
British telephone network didn’t use the same multifrequency tones (it used
2280 cycles), so the equipment had to be modified or new ways had to be devised
to fool the British system. Naturally the Captain had risen to the challenge
and carried out the most audacious phreak in England. The British telephone
system was hierarchical, with three tiers: local switching offices, zone
exchanges comprised of a number of local offices, and group offices linking
various zones. Much of the equipment in the local exchanges in those days
dated back to the 1920S; in the zone and group offices the electronics had been
put in during the 1950S, when Britain introduced national long-distance
dialing, or STD (Standard Trunk Dialing), as it was then known. The Captain
quickly discovered that users could avoid expensive long-distance charges by
routing their calls from the local exchange to one nearby. The mechanism was
simple: all a caller needed to do was dial the area code—known in Britain as
the STD code—for the nearest out-of-area local exchange and then add a 9. The
9 would give the caller another dial tone, and he could then dial through to
any other number in the country. He would only be charged, however, for the
call to the nearby local exchange. The process was known as chaining, or
sometimes bunny hopping.
With his usual enthusiasm for exploring phone networks, Captain Crunch decided
to test the limits of the system. He notified a friend in Edinburgh to wait for
his call from London while the Captain began a long, slow crawl up through
local exchanges, dialing from one to the other, through England and then into
Scotland. He is reputed to have chained six local exchanges; he could hear the
call slowly clicking its way through exchange after exchange (the call was
being routed through 1920S equipment) on its snaillike progression northward.
Thirty minutes later the Captain’s call finally rang at his friend’s house. The
connection, it is said, was terrible.
Steve Gold, like many others, had become an enthusiastic phreaker after
learning the Captain’s techniques. But like everyone else around the table at
the restaurant, his interest had eventually turned to hacking as soon as
personal computers became generally available. The group was part of the first
generation to take advantage of the technological revolution that took place in
the 1960S and 1970S: they had all learned about computers in school, having
benefited from a sudden awareness that computer literacy was important, not
merely an arcane specialty reserved for hobbyists and engineers. The science
fiction of the 1960S had become a reality, and though it had been less than
eight years since Jobs and Wozniak began assembling Apples in a California
garage, and less than a decade since the Altair had been introduced, computers
were no longer frightening or mysterious to the new generation. Mainframes had
been supplanted by small, compact
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