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Out
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A Code
Red Call to All Real Hackers
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© 8-15-01
Charles Sorgie
Remember the good old days, when Hacking
was synonymous with Learning, with Sharing Knowledge,
with Innocent Fun? When the last possible thing that
a Hacker would dream of doing was hurt someone
else, or cause someone else to lose valuable work?
Remember when Hacking meant figuring
out some really cool way to use some system to do
something that it was never intended to do? Or increasing
the functionality of something a hundredfold by discovering
some neat hidden trick?
I sure do.
The
IBM 1620 Model 1
I cut my programming teeth on an IBM
1620 Model 1. Good Lord Almighty, what a computer
that was. That is not a picture of an IBM 1620 Model
1 sitting on a desktop, that entire thing is
an IBM 1620 Model 1! With credit to The
Computer Museum History Center (not that my memory
required too much jogging), here are some tasty tidbits
regarding this venerable machine:
The
IBM 1620 Model 1 Control Panel
(1) The 1969 Universal Pictures Movie
"Colossus: The Forbin Project" used the IBM 1620 control
panel as the front end of the Colossus super(duper)
computer, which was encased in a mountain, surrounded
by intensified gamma radiation, and placed in sole,
irrefutable charge of the USA's national nuclear defense
system... how is that for a blood line, folks?
In case you never saw the movie, Colossus teamed up
with its Russian counterpart and took over the world
"for the good of all humankind." (Gee, that motive
sounds disturbing familiar, doesn't it?)
(2) The memory on the IBM 1620 was called
the "core," a term used in the StarTrek series to
this day (and to their day, too). It was called that
because it actually consisted of tiny magnetic doughnuts
hand threaded with very fine wires. The core memory
was heated to and stabilized at 104°F (40°C),
because it was simpler to maintain a consistent hot
temperature than a consistent cool one. (Concern over
the searing of laps was not a design issue, because
if you had an IBM 1620 in your lap, boy oh boy, you
had bigger problems.) If the core ever started to
cool off, e.g., due to too long of a power outage,
it would start to groan and creak like some kind of
B-movie sci fi monster. I know, because I heard it
once.
(3) The IBM 1620 Model 1 that I worked
on had (hold your breath) 20,000 (yes, a two followed
by four zeros) digital "characters." Each character
was sort of like a byte, but you could not get at
the individual bits... who wants to deal with those
pesky things, anyway? I mean, 0, 1, On, Off, blah,
blah, they are so limiting, why bother?
(4) Anyway, the IBM 1620 really was
digital in its operation, i.e., numbers (including
machine addresses!) in core memory were stored one
digit per character, with a "flag" over the leftmost
digit that marked the end of the number, and a flag
over the rightmost digit if the number was negative.
This scheme worked because all of the arithmetic instructions
simply referred to the rightmost digit, which also
meant that you had unlimited precision in your calculations.
What was way cool about the Model 1 was that the math
tables of the machine (yes, the IBM 1620 did math
the old fashioned way, it looked up the answer) were
stored in memory, so you could actually modify
the tables to do arithmetic in any base less than
10. I never did that, but I did once program
it to calculate 1000! (that is 1000 factorial, or
1000 * 999 * 998 * ... * 2 for you non-math types)
exactly, with all of the digits. Hmmm... I
wonder if I still have a printout? This table lookup
of math operations earned the IBM 1620 the internal
development code name of CADET, an acronym for Can't
Add Doesn't Even Try.
The
IBM 1620 Model 1 Console Typewriter
(5) The carriage on the console typewriter
of the IBM 1620 Model 1 (that hole on the right in
the first picture is where the typewriter went; it
needed that hole so it wouldn't shake itself off onto
the floor) extended beyond the edge of the console
itself, and was so powerful, it could crack a rib
(really). They actually, in later upgrades, guarded
the carriage with a wire cage to protect the operator
and innocent passersby. I always thought that it was
a nice touch that the hardware instruction that did
a return on the console typewriter was the same instruction
(with a different device specified) that did a seek
on the hard disk. Instructions on the IBM 1620 back
then, man, they really did something. What
do you get nowadays for a computer instruction? Another
one of those stupid, piddling bits turned on or off?
And you thought that the price of gasoline
has gone up in the past 30 years? Sheesh.
Where was I? Oh, yeah, hacking. I actually
wrote a disk operating system that fit on two cards.
Oh, I forgot to mention, you could either type the
machine language directly in on the console, or punch
80 column cards and read them in on the card reader.
OK, so all my "operating system" did was dump the
contents of memory onto a cylinder of the hard disk,
with the second card reading it in an executing it,
but boy oh boy was it FUN to show it off to
people! Eventually, I wrote an SPS II-D (that was
the name of the assembly language) program on the
thing and became the 1970 AEDS (Association of Educational
Data Systems) National Grand Prize Winner among all
of the high school contestants competing in the USA,
but that is another story.
My point is that this was all good,
clean, educational, nondestructive FUN. That,
and that all of the lost work and wasted productivity
due to this latest Code Red vandalism really ticks
me off. We, as a group, are better than this,
people. Oh, and lest I be misunderstood, I am not
begging you germs out there for any leniency, far
from it, you can all pucker up and kiss my core.
I am summoning up the autonomic immune
system.
All of you Real Hackers out there,
why not band together and form a Real Hackers
underground group? The function of the movement would
be to develop patches, policies, and protections that
would prevent worms and viruses like Code Red from
ever being able to get a foothold, or to snuff them
out quickly once they were discovered. Hey, perhaps
friendly, benevolent viruses and worms, like antibodies,
could be released that would innoculate machines and/or
disinfect them. Don't raise your eyebrows too high
in disbelief, dear reader... we are talking about
Real Hackers here, and they have already demonstrated
that they can pretty much accomplish anything that
is even remotely technologically possible.
Imagine what an altruistic, organized, international
team of them with the single purpose of mind of protecting
the net could do.
It boggles the mind, is what it does.
Or, perhaps Real Hackers could
develop a monitoring network that would make it difficult
(or perhaps impossible) to deploy malicious viruses
and worms without them being traceable back to their
originators, who could then be prosecuted to the fullest
extent of the law. That is worth a shot, isn't it?
Hey, it would still be fun, it would
reclaim the term "Hacker" for those with the mind
set for which it was originally intended, it would
be constructive, and it really would serve humankind.
It would be an actual, live computer game, the Real
Hackers vs. the Germs.
Good would triumph over Evil. Information
would flow like wine. Well, OK, like Code Red.
What do you think, Phreaks?
Charles
Sorgie
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