Levy_S-Hackers-Heroes-Computer-Revolution

oxes" hardware devices to make illegal calls for the purpose of ripping off thephone company. Nelson and the hackers believed that they were helping the phonecompany. They would get hold of priority phone company lines to variouslocations around the country and test them. If they didn't work, they would report itto the appropriate repair service.To do this, of course, you had to successfully impersonate technical employees ofthe Bell Telephone System, but the hackers became quite accomplished at that,especially after reading such contraband books as the classic Principles ofElectricity and Electronics Applied to Telephone and Telegraph Work, or Notes onDistant Dialing, or recent issues of the Bell System Technical Journal.Armed with this information, you could travel around the world, saying to anoperator, "I'm calling from the test board in Hacken-sack and I'd like you to switchme through to Rome. We're trying to test the circuit." She would "write up thenumber," which would lead you to another number, and soon you would be askinga phone operator in Italy what the weather was like there. Or you'd use the PDP-1in Blue Box Mode, letting it route and reroute your calls until you were connectedto a certain phone number in England where callers would hear a children'sbedtime story, a number inaccessible from this country except by blue box.In the mid-sixties, the phone company was establishing its system of toll-free areacode-800numbers. Naturally, the hackers knew about this. With scientificprecision, they would attempt to chart these undocumented realms: excursions to800-land could send you to bizarre places, from the Virgin Islands to New York.Eventually someone from the phone company gave a call to the line near thecomputer, asking what were these four hundred or so calls to places that, as far asthe phone company was concerned, did not exist. The unlucky Cambridge branchof the phone company had coped with MIT before, and would again at one point,they burst into the ninth floor at Tech Square, and demanded that the hackers showthem the blue box. When the hackers pointed to the PDP-6, the frustrated officialsthreatened to take the whole machine, until the hackers unhooked the phoneinterface and handed it over.Though Nelson's initial interest in the PDP-1 was its phone hacking potential, hebecame more versatile with it, and was eventually programming all sorts of things.The more he programmed, the better he got, and the better he got, the more hewanted to program. He would sit by the console of the machine while somegraduate student would fumble with a program, and he'd sort of peck around thegrad student's back, which would only make the graduate student fumble more, andfinally he would burst out, "If I solve that problem for you, will you let me have thecomputer?" The grad student, who probably had been trying to crack the problemfor weeks, would agree, not really believing this quirky fellow could solve it, but