bookssland.com » Computers » Approaching Zero - Paul Mungo (books to read to increase intelligence .txt) 📗

Book online «Approaching Zero - Paul Mungo (books to read to increase intelligence .txt) 📗». Author Paul Mungo



1 ... 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 ... 40
Go to page:
with

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.

Chapter 2 BREAKING AND ENTERING

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

1 ... 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 ... 40
Go to page:

Free e-book «Approaching Zero - Paul Mungo (books to read to increase intelligence .txt) 📗» - read online now

Comments (0)

There are no comments yet. You can be the first!
Add a comment