Old School Hackers
Chris Savage
Parallax EngineeringPosts: 14,406
Since this is just a Test Forum, I thought I would post about something that doesn't really have an area on here to discuss...A few of the "old timers" on here might be able to appreciate this...
A friend of mine and I were at EBGames yesterday looking at some new Video Games (Yeah, like I have time to play Video Games!), when another "kid" that we knew showed up.· Now my "friend" is much younger than I am anyway, probably closer to the age of the "kid" that showed up.· Once the two of them got started talking, I found myself in a kind of generation gap.· These two were using words that resembled stuff I heard in the old days, but they were using them more casually then was used then as well.
It occurs to me that back in my early days of computers, the real Computer Hackers were called "Elite."· Nowadays all these kids are 1337 (Supposing to mean LEET).· Back in the day people who referred to themselves as Elite could reverse engineer pretty much any computer software, and wrote their own software in assembly.· These days to be "1337" all you have to do is know the lingo, and the right people.
Back in the day, people who coded wrote software, usually in assembly language.· Nowadays coders are people who can change a few HTML tags, or know how to change profiles (Text Files) for games.
What happened?!?·
Post Edited By Moderator (IT Guy (Parallax)) : 8/6/2004 12:36:19 AM GMT
A friend of mine and I were at EBGames yesterday looking at some new Video Games (Yeah, like I have time to play Video Games!), when another "kid" that we knew showed up.· Now my "friend" is much younger than I am anyway, probably closer to the age of the "kid" that showed up.· Once the two of them got started talking, I found myself in a kind of generation gap.· These two were using words that resembled stuff I heard in the old days, but they were using them more casually then was used then as well.
It occurs to me that back in my early days of computers, the real Computer Hackers were called "Elite."· Nowadays all these kids are 1337 (Supposing to mean LEET).· Back in the day people who referred to themselves as Elite could reverse engineer pretty much any computer software, and wrote their own software in assembly.· These days to be "1337" all you have to do is know the lingo, and the right people.
Back in the day, people who coded wrote software, usually in assembly language.· Nowadays coders are people who can change a few HTML tags, or know how to change profiles (Text Files) for games.
What happened?!?·
Post Edited By Moderator (IT Guy (Parallax)) : 8/6/2004 12:36:19 AM GMT
Comments
Fred
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This thread is stirring some memories. Back when very few could afford the Altair, we used Z-80 processors, wire-wrap 4K memory boards and hex keypads. How quickly we put it all in the closet when the TRS-80 arrived. I always liked the paddle switches on the IMSAI. So much easier on the fingers when hand-loading a boot program.
We have set up a new forum, called the Sandbox, for threads like this one. If it acceptable, I can move this thread over to that forum so it will be around for a long, long time.
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Jim
Parallax IT Dept.
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Chris Savage
Knight Designs
324 West Main Street
P.O. Box 97
Montour Falls, NY 14865
(607) 535-6777
I remember when I found a simple solution to the problem of interfacing a Hitachi-Based LCD display to the Z80.· Hitachi's tech docs listed some kind of weird delay-line using discrete parts.· I found by using a single 74LS02 (And who doesn't have a pile of those lying around?) that I could hook up 2 displays, and correct for the timing issues all in one.· So it was bye-bye LED Displays and hello LCD Displays...
I also used to mod old C64s and C128s so that you could have different color screens on startup, different fonts, and read/write over-ride control of the disk-drives.· Not to mention Stereo Sound Chip mods!· Anyway, I'd love to continue this thread with any Old-School hackers that wish to reminisce about the old-days.
BTW, anyone still have an old Timex-Sinclair lying around, or how about a Kaypro?·
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Chris Savage
Knight Designs
324 West Main Street
P.O. Box 97
Montour Falls, NY 14865
(607) 535-6777
Somewhere I've even got an original Bally Astrocade that's never been out of the box.·
Sigh...
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I used to be different, but now I'm the same...
btw... has anyone seen a punched tape machine lately [noparse]:)[/noparse]
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Jim
Parallax IT Dept.
Later, people who had dead ones would build other types of computers into the cases, as some sick & twisted mod!·
As for the 64, it outlived any other computer system I can think of, and could do more than the engineers ever thought possible when they designed it.· I believe there are still a few User Groups (TCCUG) in the Schenectady/Albany New York area.· In fact I'm pretty sure there is still an Amiga User Group (CDAUG).
As for the Amiga, if Commodore was still in business, I'd be writing this message on an Amiga now.
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Chris Savage
Knight Designs
324 West Main Street
P.O. Box 97
Montour Falls, NY 14865
(607) 535-6777
I still think it's funny that most of my colleagues started with BASIC, and moved away from it to C++ and/or Assembly.· And that after all these years I am right back AT BASIC!·
As for the punch card thing, bite your tongue Jim...While I never worked with them personally, I remember seeing some at a friend's house who was older-school than me!· He had built alot of his stuff from scratch or kits (Remember Heathkit).· Home-Built Tube Amplifiers, TVs, Stereo Systems...This was my mentor.· He taught me how to program using toggle switches to directly enter binary machine code, before he would teach me anything else!·
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Chris Savage
Knight Designs
324 West Main Street
P.O. Box 97
Montour Falls, NY 14865
(607) 535-6777
If you really remember those days, have a look at Amiga Forever...complete emulation of the Amiga with all chips at speeds greater than a REAL Amiga.
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I used to be different, but now I'm the same...
BTW, it's amazing what a complete set of tools can accomplish, huh?
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Chris Savage
Knight Designs
324 West Main Street
P.O. Box 97
Montour Falls, NY 14865
(607) 535-6777
Who doesn't?
My brother got hold of a Sinclair ZX Spectrum(lovingly referred to as 'Speccy') 48KB back in 1984, complete with Interface 1 and 2, printer and Microdrive.
Gosh, how we loved to tease C64 owners with that.
A 48KB program loaded in less than 10 seconds...
(The microdrive was a small tape drive with cartridges about the size of a modern CD-Card which could store up to 100KB)
With the Interface 1, we got MIDI, networking(up to 64 machines, and the BASIC commands to use it) and the possibility to hook up up to 8 of the microdrives.
I now have a Speccy of my own(without those extras), a ZX81, the Z88(Sir Clive's idea of a laptop. Nice...)
and a heap of others. Some of them I've even documented on my website...
The Epson HX-20, the worlds first laptop.
(It came a year before the TRS-80 model 100, so no protests, please)
I also have a TRS-80 Model 100, previously owned by the DMV in California...
I have the Osborne 1(a late model with SS/DD drives) and would love to put my clammy hands on a Commodore SX-64.
And at the moment I'm trying to get a Psion Organiser II LZ64 to use a EB500 BlueTooth module.
(1987 vintage, see http://members.surfeu.at/org2/org2.htm )
Then there was Sculpt/Animate 3D and 4D...and then Lightwave.· I was actually a professional animator (with actual TV time...ooh...aah...) for a while...for a company who originally called me out to repair their Toaster machine.· Fun times.
And then programming them all in BASIC, Assembly, FORTH, Pascal, AREXX, C, etc...
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I used to be different, but now I'm the same...
I started out with the Timex Sinclair 1000. Learned Z-80 assembly on it.
Bought a Timex Sinclair 2068, then microdrives, and composite monitor.
Then it was onto an amstrad computer sold by montgomery wards. (PC Compatible dual 360K drives).
Learned 8088 assembly, then turbo pascal, [noparse][[/noparse]wipes away tear]. Ahh, the good old days.
Dialing BBS before anything called Internet existed.
Bean.
I used to run Opus BBS software on three nodes. The author's warrantee was, "If it breaks, you get to keep both halves."
My wife was a little concerned about needing all those phone lines. It was even more interesting when I had to explain to her that I gathered messages from machines all over N. California and shipped them to a system on the east coast every night. I sure was happy when long distance rates started dropping.
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Jim
Parallax IT Dept.
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"OIOOIOOO OIIOOIOI OIIOIIOO OIIOIIOO OIIOIIII OOIOOOOO OIIIOIII OIIOIIII OIIIOOIO OIIOIIOO OIIOOIOO OOIOOOOI"
Just stay calm and your screen will eventually return to 24 bit colors... A 16 color pallate just wasn't enough, even back in the day.
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Jim
Parallax IT Dept.
Me, I wrote my own BBS software using Microsoft QuickBASIC 4.5...Only 9600 bps coming in, but no hackers could shut MY system down!·
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Chris Savage
Knight Designs
324 West Main Street
P.O. Box 97
Montour Falls, NY 14865
(607) 535-6777
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Chris Savage
Knight Designs
324 West Main Street
P.O. Box 97
Montour Falls, NY 14865
(607) 535-6777
The new kids on the block probably never had to dial another modem and then put the telephone handset into the cradle on the old 300 acoustic modems. How far we have come in such a short time.
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Jim
Parallax IT Dept.
I have an old Sprint handheld computer in my collection.
It came with HALF an accoustic 'modem'
(It is only capable of beeping, and the operator must listen for the response from the other end himself...)
I once coded in OCTAL when I wrote a 'simplified OS' for the PDP-11/750 (A school project. It requested a filename, then loaded the application, nothing more)
Liked the help system on the PDP-11, though...
You usually typed 'HELP COMMAND' to get help on a particular command.
But if you typed 'HELP ME' it responded 'NO HELP AVAILABLE FOR YOU'
(If you just typed the command name wrong it responded with 'NO HELP AVAILABLE FOR XXXXX')
I've never dialed a BBS from home, but I've spent endless hours on them looking for drivers and utilities to use at work.
just by accident, I found this "Sandbox" forum, and I felt "at home" immediately.
When I remember right, I started my microprocessor "carreer" in 1974 when I bought a KIM-1 board with an 6502 together with the "huge amount" of 1 k of RAM, a hex display/keyboard, and an audio cassette interface. At this times, I wrote my first Assmbly language programs "on paper", and then manually translated the instructions into hex code, also manually calculating the required jump addresses. Today, I can only remember that 0x60 was the code for RTS on that CPU
For a while, I did not really understand what the TTY interface on this board was good for. Then I found out that it would allow you to hook up a teletype machine, or a "display terminal". So my next project was to "wire-wrap" a display terminal unit with 16 lines by 64 characters. After some "fights" with the CRT monitor that I planned to use, I finally got the terminal up and working (consuming about 4 Amps @ 5 Volts).
My next machine was an SWTP 6800 (South West Technical Products) based on the SS-50 (Smoke Signal 50) bus with 16 K of RAM memory. This Motorola 6800-based machine was my first computer which could support floppies. I did some programming with this machine, but then the TRS-80 (Model I with the Expansion Box) came up, so I concentrated on this one (using the SWTP-6800 as an interface between the TRS-80's parallel port and my IBM Selectric Printer - noisy, and slow). Later, this setup became obsolete, after I had built my first Heathkit matrix printer (sorry, I don't remember it's name anymore).
The "Trash-80" was my favorite machine for a while, and I have owned all types, Model I, II (the business machine with 8" Floppies - I still have some Floppies around, if NASA should need them), III (the all-in-one machine), IV (the better all-in-one machine), plus the Color Computer II (I wrote the German Language Docs for Tandy for this machine), and the Model 100 - IMO, one of the first Laptop computers around.
During my "TRS-80 times", I translated the "TRS-80 Disk and other Mysteries" book into German language plus various volumes of "The Disassembled TRS-80" authored by a guy called Bill Richardson.
With my TRS-80, I did some successful development projects for a German electronic organ company using the MZAL (Macro Z-80 Assembly Language) system.
Later, I also touched the PET's, and C64s, and the Apple IIs, but to be honest, I never really got really "familiar" with these machines - except of the Apple II and IIe machines, because I had a great time working at the MIT for two weeks localizing a software package (Apple Logo) from Englich to German for the Apple IIs.
BTW - This was my first stay in the US, and I immediately fell in love with this country (I had tears in my eyes when my plane took off from Boston, heading back to Germany).
Here is another story that might be of interest:
While working at the MIT, I also met a book publisher in Boston who showed me Lotus 123 running on an IBM PC with two monitors (one for text, one for CGA graphics). I was really amazed about the power and the menu-controlled user-interface of that program - much better than VisiCalc, which was the only calculation software I knew so far. This publisher arranged a meeting for me with the Lotus people in Boston. On that meeting, I told them that I'd be highly interested in localizing 123 to German language. The only answer I got was "We're not interested in international right now because we're busy enough to cover our domestic market". Seems as if Lotus has changed it's direction a bit in the meantime
I could continue telling the "old tales". If you are interested, please let me know - I'd be glad to add more if I find the time between my "modern" jobs programming microcontrollers, like the SX.
G
At some point in the gaming community it was decided by a few punky-kids that claiming to be a "1337 H@Kz0rz" made you appear cooler.· From there all you had to do was make fun of people by utilizing poorly developed grammar skills, make a few slants about tupping someone's mother, or replacing various letters in your sentences with other symbols.
The famous 's' for 'z' exchange quickly caught on among the gamerz, and a lame little pop-culture began to emerge from the disrespectful tweenies.· Your average elite member of the programming community is usually a 12-16 y/o with a few automated programs to snatch IDs, a colorful array of basic programming, and an ego the size of Australia.
I am by no means a programmer; however I do game, and I have had the misfortune of running into these tweakers myself.· Sadly, most of them are young posers: I have met a few kids that are deserving of the title Elite, as I've met a 13 y/o who took apart a kernel and reconstructed it (I really don't understand why this is a cool thing, but my other nerdy friends tell me this is an awesome feat).
So yeah; they're just a bunch of disrespectful kids who are looking for acceptance by tacking on a shiny title, but some show promise... mmmm pop-culture references.
No worries,
-JJ
·· See, you were one of the more serious guys...My system used a single phone line, and was mainly tied into my database software so that (Provided nobody was signed on) I could access it from remotely.· Fortunately during service calls (Normally during the day), nobody was signed onto my BBS anyway.· Most of my calls were at night.
·· BTW, do you think it would be more appropriate now to change the thread name to something more descriptive of us Old-Schoolers chatting here?· If you can, and you can think of something good, go for it!
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Chris Savage
Knight Designs
324 West Main Street
P.O. Box 97
Montour Falls, NY 14865
(607) 535-6777
Gotta laugh at the "script kiddies"...
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I used to be different, but now I'm the same...
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Chris Savage
Knight Designs
324 West Main Street
P.O. Box 97
Montour Falls, NY 14865
(607) 535-6777
Business Page:·· http://www.knightdesigns.com
Personal Page:··· http://www.lightlink.com/dream/chris
·
BTW, good label..."Script Kiddies"...Yeah, I have yet to see one of these Hackzors (sp?) that could write a line of real code.· Do something constructive...
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Chris Savage
Knight Designs
324 West Main Street
P.O. Box 97
Montour Falls, NY 14865
(607) 535-6777
Business Page:·· http://www.knightdesigns.com
Personal Page:··· http://www.lightlink.com/dream/chris
·
I think I have one of those, too...
(With an optional module to automate logging in, or something)
I should probably test it soon.
I never could solve Zork or Colossal Cave...
And I always got stuck inside the mountain when playing The Hobbit on the old ZX Spectrum.
(But I have played Tetris on a VT100 terminal, connected to a VAX... )
Anyone ever build their own simple CPU from discrete parts?· Had a friend who tackled this in college...I myself couldn't see the point, but I know he had a bigger appreciation for the internal workings of modern processors after that.· I don't remember how many instructions he built in, but I know it wasn't much.
The closest I came to building from discrete parts was merely "re-inventing the wheel."· First I built Forrest Mimms Solid State Experimental Oscilliscope, then later·built a 4 digital frequency counter.· At the time, all of the parts needed for both projects were available at Radio Shack.· How things have changed over the years with them.
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Chris Savage
Knight Designs
324 West Main Street
P.O. Box 97
Montour Falls, NY 14865
(607) 535-6777
Business Page:·· http://www.knightdesigns.com
Personal Page:··· http://www.lightlink.com/dream/chris
·
Long live it all.