CDNE Chapter 3 - The Grass-Roots of Hacker Culture

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Chapter 3
THE GRASS-ROOTS OF HACKER CULTURE

The grass-roots of hacker culture consisted of amateur radio and electronics hobbyists, who built their own microcomputers using the very first mail-order kits. Radio amateurs have been around since 1915, and they are organized in several camps. The most puritan insist that the telegraph key and Morse code are still the best tools for international communication. Others prefer radio telephony, i.e. voice transmissions. Still others have tried amateur TV, and some fiddle around with data communication by radio. Radio amateurs are found in any city worth its name, and many have turned to data transfer through the Internet, where they explore yet another means of communication. In a sense, the radio enthusiasts became the first hackers, even before MIT. The radio amateurs, as opposed to the hackers, seldom attracted young people to any great extent. In Sweden, part of the reason is that you have to be sixteen years old and become certified to use shortwave radios. The average Swedish youth can't afford the courses and testing required for radio certification. Some mess around with radio anyway, and are known as radio pirates. Broadcasting amateur radio without certification is not a big deal, as long as you don't cause problems. You have to be careful to stick to the correct frequencies; broadcasting on bands that are reserved for specific purposes, such as emergency or military channels, carries a risk of being traced and fined. To keep track of what frequencies to use to avoid trouble, radio amateurs soon began cooperating internationally. This became the first virtual society , which transcended geographic boundaries but was limited by technology. Radio amateurs embody a great deal of the culture that would later be adopted by the hackers: a fascination with technology (machines), and a fascination with interpersonal communication. Some are constantly on the lookout for new, cool equipment (gadget freaks). Others only want to find ways to communicate with other people as efficiently as possible, and try to improve existing systems (evolutionists), and some feel that they've mastered an aspect of technology and simply stay with it (these are sometimes called conservatives). Finally, there are those that most amateurs do not want anything to do with: the people that think that broadcasting pirate radio is the most awesome thing in the world, and who use technology as a means of rebelling against society. The early computer-oriented electronics hobbyists initially gathered around the very first personal computer: the Altair 8800 , which was introduced as a mail-order kit in 1975. The computer got its name from a planet in a Star Trek episode, and sold in such large quantities that some of the enthusiasts formed their own user groups. They were invariably electronics hobbyists, and often professional engineers. Virtually all of them were adults, but they were struck by the same technical fascination with programming that kept the university hackers awake all night and made them forget everything but the machines. The most active user group was the Homebrew Computer Club in San Fransisco. One of its members was Steve Wozniak , a dedicated hacker who was to build the Apple II computer. His friend Steve Jobs successfully marketed it in 1977 as the first real personal computer. Homebrew Computer Club's Swedish counterpart was called PD68 , which catered to happy engineers and others who found microcomputers fascinating. Personal Computers for a Broad Market In 1978, the Swedish companies Luxor and Scandia Metric contracted with Data Industrier AB (DIAB) to build a computer called ABC80 . DIAB manufactured the chips, while Luxor built the case, monitor, and keyboard. Despite its monochrome display (which required a special monitor), the ABC80 was a quality machine. As with its contemporaries Apple II and Tandy Radio Shack TRS-80, the established American computer industry considered these computers virtually useless. IBM displayed no interest whatsoever. The current trend was toward manufacturing minicomputers such as Digital Equipment's enormous DEC, since the industry giants (spearheaded by IBM and Digital) projected a global need for about 50 large computers in the year 2000. Users would connect to these computers through terminal networks. It is unclear what prompted Luxor and Scandia Metric to produce a computer for the regular consumer. Most likely, the chief engineers observed personal computing trends in the U.S., where the Apple II and TRS-80 had entered mass-production, and somehow persuaded the management to approve such a venture. ABC80 became a great success among Sweden's early computer enthusiasts, who had been waiting a long time for a real computer (previous computers had been very expensive and directly imported from the U.S.). Now there was one - and to top it off, it was Swedish! In 1981, it was succeeded by the ABC800. In 1980, electronics hobbyists, engineers, and other enthusiasts formed ABC-klubben (the ABC Club) under the leadership of the legendary Gunnar Tidner . The ABC Club showed an interest in computer communications from the start, and at the end of that year it opened Monitorn (The Monitor), which probably was Sweden's first non-profit BBS. It ran thanks to a program written by Tidner himself. For the rest of the 80's, most new Swedish BBS's were named X-Monitorn (such as Örebro-Monitorn, Eskilstuna-Monitorn, etc.) as a tribute to Tidner's breakthrough. The club still has a "monitor" that's used as an internal switchboard for all kinds of things. The ABC Club grew exponentially as personal computing in Sweden became all the rage it was in the U.S. It became a center for debating the technology of ABC computers as well as data communications in general. In 1985, through a contract with the QZ Computer Center in Stockholm, the ABC club gained access to a DEC-10 computer. On this machine, the members started a central BBS (a "real" conferencing system) with several discussion groups. The BBS, named Q-Zentralen (The Q-Zentral) ran on QZ's KOM-system, and resembled past and present networks such as U.S.A.'s Usenet and Prodigy, or England's Compunet. Many of the pioneers of the future electronic Sweden were found on Q-Zentral's discussion groups: Sven Wickberg, Anders Franzén, Henrik Schyffert, and Jan-Inge Flücht. It was not until the early 80's, after the introduction of small, cheap computers, that any real changes in personal computing took place. It was no longer necessary to know how to build your own equipment; therefore, anyone who could afford it could have access to their own computer (albeit not very advanced). Overnight, an array of personal computers appeared, in the U.S. as well as Europe: Sord, Atari 800, Sol, Texas TI-99A, Vic-20, Spectravideo, etc. Most remained on the market for only a few years before production was halted and/or their manufacturers went bankrupt. In Sweden, only three survived the competition: Sinclair ZX-80 (thanks to its low price), ABC-80 (because of its industrial applications and strong support from the ABC-Club), and Commodore 64 (which will be referred to as the C64 ), simply because it was the most technologically advanced home computer of the time. Even the first PC's hit the market in early 1981, but they commanded such exorbitant prices that no normal person would consider them personal computers. In America, the Apple II, Atari 800, Commodore PET, and C64 were the main survivors. Apple II, in particular, was to the U.S. as the ABC-80 was to Sweden. To this day, there are resilient Apple II-fanatics who still use their late 70's computers, just like Sweden has its resilient ABC-80 users (some of which make up the heart of the ABC80 Club). Initially, most European hackers were of the same kind as the American ones: old radio amateurs, engineers, or electronics enthusiasts who dreamed of using a real computer such as VAX or IBM (those lovely, gray, refrigerator-looking things) instead of simple home computers. The hacker culture from MIT in the 60's, and its extension of the radio amateurs' philosophy, were considered an ideal; a real hacker was a person who wrote programs that did something useful (or appeared to do something useful), or who had mastered electronics and could modify their computer to the amazement of their friends. The most fortunate computer clubs had been able to start their own BBS's on a used minicomputer purchased from some company. The hackers that had gotten started on ABC80, minicomputers, and electronics were generally shocked and somewhat disgusted by the culture that emerged in the mid-80's through the invasion of the C64 (this will be discussed in the chapter 5, Subculture of the Subcultures ). Many of those hackers have now obtained a PC, and consider writing shareware programs and other real "hacks" to be a noble art. Hackers of this sort also started the alternative computer network Fidonet . In San Francisco, amateurs Tom Jennings and John Madill devised a system in which different BBS's called each other according to a specific pattern, and through skillful coordination managed to provide coverage as broad as the Internet's. The main difference was that electronic mail had longer delivery times, and there were no permanent connections; the mail was distributed through substations, just like in an old-fashioned postal system. The network also allowed for globally accessible discussion groups. In the beginning of 1985, the Swedish Fidonet was started in Karlstad by Conny Johnsson . Because of the increased affordability of the Internet, many think that Fidonet has become obsolete. Far from everyone agrees - Fidonet is a true amateur creation, while the Internet has mainly been constructed by academicians. However, for a long time there have been bridges connecting the two networks, enabling their respective users to send mail to each other. Personal computing became a public concept, and many teenagers received their first computer in the mid-80's. Most futuristic parents who bought a computer probably hadn't expected their children to spend as much time on the computer as they did, but this was a result of a marketing glitch. Personal computers were marketed as office systems to be used for financial, word processing, and database applications, for all of which they turned out to be quite useless. Apparently, it was simpler to find a recipe in a cookbook than to boot up the computer and look through some database which took five minutes to load. The only "useful" tasks that the machines could perform efficiently were word processing and simple calculations, which was something that few people were familiar with or could appreciate. The only adults who really used their computers were almost exclusively technicians or technology fans, who could stay up all night and fight with their ABC80 to make it do one thing or another. Many were electronics hobbyists that modified the computer to suit their own wants and needs. (I belong to the wave of youths who were completely captured by the ABC computers around 13 or 14 years of age; for many in my generation, those machines became a ticket to the electronic world). It would be until the 90's before the personal computer really got its breakthrough as a popular appliance - but when it came, it came with a vengeance. It is only recently that IBM PC's have become common in the home. If it hadn't been for the Altair 8800, Apple II, Atari 800, and ABC80, it would never even have occurred to IBM to manufacture PC's. The previous trend had been toward building mainframes: mammoth boxes that consumed several kilowatts per hour, and generated so much heat that they needed a separate cooling system to be able to operate. The idea of one computer for each user was and remains a hacker's notion, which goes all the way back to MIT, where many late nights were spent working alone on a PDP-1. Had these microcomputers not emerged, the industry would still be working on their 50 supercomputers that were to provide computing power for the entire world. Without the microcomputer, modern information systems such as the Client-Server model (in which a coordinated network of computers distribute tasks and information between them) would never have been invented.

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