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No offense mate, but from what I can tell, Iolo is bloatware. There are many other better antivirus tools, even for free. Along with that, registry cleaners and other things like that are unnecessary, and can even damage performance and if severe enough, can trash your entire operating system install. I'd be careful with them.
Steven Levy's book, "Hackers", is a superb history on computer hacking. It started with the MIT Model Railroad Club. Back then in the 1960s, hacking was a good thing. The model railroaders would constantly work on the RR layout, "hacking" things apart and rebuilding it. Those RR layouts used a system of switches, relays, etc. that inspired similar systems in early computers.
I was going to recommend that as well! Like this video it’s a great guide to computer security for the general public, that explains things simply and accurately.
Another book recommendation - "Shockwave Rider" by James Brunner (1975). The book that defined the use of "worm" for this. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shockwave_Rider
There was a lot of overlap between the telephone phreakers and the first hackers in the late 70s and early 80s, with people who were doing both hacking and phreaking (telephone network hacking). I was surprised I didn't see a mention of it here. Maybe a full topic for another time.
This reminds me of the movie "Hackers." The characters were involved in both phreaking and computer hacking. Yes, I realize the movie is unrealistic, but if you suspend disbelief it's a fun movie. One of my favorites. 😀
Such a huge story on it's own, and such a gaping hole in this (hi)story. Definitions change over time but I wouldn't consider spreading viruses as "hacking". Back in the day, "hacking" often required a soldering iron.
I remember an Email that came out, telling you how to look in a specific place in the Windows registry and if you found this odd looking line, you were infected an had to remove it immediately. Of course, the line was a critical part of the Windows registry and removing it wrecked Windows. The Email effectively told you how to wreck your own computer, and a lot of people fell for it.
I remember years ago late 70’s early 80’s there was a Scientific American article that talked about computer logic bombs and thought how far this could be taken. Thank you for the deep dive here.
In fact, I remember SA discussing worm contests where the winner was the worm with the most copies of itself in memory after a given number of clock cycles. The article discussed techniques for writing better worms.
Good morning from Ft Worth TX to everyone watching. Have a safe holiday weekend. I remember when a computer required DOS commands, Dot Matrix printer, and calling to a main frame.
Good morning from Boulder, Colorado. I remember when you called into the mainframe at 300 baud from a dumb terminal because there were no floppy disks or home computers yet. Long live the LSI ADM-3A.
And! Don't forget the joy of twenty minutes of squealing cassette tape ! Just as you got your hopes up. The tape slipped and , you started all over again, and again and again.
I remember hearing about the Morris Worm in the Cliff Stoll book, The Cuckoo's Egg. I think Stoll's book was also the first time I learned the word "internet." Thanks for reminding me of all this, History Guy!
I’m happy to see you brought up this book. It is not only a great read but a fascinating look at how law enforcement knows so little about the internet crime curve.
Kevin Mitnick was more a case of hubris than of hacking/cracking, IMO. There was no shortage of clever hackers during Mitnick's heyday. Mitnick's problem was that he thought he was smarter than everyone else, so used the same exploits repeatedly and never made more than cursory attempts to cover his tracks, even after he got caught again and again and again. And, naturally, each time authorities caught him, they exposed what he had done. This made him appear to be a brilliant hacker - although I don't know how many of his exploits he actually found or devised himself - but also a criminal with no horse sense.
Cliff came to my office a couple times in 1993 for meetings and he was so excited at one point that he stepped up onto the CEO's desk and walked back and forth a couple steps as he was speaking. Everybody in a suit just looked at him and gave a weird contented look as if to say, "We don't care. Let him do whatever he wants."
If you haven't had a chance to read the book ( The Cuckoo's Egg), you really should. My dad gave me a copy when I first started getting into computers in the early 90's. Was an amazing tale of not only the hunt, but of the interesting life in and around Berkeley at the time.
I remember the 88 Princeton hack well. My grandfather worked for them and ran their press and for an old guy was well ahead of his time. Our first "home computer " he built in our garage was half the size of it used drives that were the size of full sized 12 inch lp and each one weighed about 10 lbs. I still have my old Tandy TSR 80 that I learned DOS on and live just writing useless things like having programs run power commands to switches in my house. Back then code was fun. Now it's so deep I won't even bother. Not like I get paid like a hack for any of it. This was a fun episode. Thanks for the memories.
Mine was a Tandy 1000 and I would laugh at all my friends with my 16 color integrated graphics while they had 4 color RGBs.😂 I still regale my grandkids with the days of dip switches and typing every line of code. Windows 95 made everyone lazy!😋
@@lapurta22 now we're in here talking about the grand old days, lol. Real hardware hacking, and DOS programs a mile long on a TRASH-80 to turn a light off. Or the first time I sat down in front of the Tandy 1000 my mother brought home. Thank God she was an early adopter of tech. She wasn't as happy when she saw what it looked like on the inside, but she did enjoy the extra RAM set... There were other adventures, too, but that's enough for here. Suffice it to say, the old modem I scrounged from high school because no one knew what to do with it was nice to have around... I'm almost sad those days are gone. But in retrospect, seeing how far everything's come, and how far it could still go is certainly entertaining. It's like daydreaming in elementary school, without being scolded, and scared out of the futuristic thoughts of what's to come, and the what has been of the past. Thanks to everyone in this thread for the memory jog. Its still amazing to me, when I stop and really think about it. I'm currently tapping this out on a mobile phone, from North Carolina, sat at my daughter's swim meet. Dick Tracy's phone watch doesnt have anything on us now!
I'm really surprised you didn't mention Phone Phreaking in your computer hacking history, as Phone Phreakers were really the first true Hackers of electronic media. A really great book on the topic is "Exploding The Phone" by Phil Lapsley. Maybe you could do another video on the history of Phone Phreaking after reading Mr. Lapsley's book?
Wow, a THG episode on my area of expertise. He did a great job of covering it. One nit, though: at MIT, the term “hacker” is better defined as “tinker” than bad guy. You don’t have to break into someone’s computer to come up with a good hack. There’s an annual invitation-only conference called Hackers that is attended by a couple hundred movers and shakers, people coming up with amazing new ideas. Occasionally, RUclipsr Scott Manley can be seen wearing a tee shirt from this conference.
1976, Indiana University. Some of us would often break into the computer lab during the night and try to get into other systems in the country solely for the personal props. It never even occurred to us to try something malicious.
In the 70's and 80's, when I first experimented in electronics, the hackers and phone phreakers often referred to ourselves as "white hat", "black hat and "grey hats", mixing our cowboy hats (seeing ourselves on a new frontier) mixed with the colors of wizard predisposition from role playing games like Dungeons and Dragons. A "white hat" used their skills to benefit rather than harm, a "black hat" didn't care about the harm they caused and the "grey hat" had mixed ethics about the effects they caused.
@@Bear-cm1vl All true. But I believe the MIT version of the word predated the 70s. Certainly, the Hackers conference goes back to the mid-70s. Of course, there were phone hackers busy at the time.
Dear History Guy, I have binging your series over the past few days, and it’s hard to get enough of it. I am sure you have dozens of requests for topics, but I’d be much obliged if you considered discussing any of these subjects: A history of fruit: the “other” king of fruits- durian; A history of fruit: peaches One of the noted non-European explorers of the world, Chinese mariner Zheng He. The case of Mark James Robert Essex and the retired marine who literally stole a helicopter to take him down.
I read somewhere yesterday that for the first time, streaming has taken over traditional TV in usage. The younger generation prefers to watch RUclips than regular television
Good video! you presented the Morris Worm story as well as I have ever seen it done. I've been in the computer biz since 1974, now retired but still tinkering away at them. Another classic story is "A Cuckoo's Egg". Keep up the fine work, but don't forget to RTFM!
@"The History Guy: History Deserves to Be Remembered", This is an incredible story and will surprise you if you haven't heard it already. "A Cuckoo's Egg" is a good read also
I was a hacker in high school in the mid 80's. There was an extra programming class that met at JPL (Jet Propulsion Laboratory) on Saturdays. 1/3 of the class were hackers and we all shared information on what we were learning, what we could do, and where we could go. 2 months after I graduated, I was hired by JPL and worked there for 10 years as a programmer.
In the late 80s, I was working on hospital communications systems at military hospitals, changing their analog communication systems to digital ones. The worm was a hot topic for a while and I was asked if I could fix things so that their systems wouldn't be vulnerable. I remember laughing and telling them not to worry, all their systems were standalone so weren't going to even be exposed. But that got me thinking, I'd learned the assembly languages for the Intel 8086 and Motorola 6800 CPU families in tech school, so I thought I'd see what I could make happen. I hacked some of the first computer games just for fun, instead of a broadsword, I'd have an M60 LMG, for instance. I soon realized this tended to destroy the game's appeal to me so I stopped doing it, then the internet came about... and I plead the 5th for what happened next.
I was a computer network researcher at the University of Illinois in 1988, and the Morris Worm is still a strong memory of mine. I’d never been called by the press before, which was a wild experience. It did get me a short quote on the front page of the Chicago Tribune (above the fold!). It boggles the mind how those first early, possibly even innocent experiments have grown into a multi-trillion dollar crime empire.
A lot of the early applications to 'hacking' can be traced to MIT in the mid to late 50s, later spreading to Caltech in the 60s. Most 'hacks' were basically either pranks or the purist pursuit to do cool things on the machines available then, the PDP-1, 7, and 9 respectively. That, and the principle that information should be free and programs were regularly shared and improved. This later aspect would be the early seeds of the Free and Open Source Software movement, which revolutionized how we live and work as much of what runs technology now is under FOSS and/or GNU licensing
Your mention of floppy disks made me smile. Anybody else remember when you could load a program onto an Apple 2c by plugging in a standard cassette tape player and playing a cassette tape containing the program?
I still remember a quote from a business leader I read in an article in 1992: “why do people make computer viruses? I don’t know- why do people throw bricks through windows?
There seems to be a big etymological disconnect between a “hack” in the sense of someone who produces high-volume, low-quality work and a “hacker” in the sense of someone who enjoys technical challenges and skillfully solves them.
and in the computer accessing world there is a preference to split between those exploring and those doing harm. usually a preference is those exploring(not taking or damaging data) are hackers and those doing the accessing for malicious intent as crackers. Or maybe that was just a long time ago.
I enjoyed this presentation. The year 1964 was when I first got to play with a computer--a networked computer. It was new equipment for a remote air defense radar station and the off-line training counsel needed an eight-year old's attention to see if it was airman-proof. Then in 1973 my high school's science lab I was on-line with another school for a lesson. In those days there were no CRT for the computer--it was a teletype for the linked computers and a printer for stand-alone computers. CRTs made things more efficient. So I'm bragging that I lived with the later developments and the need to constantly update anti-virus software.
@@Peter_S_ I remember the large hard drives they had for storage at the local community college. By large I mean a physically large contraption about the size of a water heater. Each unit had 120megabytes of space. They had four of them. It was nice to see the newer equipment showing up. Before we had to use computer cards for batch programming.
I used to work for Control Data. I spotted the old pics of the Cyber series computer. Brought back memories (got my first genuine ulcer working for them!)
I started in 1984 with an Atari 800XL. I paid around $350 for the 64k computer, a disk drive and small printer. My Navy shipmate who inspired me had paid over $1,000 for a similar system the year before, but only 48k. The gear got better and prices dropped quickly. Got my Commodore C64 a couple years later.
Early hacking was about exploring. Trying things out just to see what would work. Wargames remains the best movie about hacking. Looking up information about a system. Reading, testing out weaknesses and exploring are the heart of hacking. Banging keys really fast are not and unplugging a monitor is not going to stop a virus. Oh, and viruses written on bones will not make your computer explode!
The media gets it so bad, that Wargames was still the most realistic depiction of network security for decades. That finally changed with the release of Mr. Robot -- which gained great fandom among the network security community for its realistic depictions of what systems intrusion actually entails. It's all sped up for drama -- looking at a terminal for hours would be boring -- but the tools and techniques are very real. The irony is that AI technology is only, in current year, able to replicate the core conceit of Wargames -- an independent AI that can be reasoned with.
@@NozomuYume There's a very realistic hacking scene in, of all places, The Matrix Reloaded. There's a scene where Trinity, inside The Matrix, uses a real attack program to exploit a real system vulnerability. The only thing that's fake is the invalid IPv4 address she targets.
@@snapdragon6601 He had to be a phreaker too, When his GF in the movie wargames makes a comment about the phone calls being expensive he drops a quick line about there being ways around that. Looking back knowing what I know of history now, he clearly knew how to mess with the phones, aka a phreaker. Ive heard rumors War Games is where the term wardriving came from for looking for open WiFi, A modern version of his randomly dialing around looking for open modems setup to answer.
@@evensgrey That is very likely deliberate. Movies are known to use deliberately invalid IPv4 or use local addresses (ie 192.168.x.x) for the same reason that telephones in films are 555-xxxx.
Believe me, everything they write is fully calculated and executed with precision to influence public opinion. They are propagandists- there is nothing hack about it.
I live in Washington State and I remember that Rose Bowl card stunt. I didn't actually see in, but I do remember other students talking about it and seeing news stories about it.
Anybody interested in this history MUST watch Douglas Engelbart's infamous 'Mother of All Demos' from 1969 which introduced the world to the paradigm of the modern computer. Doug's lab at SRI was 1/2 of the first link in ARPANet. The first message on ARPANet was 'LO' because the predictive code at the receiving end that would have completed the 'GIN' portion automatically had a bug and crashed. It took about 15 minutes to correct and recompile the code and then it worked. Fun fact: one of the 10 original nodes of ARPANet was located in a pizza restaurant in Silicon valley near SRI which was frequented by the SRI researchers.
As an early computer programmer -my first computer programming job starting in the fall semester of my senior year of high school in 1974 - I can tell you that “hacking” had a much different derivation among programming than what you describe. “Hacking” came from the process of clearing underbrush, as with a machete, to form a path not delineated as a trail. It thus referred to using machine code to accomplish results not obtainable within the constraints of standard interpreted or compiled programming languages. Thus, while at CMU, I was called a “LISP hacker” for using LISP macros (in MacLISP) as an end run around the constraints of standard LISP code. I was also witness to the criminalization of “hacking”, while my group at Odyssey Research Associates was finishing work on its “Romulus” computer security modeling system, for which key deliverables were sent to the Computer Security Center, then headed by Bob Morris, Sr. At the same time, Cornell University, across the lake from Odyssey Research Associates, was given administration responsibility for sendmail - the protocol for e-mail on UNIX systems - and this duty devolved to Bob Morris, Sr.’s son, Bob Morris, Jr., then a first-year graduate student at Cornell. The younger Bob Morris wrote an updating program for sendmail which used an AI password-guessing program to infiltrate the computer systems and then to update the sendmail program. This was how “hacking” became a crime and how Romulus, a provably correct computer security modeling system, based on a theorem prover applied to the “hook-up secure” assertion, was scuttled by lower-level computer security analysts to protect their jobs, threatened by “Romulus”, while Bob Morris, Sr. was defending his son from the trumped-up charges on what was clearly a mistake. Of course, having their manual, tedious, and error-prone jobs replaced by an automated and correct computer security modeling system would not be so grievous if not for the mortgage evil trashing their family estates and creating unnecessary want in a land of plenty. #AbolishTheMortgage
Interesting history of hacking. Thought the story of “The Cuckoo’s Egg” may be included but after listening I realized the honeypot setup used by Clifford Stoll is regarded as cyber detection and your story is hacking.
While in it's latter days some phreakers used modems and computers to generate tones, the original phreaks made custom circuits and circuit boards to generate the tones used to bypass the phone system's long distance security.
Check out a SF book titled "Shockwave Rider" from the 70s about a hacker. It foretold online universities, banking, and many things we take for granted today. The hero is a hacker savant. Excellent reading.
I was working at Yale University on November 2, 1988. The Yale mainframe was unaffected by the Morris Worm because the operating system was older than that needed for the worm to work.
I purchased my first computer in 1984. It was an Apple //e with 64K RAM. The first add-on was an "80 Column Card" which increased RAM to 128K and doubled the 40 column display built into the motherboard to 80 columns. Also connected to the computer were two 180K RAM, single sided, 5.25" floppy disc drives, an external 10MB hard drive, an 80 column dot matrix printer, a 300 baud internal dial-up modem and serial cabled joystick. To top it off I added a sound card w/ speakers and a serial cabled steering wheel/pedal combination. Not only was the internet not invented yet, neither was plug-n-play. Simply connecting a new component could make one or more components stop working.
I owned a Laser 128, which was a clone of the Apple//e. It came with 128K of memory and ran programs written for the //e. However, it had its own BIOS, not a copy of the Apple BIOS. I felt that its built in disassembler was superior to the one built into the //e. Each time a program loaded into the //e from floppy disk, all the code was loaded from scratch. There was no way for a virus to reside in memory and pass from one program to another. Apple made the operating system available to software companies to be freely copied onto their disks, so most software loaded a fresh copy each time. IBM PCs typically had the DOS loaded into memory first, and it would read the commercial disks. The Apple //e commercial software disks usually came with copy protection. Unlike the IBM PC, reading the disk was heavily done in software. The IBM PC had hardware to read sectors, where for the Apple //e that task was done in software. The software writers had to rely on a piece of hard coded software in BIOS to read track 0, sector 0 into memory. Then code in track 0 sector 0 executed. Usually, the code read in a few more sectors, with help form the BIOS, until enough code was loaded to take over. There were several flavors of copy protection. One was to have the disk formatted the standard Apple way and have a nonstandard data pattern somewhere on the disk. A subroutine would read the nonstandard pattern and decide if the disk was genuine. It could return a 1 for yes or 0 for no. If you tried to copy the disk with normal Apple copy software, the nonstandard pattern would not copy and the subroutine would reject the copied disk. Programs like Locksmith attempted to copy disks bit by bit. There was a "war" between software developers and disk copy developers. It was legal to make backup copies of software that you had purchased, so Locksmith had a legitimate use. A much better way was to find the subroutine in the machine code and patch it to bypass the disk read and return "success". There was a disk editor program which could be used to patch the code on a copy of the commercial disk. Patched disks used standard format and could be copied with Apple copy software. A second copy protection method was to use a nonstandard method of writing the program on the commercial disk. One hack was to modify their loader to read the entire program into the computer memory and then jump to code written by the hacker. This code would pull the program from memory and write it back in standard format to a blank disk equipped with a standard loader. Now, the computer could boot from the standard disk and jump to the memory address where the program normally commenced execution. The hacker's disk could be copied with standard programs. There was one popular program where the copy protection prevented it from running on the Apple IIGS. The software development company refused to fix the problem. So, a hacker's copy made its way into the hands of IIGS owners and ran on IIGS machines, something that the original disks did not do. The hacked copies also found a legitimate home in schools. Many times the standard disk drives didn't read the nonstandard data patterns well. Furthermore, students often damaged disks and replacement meant buying new copies of the software. The schools could store the original copies of the software in a safe place and let the students use copies which could be readily duplicated. In many cases, the copies worked better than the original disks.
Many hackers in the early 80's started out as Phone Phreaks. People who developed equipment and skills that allowed them to make free phone calls. If memory serves, you are describing the first internet worm, but worm type viruses existed from the early 80's. First worms were a type of virus program that before activating the primary program, usually on a certain date, they copied themselves first to all writable media attached to the computer and later to all bulletin boards and other compatible computer systems connected to by modem. Remember, before the internet, there were networks in existence besides Arpanet and its successors. I got my first 100 Baud modem for $500 in 81 or 82. AOL was originally Applelink, before they parted ways in 83.
Very few knew and ever fewer remembered that Applelink Personal Edition got an infusion from G.E. Investment Capital to create AOL. Those were the days.... I met the infamous Cap'n Crunch at a party and hung out a bit at his place before I started to wonder if he had a thing for young boys, which is turns out he did.
You probably know the story about a woman in a locked room who got a General's private data simply by demanding it. "The General needs it now!". It is always a human who doesn't follow rules that lets something slip past.
@@20chocsaday social engineering, Your firewall may be strong but your meat wall is weak. Even physical layer access is possible with good social engineering, I mean we have even had training videos about it where I work and that is a supermarket. As naturally there are likely people who have bad intents who would want access to our communications room which has the phone lines, VOIP boxes, and of course the switches and routers that drive the store network including the POS terminals. Now yes CCs and Debit are encrypted at the pin pad so odds are a MITM upstairs is useless but with computer security if you give the bad guys a bit they will take a whole byte.
I’m surprised there was no mention of the phone hackers who would try to make long distance calls on the land lines. The phone would listen for a specific tone which would indicate that it was making a long distance call after inserting the specific amount of money, but some people were able to make that sound with their voice and trick the system into giving them a free long distance call
Hard to accept that 1988 is indeed history. Feels like yesterday, perhaps even current events, notes this born in 1949 man. You illustrat hacking in language a child can understand, always with an impassioned tone. Thank you. Funny, twenty-first century hackers traced to a medieval township - comprehensive.
Hacking the word has transformed its own meaning in recent years. Now hacking does not just mean trying to find weaknesses in computer systems. But also in trying to figure out anything and then trying to find ways to change that thing into something more useful to you. Modifying your car to gain more horsepower, is a form of hacking. Repairing something you bought that ends up broken after the warranty, is hacking. Heck repairing something that would just cost too much to take somewhere and have it done, is hacking.
That's not even all that new a usage. That usage of the term 'hacking' goes back over 50 years, and directly connects to the 'phone phreaking' subculture of the 1970's. There's a certain sort of person who, before and above anything else, wants to get into the guts of the system and understand how it works and how to control it, and then uses that knowledge to make things do things they weren't intended to. A classic trick was how you could make a certain model of early hard disk unit literally walk across the floor by using the right combination of seeks. If you were clever and the machine was originally installed in the right place in the machine room, there were instances of people actually blocking the door to the room shut. In at least once instance, they ended up cutting through the concrete block wall to get into the machine room because nobody could make the damn thing move away from the door again. (As to why the walls were built so sturdily, these were typically 14 in steel platters spinning at 10 000 RPM. If a head crashed and nobody was there to manually shut down the drive, it might develop a wobble. At 10 0000 RPM and 14 inches in diameter. There was at least one instance of such a platter embedding itself half it's diameter into a concrete block wall. While machine rooms were built secure to keep the contents from being stolen, they were mainly built that way to make sure the contents stayed inside if there was a mechanical failure.)
That is pretty much the original use. Hacker/hacking used to, and sometimes still refers to, people who explore systems, finding undocumented behavior, coming up with novel approaches to accomplish something, etc. Part of that was finding ways around security measures, not really out of malicious intent, but simply as a challenge and to get to know how things work. It is the media in the 80s and 90s that caused the general public to take hacker/hacking to mean malicious attacks on computer systems and networks.
My Dad worked at BBN in the 1960s and 70s. The middle B was for Leo Baranek. Leo spoke his name as BarANek. A very interesting guy indeed. The other two guys were Dick Bolt, and Bob Newman, also pretty smart guys.
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Dear history guy I enjoy your channel very much . I have learned a great deal about many things thank you Recently I saw your program about the history of hacking. I recommend that you do a prequel to that episode. Telephone hacking. I recommend a book called ghost in the wires.
I remember as a county employee hacking into what became the internet in the late 80s through the county library which had the only access in the county
Fun fact: Hacking is also a term used for raising wild birds for repopulation. You can still find articles about the "Eagle hacking program" for New York state.
Back in the late 1980s, I was into home built z80 computers, mainly the Australian designed TEC 1B by talking electronics magazine. It was a simple machine coding system on an A4-ish sized pcb designed for education , I also had a cheap radio shack cordless phone that contained a simple channel/security selection chip , I managed to get the z80 to talk to the phone chip and scan through the channels as I drove around town , each time a base station connected the computer would store the code, almost had my own cellar network for out going calls, except for one call sitting at my kitchen table to see if my home phone would ring, it did and I proved to myself that it worked and no more calls were made.
I attended MIT in the late 80s. At that time people used the verb Hacking to refer to a problem-solving strategy that is comparable to a person with a machete, who keeps hacking through the dark jungle until he/she creates a pathway to the light. In this sense, the problem is not solved by skill but by tireless, obsessive persistence. A hack in computer code is a modification that gets the job done through a minimal understanding of the comprehensive design or theory. In this sense, Hacking is associated with unauthorized brute force penetration and escape, as one would accomplish with dogged use of a machete. I'm not saying that this is the "right" meaning or etymology of the word, but this is the way I learned to use it at MIT. In any case, thank you History Guy, for another scintillating episode.
I remember being a hacker in the late 70s and early 80s. I "hacked" my way into a few big companies just to poke around. I always considered "hacking" as in "whacking away and trying different things until something works". So, a derivative of "hacking" in the sense of hitting plants with a stick in order to eventually clear a path using brute force.
I got into hacking a few computer role playing games in the 1980s, after I discovered how to use sector editors to look at and change the program floppy disk. I'd give my characters more powerful weapons and stats. One game foxed me though. Somehow my character got turned into a vampire, and would randomly attack other player party members, acting like an NPC! I never did figure that out!
The first use of the word hacker we know of today for pranksters came out of MIT model railroad club in the 60s. Hacks they did include measuring a bridge with units of mark or Michael (whatever the name of the man they used as a measuring device) and at night they placed a car on the dome of the school building. There's a documentary called "we are legion, origin of the hacktivist" that goes into detail about the MIT community.
Hacking as in terms of gaining unauthorized access to systems can also be traced to people hacking phone systems after touch tone phones came into use. Thus was done by playing back sequences of tones each corresponding to 0 through 9. The purpose to make free long distance phone calls. Also at MIT computer students used the schools computers to control the MIT Model Railroad Club's layout in the 50s.
Except that practice was known as phreaking, not hacking. But very often if a person was a member of the one community they were also a member of the other.
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DO SHOW ON ORGIN OF 420.
No offense mate, but from what I can tell, Iolo is bloatware. There are many other better antivirus tools, even for free. Along with that, registry cleaners and other things like that are unnecessary, and can even damage performance and if severe enough, can trash your entire operating system install. I'd be careful with them.
You got hackers posing as you using your pics
Yes origin of shit comes from London cause they live London
Fear of hacker existed long before 1988. The film Wargames (1983) was used as an argument for the anti-hacking law used against Morris.
Shall we play a game?
Was about to say this.
@@navret1707 “The only winning move is not to play.”
How about a nice game of chess?
How about a game of Global Thermo Nuclear War.....😁
Steven Levy's book, "Hackers", is a superb history on computer hacking. It started with the MIT Model Railroad Club. Back then in the 1960s, hacking was a good thing. The model railroaders would constantly work on the RR layout, "hacking" things apart and rebuilding it. Those RR layouts used a system of switches, relays, etc. that inspired similar systems in early computers.
That’s the way I’ve always heard explained as well.
Great book.
+1 for him to read this, maybe he’ll get a clue about the topic.
Read "The Cuckoo's Egg" by Cliff Stoll. It is Computer History that deserves to be remembered.
I was going to recommend that as well! Like this video it’s a great guide to computer security for the general public, that explains things simply and accurately.
Another book recommendation - "Shockwave Rider" by James Brunner (1975). The book that defined the use of "worm" for this. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shockwave_Rider
There was a lot of overlap between the telephone phreakers and the first hackers in the late 70s and early 80s, with people who were doing both hacking and phreaking (telephone network hacking). I was surprised I didn't see a mention of it here. Maybe a full topic for another time.
This reminds me of the movie "Hackers." The characters were involved in both phreaking and computer hacking. Yes, I realize the movie is unrealistic, but if you suspend disbelief it's a fun movie. One of my favorites. 😀
@@lydiarose5212
I think it's Angelie Jolie's first movie. I watched that cast go on to other good movie's as well.
Such a huge story on it's own, and such a gaping hole in this (hi)story.
Definitions change over time but I wouldn't consider spreading viruses as "hacking".
Back in the day, "hacking" often required a soldering iron.
@@Istandby666 not at all. Cyborg 2 my dude
I, too, expected to hear about phone phreakers in this.
I remember an Email that came out, telling you how to look in a specific place in the Windows registry and if you found this odd looking line, you were infected an had to remove it immediately. Of course, the line was a critical part of the Windows registry and removing it wrecked Windows. The Email effectively told you how to wreck your own computer, and a lot of people fell for it.
I remember years ago late 70’s early 80’s there was a Scientific American article that talked about computer logic bombs and thought how far this could be taken. Thank you for the deep dive here.
In fact, I remember SA discussing worm contests where the winner was the worm with the most copies of itself in memory after a given number of clock cycles. The article discussed techniques for writing better worms.
@@jackiemowery5243 I do believe I remember that now. It was just a few years ago so bit of a reach back in the cobwebs....🤣
Good morning from Ft Worth TX to everyone watching. Have a safe holiday weekend. I remember when a computer required DOS commands, Dot Matrix printer, and calling to a main frame.
You as well be safe!
Good morning from Boulder, Colorado. I remember when you called into the mainframe at 300 baud from a dumb terminal because there were no floppy disks or home computers yet. Long live the LSI ADM-3A.
@@Peter_S_ I used to live in Brighton CO.
@@RetiredSailor60 Cheers from the land of (temporary) ice and snow. I was in Thornton yesterday.
And! Don't forget the joy of twenty minutes of squealing cassette tape ! Just as you got your hopes up. The tape slipped and , you started all over again, and again and again.
I remember hearing about the Morris Worm in the Cliff Stoll book, The Cuckoo's Egg. I think Stoll's book was also the first time I learned the word "internet." Thanks for reminding me of all this, History Guy!
I’m happy to see you brought up this book. It is not only a great read but a fascinating look at how law enforcement knows so little about the internet crime curve.
@@kevindown1592 I always liked the "if you didn't right it down, it didn't happen".
@@kevindown1592 Very much not true any more.
I'm really surprised he got all the way through this without ever mentioning Kevin Mitnick.
You will know that Robert TAP IN Morris was spoken a lot at his trial.
Who
The feds were scared that Mitnick could launch nuclear missiles by whistling into a telephone.
Kevin Mitnick was more a case of hubris than of hacking/cracking, IMO. There was no shortage of clever hackers during Mitnick's heyday. Mitnick's problem was that he thought he was smarter than everyone else, so used the same exploits repeatedly and never made more than cursory attempts to cover his tracks, even after he got caught again and again and again. And, naturally, each time authorities caught him, they exposed what he had done. This made him appear to be a brilliant hacker - although I don't know how many of his exploits he actually found or devised himself - but also a criminal with no horse sense.
Captain Crunch showed Steve Wozniak how to build a “blue box” to make long distance phone calls for free. A pioneer hacker.
The PBS NOVA special "The KGB, the Computer, and Me" with Cliff Stoll from 1988 is on RUclips. A great story of international hacking.
Cliff came to my office a couple times in 1993 for meetings and he was so excited at one point that he stepped up onto the CEO's desk and walked back and forth a couple steps as he was speaking. Everybody in a suit just looked at him and gave a weird contented look as if to say, "We don't care. Let him do whatever he wants."
If you haven't had a chance to read the book ( The Cuckoo's Egg), you really should. My dad gave me a copy when I first started getting into computers in the early 90's. Was an amazing tale of not only the hunt, but of the interesting life in and around Berkeley at the time.
I remember the 88 Princeton hack well. My grandfather worked for them and ran their press and for an old guy was well ahead of his time. Our first "home computer " he built in our garage was half the size of it used drives that were the size of full sized 12 inch lp and each one weighed about 10 lbs. I still have my old Tandy TSR 80 that I learned DOS on and live just writing useless things like having programs run power commands to switches in my house. Back then code was fun. Now it's so deep I won't even bother. Not like I get paid like a hack for any of it. This was a fun episode. Thanks for the memories.
Mine was a Tandy 1000 and I would laugh at all my friends with my 16 color integrated graphics while they had 4 color RGBs.😂 I still regale my grandkids with the days of dip switches and typing every line of code. Windows 95 made everyone lazy!😋
You knew you had a bad ass Tandy system when your doubled your RAM by soldering a second IC piggyback on the motherboard RAM chip.
@@lapurta22 now we're in here talking about the grand old days, lol. Real hardware hacking, and DOS programs a mile long on a TRASH-80 to turn a light off.
Or the first time I sat down in front of the Tandy 1000 my mother brought home. Thank God she was an early adopter of tech.
She wasn't as happy when she saw what it looked like on the inside, but she did enjoy the extra RAM set...
There were other adventures, too, but that's enough for here. Suffice it to say, the old modem I scrounged from high school because no one knew what to do with it was nice to have around...
I'm almost sad those days are gone. But in retrospect, seeing how far everything's come, and how far it could still go is certainly entertaining. It's like daydreaming in elementary school, without being scolded, and scared out of the futuristic thoughts of what's to come, and the what has been of the past.
Thanks to everyone in this thread for the memory jog.
Its still amazing to me, when I stop and really think about it. I'm currently tapping this out on a mobile phone, from North Carolina, sat at my daughter's swim meet. Dick Tracy's phone watch doesnt have anything on us now!
I'm really surprised you didn't mention Phone Phreaking in your computer hacking history, as Phone Phreakers were really the first true Hackers of electronic media. A really great book on the topic is "Exploding The Phone" by Phil Lapsley. Maybe you could do another video on the history of Phone Phreaking after reading Mr. Lapsley's book?
genius ad placement - good job !! Nice topic too !!
I'm a bit surprised that you didn't go more into phreaking but the subjects covered were still significant and interesting.
Wow, a THG episode on my area of expertise. He did a great job of covering it. One nit, though: at MIT, the term “hacker” is better defined as “tinker” than bad guy. You don’t have to break into someone’s computer to come up with a good hack. There’s an annual invitation-only conference called Hackers that is attended by a couple hundred movers and shakers, people coming up with amazing new ideas. Occasionally, RUclipsr Scott Manley can be seen wearing a tee shirt from this conference.
This. It always irks me when hacking is defined solely as maliciously breaking into computers and their networks.
1976, Indiana University.
Some of us would often break into the computer lab during the night and try to get into other systems in the country solely for the personal props. It never even occurred to us to try something malicious.
In the 70's and 80's, when I first experimented in electronics, the hackers and phone phreakers often referred to ourselves as "white hat", "black hat and "grey hats", mixing our cowboy hats (seeing ourselves on a new frontier) mixed with the colors of wizard predisposition from role playing games like Dungeons and Dragons. A "white hat" used their skills to benefit rather than harm, a "black hat" didn't care about the harm they caused and the "grey hat" had mixed ethics about the effects they caused.
@@Bear-cm1vl All true. But I believe the MIT version of the word predated the 70s. Certainly, the Hackers conference goes back to the mid-70s. Of course, there were phone hackers busy at the time.
Dear History Guy, I have binging your series over the past few days, and it’s hard to get enough of it. I am sure you have dozens of requests for topics, but I’d be much obliged if you considered discussing any of these subjects:
A history of fruit: the “other” king of fruits- durian;
A history of fruit: peaches
One of the noted non-European explorers of the world, Chinese mariner Zheng He.
The case of Mark James Robert Essex and the retired marine who literally stole a helicopter to take him down.
I read somewhere yesterday that for the first time, streaming has taken over traditional TV in usage. The younger generation prefers to watch RUclips than regular television
Robert Morris' father was chief scientist at the NSA's cybercrime laboratory.
Good video! you presented the Morris Worm story as well as I have ever seen it done. I've been in the computer biz since 1974, now retired but still tinkering away at them. Another classic story is "A Cuckoo's Egg".
Keep up the fine work, but don't forget to RTFM!
@"The History Guy: History Deserves to Be Remembered", This is an incredible story and will surprise you if you haven't heard it already. "A Cuckoo's Egg" is a good read also
I was a hacker in high school in the mid 80's. There was an extra programming class that met at JPL (Jet Propulsion Laboratory) on Saturdays. 1/3 of the class were hackers and we all shared information on what we were learning, what we could do, and where we could go. 2 months after I graduated, I was hired by JPL and worked there for 10 years as a programmer.
In the late 80s, I was working on hospital communications systems at military hospitals, changing their analog communication systems to digital ones. The worm was a hot topic for a while and I was asked if I could fix things so that their systems wouldn't be vulnerable. I remember laughing and telling them not to worry, all their systems were standalone so weren't going to even be exposed. But that got me thinking, I'd learned the assembly languages for the Intel 8086 and Motorola 6800 CPU families in tech school, so I thought I'd see what I could make happen. I hacked some of the first computer games just for fun, instead of a broadsword, I'd have an M60 LMG, for instance. I soon realized this tended to destroy the game's appeal to me so I stopped doing it, then the internet came about... and I plead the 5th for what happened next.
Thank you again History Guy!
I was a computer network researcher at the University of Illinois in 1988, and the Morris Worm is still a strong memory of mine. I’d never been called by the press before, which was a wild experience. It did get me a short quote on the front page of the Chicago Tribune (above the fold!). It boggles the mind how those first early, possibly even innocent experiments have grown into a multi-trillion dollar crime empire.
Good Morning!
I do like your ad tie-ins. It's nice that they're relevant.
A lot of the early applications to 'hacking' can be traced to MIT in the mid to late 50s, later spreading to Caltech in the 60s. Most 'hacks' were basically either pranks or the purist pursuit to do cool things on the machines available then, the PDP-1, 7, and 9 respectively. That, and the principle that information should be free and programs were regularly shared and improved. This later aspect would be the early seeds of the Free and Open Source Software movement, which revolutionized how we live and work as much of what runs technology now is under FOSS and/or GNU licensing
I would disagree, because during WW2, the German Enigma had to be “Hacked” in order to de-code messages.
@@JesusisJesus But was the term "Hacked" used THEN - or is it being used NOW to describe what was done then?
.
@@BobSmith-dk8nw Yes
Your mention of floppy disks made me smile. Anybody else remember when you could load a program onto an Apple 2c by plugging in a standard cassette tape player and playing a cassette tape containing the program?
I still remember a quote from a business leader I read in an article in 1992: “why do people make computer viruses? I don’t know- why do people throw bricks through windows?
There seems to be a big etymological disconnect between a “hack” in the sense of someone who produces high-volume, low-quality work and a “hacker” in the sense of someone who enjoys technical challenges and skillfully solves them.
and in the computer accessing world there is a preference to split between those exploring and those doing harm. usually a preference is those exploring(not taking or damaging data) are hackers and those doing the accessing for malicious intent as crackers. Or maybe that was just a long time ago.
Another fascinating history lesson!
This was a great one. It's a slice of history that I just don't get exposed to much
The Rose Bowl Caltech card debacle and ARPANET stories were perfect for this episode. Thanks for another excellent episode!
A great topic focus.. thank you History Guy.
I am old. I first learned FORTRAN in the 60's and used punch-cards. When BASIC came around, it made things easier.
I enjoyed this presentation. The year 1964 was when I first got to play with a computer--a networked computer. It was new equipment for a remote air defense radar station and the off-line training counsel needed an eight-year old's attention to see if it was airman-proof. Then in 1973 my high school's science lab I was on-line with another school for a lesson. In those days there were no CRT for the computer--it was a teletype for the linked computers and a printer for stand-alone computers. CRTs made things more efficient. So I'm bragging that I lived with the later developments and the need to constantly update anti-virus software.
Remember when terminals were called "glass teletypes"? Long live the ADM-3A.
@@Peter_S_ Hadn't heard of glass teletypes before and I worked in commo centers with teletypes. Does make sense. Thanks.
@@Peter_S_ Yep, I sure do. Wasn't very long that that term was in use tho.
@@Peter_S_ I remember the large hard drives they had for storage at the local community college. By large I mean a physically large contraption about the size of a water heater. Each unit had 120megabytes of space. They had four of them. It was nice to see the newer equipment showing up. Before we had to use computer cards for batch programming.
so glad to see THG do a video on this.
I used to work for Control Data. I spotted the old pics of the Cyber series computer. Brought back memories (got my first genuine ulcer working for them!)
Plot twist: Iolo pirates have hacked The History Guy. Social Engineering that deserves to be remembered.
Houston enjoyed our antics from the late '70s through the mid '90s.
Hello Dave,Can I ask you a question?
Thanks! A part of computer networking history I had forgotten about!
Thank you!
I was enthralled by Lyndon Hardy's "magic" trilogy. Especially the first one, "Master of the Five Magics".
I got my first computer in 1981, a TRS-80 Model 1. It had a cassette tape for storage. 🤣
My first computer was a commodore vic-20 with tape drive memory
My first machine was an Apple ][ in 1978 and disk drives for them didn't exist yet. Tape was all we had.
As a Radio Shack employee, I sold the first TRS-80 computer West of the Mississippi. To my boss.
I started in 1984 with an Atari 800XL. I paid around $350 for the 64k computer, a disk drive and small printer. My Navy shipmate who inspired me had paid over $1,000 for a similar system the year before, but only 48k. The gear got better and prices dropped quickly. Got my Commodore C64 a couple years later.
Love THG's topics and presentations. Big fist bump for seamless inclusion of references in the body of the script. 🏆
Thanks for reminding me to be careful!
Thank you!
Early hacking was about exploring. Trying things out just to see what would work. Wargames remains the best movie about hacking. Looking up information about a system. Reading, testing out weaknesses and exploring are the heart of hacking. Banging keys really fast are not and unplugging a monitor is not going to stop a virus. Oh, and viruses written on bones will not make your computer explode!
Phreaking ☎️ 🙂
The media gets it so bad, that Wargames was still the most realistic depiction of network security for decades. That finally changed with the release of Mr. Robot -- which gained great fandom among the network security community for its realistic depictions of what systems intrusion actually entails. It's all sped up for drama -- looking at a terminal for hours would be boring -- but the tools and techniques are very real.
The irony is that AI technology is only, in current year, able to replicate the core conceit of Wargames -- an independent AI that can be reasoned with.
@@NozomuYume There's a very realistic hacking scene in, of all places, The Matrix Reloaded. There's a scene where Trinity, inside The Matrix, uses a real attack program to exploit a real system vulnerability. The only thing that's fake is the invalid IPv4 address she targets.
@@snapdragon6601 He had to be a phreaker too, When his GF in the movie wargames makes a comment about the phone calls being expensive he drops a quick line about there being ways around that. Looking back knowing what I know of history now, he clearly knew how to mess with the phones, aka a phreaker.
Ive heard rumors War Games is where the term wardriving came from for looking for open WiFi, A modern version of his randomly dialing around looking for open modems setup to answer.
@@evensgrey That is very likely deliberate. Movies are known to use deliberately invalid IPv4 or use local addresses (ie 192.168.x.x) for the same reason that telephones in films are 555-xxxx.
Also NEVER forget about doing backups!!!
Thank you for the lesson.
Loved this one!
I appreciate you, thank you for making content.
Unfortunately Hack Writers havent gone anywhere. They are all over corporate news sites.
Believe me, everything they write is fully calculated and executed with precision to influence public opinion. They are propagandists- there is nothing hack about it.
Amen. 😔
I think they use an app now
Heck, there are hack writer AIs now. How far we've come... :(
Robot Journalism sucks
Clifford Stoll's _The Cuckoo's Egg_ is a fun read on an early hacking attempt at Berkeley. Starts with a simple accounting error of 75 cents.
Another cool fact is that Morris' father was also a cryptographer and computer scientist at the NSA.
I live in Washington State and I remember that Rose Bowl card stunt. I didn't actually see in, but I do remember other students talking about it and seeing news stories about it.
ha.
A hacker was a talented dev who could quickly hack together code on the fly
There might still be competitions to see who can write the code that performs the job with the least code.
@@20chocsaday yes, all the time.
The greatest early hack ever was Apollo 14 hacking their flight computer to ignore their abort switch.
How was that done?
More than sticky tape over a sensor I expect.?
@@20chocsaday No, they litterally hacked it. They reprogrammed it. Scott Manley has a video about it.
Excellent video!
Anybody interested in this history MUST watch Douglas Engelbart's infamous 'Mother of All Demos' from 1969 which introduced the world to the paradigm of the modern computer. Doug's lab at SRI was 1/2 of the first link in ARPANet. The first message on ARPANet was 'LO' because the predictive code at the receiving end that would have completed the 'GIN' portion automatically had a bug and crashed. It took about 15 minutes to correct and recompile the code and then it worked. Fun fact: one of the 10 original nodes of ARPANet was located in a pizza restaurant in Silicon valley near SRI which was frequented by the SRI researchers.
No.
Infamous? No.
THIS is why we can't have nice things.
As an early computer programmer -my first computer programming job starting in the fall semester of my senior year of high school in 1974 - I can tell you that “hacking” had a much different derivation among programming than what you describe. “Hacking” came from the process of clearing underbrush, as with a machete, to form a path not delineated as a trail. It thus referred to using machine code to accomplish results not obtainable within the constraints of standard interpreted or compiled programming languages. Thus, while at CMU, I was called a “LISP hacker” for using LISP macros (in MacLISP) as an end run around the constraints of standard LISP code.
I was also witness to the criminalization of “hacking”, while my group at Odyssey Research Associates was finishing work on its “Romulus” computer security modeling system, for which key deliverables were sent to the Computer Security Center, then headed by Bob Morris, Sr. At the same time, Cornell University, across the lake from Odyssey Research Associates, was given administration responsibility for sendmail - the protocol for e-mail on UNIX systems - and this duty devolved to Bob Morris, Sr.’s son, Bob Morris, Jr., then a first-year graduate student at Cornell. The younger Bob Morris wrote an updating program for sendmail which used an AI password-guessing program to infiltrate the computer systems and then to update the sendmail program. This was how “hacking” became a crime and how Romulus, a provably correct computer security modeling system, based on a theorem prover applied to the “hook-up secure” assertion, was scuttled by lower-level computer security analysts to protect their jobs, threatened by “Romulus”, while Bob Morris, Sr. was defending his son from the trumped-up charges on what was clearly a mistake.
Of course, having their manual, tedious, and error-prone jobs replaced by an automated and correct computer security modeling system would not be so grievous if not for the mortgage evil trashing their family estates and creating unnecessary want in a land of plenty.
#AbolishTheMortgage
Great work, many thanks.
Interesting history of hacking. Thought the story of “The Cuckoo’s Egg” may be included but after listening I realized the honeypot setup used by Clifford Stoll is regarded as cyber detection and your story is hacking.
Yes, but he was was starting early computer/network security against the first serious Soviet hackers.
Great book! Stolll stumbled into detecting the farming scheme, but did a bang up job of setting up the honey pot.
This was a fascinating read and I recommend it.
Loved the "unlimited defense for up to 10 devices" part of the ad read. 🤣
Great story , only one tidbit to add look up who Robert Morris's dad was and where he worked when this occurred lol
Im surprised that phone phreaking (hacking) wasn't mentioned. That computerized network predates the web.
While in it's latter days some phreakers used modems and computers to generate tones, the original phreaks made custom circuits and circuit boards to generate the tones used to bypass the phone system's long distance security.
Thank you again Sir.
In a word; facinating!
Check out a SF book titled "Shockwave Rider" from the 70s about a hacker. It foretold online universities, banking, and many things we take for granted today. The hero is a hacker savant. Excellent reading.
Thanks for this.
I was working at Yale University on November 2, 1988. The Yale mainframe was unaffected by the Morris Worm because the operating system was older than that needed for the worm to work.
I purchased my first computer in 1984. It was an Apple //e with 64K RAM. The first add-on was an "80 Column Card" which increased RAM to 128K and doubled the 40 column display built into the motherboard to 80 columns. Also connected to the computer were two 180K RAM, single sided, 5.25" floppy disc drives, an external 10MB hard drive, an 80 column dot matrix printer, a 300 baud internal dial-up modem and serial cabled joystick. To top it off I added a sound card w/ speakers and a serial cabled steering wheel/pedal combination.
Not only was the internet not invented yet, neither was plug-n-play. Simply connecting a new component could make one or more components stop working.
The net had been invented years before. The web hadn't.
I owned a Laser 128, which was a clone of the Apple//e. It came with 128K of memory and ran programs written for the //e. However, it had its own BIOS, not a copy of the Apple BIOS. I felt that its built in disassembler was superior to the one built into the //e.
Each time a program loaded into the //e from floppy disk, all the code was loaded from scratch. There was no way for a virus to reside in memory and pass from one program to another. Apple made the operating system available to software companies to be freely copied onto their disks, so most software loaded a fresh copy each time. IBM PCs typically had the DOS loaded into memory first, and it would read the commercial disks.
The Apple //e commercial software disks usually came with copy protection. Unlike the IBM PC, reading the disk was heavily done in software. The IBM PC had hardware to read sectors, where for the Apple //e that task was done in software. The software writers had to rely on a piece of hard coded software in BIOS to read track 0, sector 0 into memory. Then code in track 0 sector 0 executed. Usually, the code read in a few more sectors, with help form the BIOS, until enough code was loaded to take over. There were several flavors of copy protection. One was to have the disk formatted the standard Apple way and have a nonstandard data pattern somewhere on the disk. A subroutine would read the nonstandard pattern and decide if the disk was genuine. It could return a 1 for yes or 0 for no. If you tried to copy the disk with normal Apple copy software, the nonstandard pattern would not copy and the subroutine would reject the copied disk. Programs like Locksmith attempted to copy disks bit by bit.
There was a "war" between software developers and disk copy developers. It was legal to make backup copies of software that you had purchased, so Locksmith had a legitimate use. A much better way was to find the subroutine in the machine code and patch it to bypass the disk read and return "success". There was a disk editor program which could be used to patch the code on a copy of the commercial disk. Patched disks used standard format and could be copied with Apple copy software.
A second copy protection method was to use a nonstandard method of writing the program on the commercial disk. One hack was to modify their loader to read the entire program into the computer memory and then jump to code written by the hacker. This code would pull the program from memory and write it back in standard format to a blank disk equipped with a standard loader. Now, the computer could boot from the standard disk and jump to the memory address where the program normally commenced execution. The hacker's disk could be copied with standard programs.
There was one popular program where the copy protection prevented it from running on the Apple IIGS. The software development company refused to fix the problem. So, a hacker's copy made its way into the hands of IIGS owners and ran on IIGS machines, something that the original disks did not do.
The hacked copies also found a legitimate home in schools. Many times the standard disk drives didn't read the nonstandard data patterns well. Furthermore, students often damaged disks and replacement meant buying new copies of the software. The schools could store the original copies of the software in a safe place and let the students use copies which could be readily duplicated. In many cases, the copies worked better than the original disks.
That was a great story. Thank You.
I'm kinda disappointed he didn't mention Captain Crunch... real early hacking!
The Caltech Rose Bowl prank was recreated by Yale, who got the Harvard student body to hold up cards that read “WE SUCK” during the Harvard-Yale game.
"I don't know what the dark web is, but I don't wanna find out." You don't know how right you are HG.
Great overall, plus I'm happy to hear an explanation of "hackney"
I love your Air Force Academy Parade Cap in the background. Where did you get it?
Mike R.
USAFA Class of 1989
Many hackers in the early 80's started out as Phone Phreaks. People who developed equipment and skills that allowed them to make free phone calls. If memory serves, you are describing the first internet worm, but worm type viruses existed from the early 80's. First worms were a type of virus program that before activating the primary program, usually on a certain date, they copied themselves first to all writable media attached to the computer and later to all bulletin boards and other compatible computer systems connected to by modem. Remember, before the internet, there were networks in existence besides Arpanet and its successors. I got my first 100 Baud modem for $500 in 81 or 82. AOL was originally Applelink, before they parted ways in 83.
Very few knew and ever fewer remembered that Applelink Personal Edition got an infusion from G.E. Investment Capital to create AOL. Those were the days.... I met the infamous Cap'n Crunch at a party and hung out a bit at his place before I started to wonder if he had a thing for young boys, which is turns out he did.
You probably know the story about a woman in a locked room who got a General's private data simply by demanding it.
"The General needs it now!".
It is always a human who doesn't follow rules that lets something slip past.
@@20chocsaday social engineering, Your firewall may be strong but your meat wall is weak. Even physical layer access is possible with good social engineering, I mean we have even had training videos about it where I work and that is a supermarket. As naturally there are likely people who have bad intents who would want access to our communications room which has the phone lines, VOIP boxes, and of course the switches and routers that drive the store network including the POS terminals.
Now yes CCs and Debit are encrypted at the pin pad so odds are a MITM upstairs is useless but with computer security if you give the bad guys a bit they will take a whole byte.
" a generation lost in space "
I’m surprised there was no mention of the phone hackers who would try to make long distance calls on the land lines. The phone would listen for a specific tone which would indicate that it was making a long distance call after inserting the specific amount of money, but some people were able to make that sound with their voice and trick the system into giving them a free long distance call
Hard to accept that 1988 is indeed history. Feels like yesterday, perhaps even current events, notes this born in 1949 man. You illustrat hacking in language a child can understand, always with an impassioned tone. Thank you. Funny, twenty-first century hackers traced to a medieval township - comprehensive.
Hacking the word has transformed its own meaning in recent years. Now hacking does not just mean trying to find weaknesses in computer systems. But also in trying to figure out anything and then trying to find ways to change that thing into something more useful to you. Modifying your car to gain more horsepower, is a form of hacking. Repairing something you bought that ends up broken after the warranty, is hacking. Heck repairing something that would just cost too much to take somewhere and have it done, is hacking.
That's not even all that new a usage. That usage of the term 'hacking' goes back over 50 years, and directly connects to the 'phone phreaking' subculture of the 1970's. There's a certain sort of person who, before and above anything else, wants to get into the guts of the system and understand how it works and how to control it, and then uses that knowledge to make things do things they weren't intended to.
A classic trick was how you could make a certain model of early hard disk unit literally walk across the floor by using the right combination of seeks. If you were clever and the machine was originally installed in the right place in the machine room, there were instances of people actually blocking the door to the room shut. In at least once instance, they ended up cutting through the concrete block wall to get into the machine room because nobody could make the damn thing move away from the door again. (As to why the walls were built so sturdily, these were typically 14 in steel platters spinning at 10 000 RPM. If a head crashed and nobody was there to manually shut down the drive, it might develop a wobble. At 10 0000 RPM and 14 inches in diameter. There was at least one instance of such a platter embedding itself half it's diameter into a concrete block wall. While machine rooms were built secure to keep the contents from being stolen, they were mainly built that way to make sure the contents stayed inside if there was a mechanical failure.)
That is pretty much the original use. Hacker/hacking used to, and sometimes still refers to, people who explore systems, finding undocumented behavior, coming up with novel approaches to accomplish something, etc. Part of that was finding ways around security measures, not really out of malicious intent, but simply as a challenge and to get to know how things work. It is the media in the 80s and 90s that caused the general public to take hacker/hacking to mean malicious attacks on computer systems and networks.
My Dad worked at BBN in the 1960s and 70s. The middle B was for Leo Baranek. Leo spoke his name as BarANek. A very interesting guy indeed. The other two guys were Dick Bolt, and Bob Newman, also pretty smart guys.
Hello, Can I ask you a question?
Of course, hopefully I will have an answer.
@@philrulon 👋how are you today and I hope this message meets you in good health? I believe in the saying that you can't meet better people if you don't meet strangers. I admire your profile very much and it will be great to have you as a friend please can we be friend?. Thank you and remain blessed 🙏
thanks
Hacking piss me off a lot.
Dear history guy
I enjoy your channel very much
. I have learned a great deal about many things thank you
Recently I saw your program about the history of hacking.
I recommend that you do a prequel to that episode.
Telephone hacking.
I recommend a book called ghost in the wires.
I remember as a county employee hacking into what became the internet in the late 80s through the county library which had the only access in the county
Fun fact: Hacking is also a term used for raising wild birds for repopulation. You can still find articles about the "Eagle hacking program" for New York state.
Thanks!
Thank you.
Back in the late 1980s, I was into home built z80 computers, mainly the Australian designed TEC 1B by talking electronics magazine. It was a simple machine coding system on an A4-ish sized pcb designed for education , I also had a cheap radio shack cordless phone that contained a simple channel/security selection chip , I managed to get the z80 to talk to the phone chip and scan through the channels as I drove around town , each time a base station connected the computer would store the code, almost had my own cellar network for out going calls, except for one call sitting at my kitchen table to see if my home phone would ring, it did and I proved to myself that it worked and no more calls were made.
I'm digging the lex luger sound effect at the beginning.
TheCukoo’s egg is a great true story of early hacking
I attended MIT in the late 80s. At that time people used the verb Hacking to refer to a problem-solving strategy that is comparable to a person with a machete, who keeps hacking through the dark jungle until he/she creates a pathway to the light. In this sense, the problem is not solved by skill but by tireless, obsessive persistence. A hack in computer code is a modification that gets the job done through a minimal understanding of the comprehensive design or theory. In this sense, Hacking is associated with unauthorized brute force penetration and escape, as one would accomplish with dogged use of a machete. I'm not saying that this is the "right" meaning or etymology of the word, but this is the way I learned to use it at MIT. In any case, thank you History Guy, for another scintillating episode.
I remember being a hacker in the late 70s and early 80s. I "hacked" my way into a few big companies just to poke around.
I always considered "hacking" as in "whacking away and trying different things until something works". So, a derivative of "hacking" in the sense of hitting plants with a stick in order to eventually clear a path using brute force.
I got into hacking a few computer role playing games in the 1980s, after I discovered how to use sector editors to look at and change the program floppy disk. I'd give my characters more powerful weapons and stats. One game foxed me though. Somehow my character got turned into a vampire, and would randomly attack other player party members, acting like an NPC! I never did figure that out!
You forgot the infamous "Cookie Monster".
The first use of the word hacker we know of today for pranksters came out of MIT model railroad club in the 60s.
Hacks they did include measuring a bridge with units of mark or Michael (whatever the name of the man they used as a measuring device) and at night they placed a car on the dome of the school building.
There's a documentary called "we are legion, origin of the hacktivist" that goes into detail about the MIT community.
Curious that you didn't mention Kevin Mitnick in your report
Back late 70’s writing computer programs was called hacking and programmers called hackers…it was a positive title I carried with pride.
I remember the first time I received a " free cupholder" in an email and the amazement I had when the cd drive popped open. Good morning
You should have included Clifford Stoll's accidental Cold War hacking adventures. But still a great video, thanks!
Hacking as in terms of gaining unauthorized access to systems can also be traced to people hacking phone systems after touch tone phones came into use. Thus was done by playing back sequences of tones each corresponding to 0 through 9. The purpose to make free long distance phone calls. Also at MIT computer students used the schools computers to control the MIT Model Railroad Club's layout in the 50s.
Except that practice was known as phreaking, not hacking. But very often if a person was a member of the one community they were also a member of the other.