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From: nishri@utcs.UUCP (Alex Nishri)
Newsgroups: net.micro,net.college
Subject: Re: The New Hack(er)s
Message-ID: <222@utcs.UUCP>
Date: Wed, 21-Nov-84 23:01:33 EST
Article-I.D.: utcs.222
Posted: Wed Nov 21 23:01:33 1984
Date-Received: Thu, 22-Nov-84 12:33:15 EST
References: <1502@hcrvax.UUCP> <468@watcgl.UUCP> <450@intelca.UUCP>
Reply-To: nishri@utcs.UUCP (Alex Nishri)
Organization: University of Toronto - General Purpose UNIX
Lines: 74
Summary: Fewer unrestricted access machines maybe not cause of few hackers

I have been reading with quite a bit interest the items on "hacks" and have some
general observations.  First of all, I am not a typical hacker on this net in 
that Unix and/or its ancestors was not where I started.  My first system was
York/APL.  The people at York University had their own version of APL which
they made changes to once a week.  (Many of the changes were major improvements
to the language.)  Although not even in high school at the time, I would
sign on to York/APL to "try and find the bugs".  York would give prizes to
those who found the bugs introduced that week ($10), but the challenge was
really there without it.  For one thing, there always seemed to be people
like myself hanging around, and we all shared information.  We would spend
hours trying to figure out how the internals must work.  (No -- we did not
have source.)  Nobody I knew was malicious.  When we figured out how to read
protected files belonging to another account, we read each others files
to prove we could do it.  

>From York/APL, I moved on to the IBM/MVT.  Few places gave accounts, so
I had to settle on using the University of Toronto's "High Speed Job
Stream" which gave one three seconds of CPU time (IBM 370/165) at no
cost.  The catch was that you needed to use cards!  Each time I went
down to the computer centre I recognized some familiar faces, many of
them people I had known from my APL days.  There were some people there
who were reputed to know a lot about MVT internals -- they were looked
up to by the rest of us.  The first thing I did was to write a disassembler
and start disassembling the operating system (which was all in one address
space with all the user code).  Then I started disassembling the compilers.
Pretty soon I understood quite a bit about how the system worked.

Eventually I starting working for the University of Toronto Computing 
Centre as a parttime consultant.  It seemed that all the best IBM
hackers were also there.  Once I was "in" I started to get my hands on
"Logic Manuals".  I had the oppurtunity to read manuals and use systems
such as the Dec10 and Unix.  After a year I moved on to become a
Systems Programmer in charge of maintenance and system installs.

Today I am a supervisor in the user services area.  One of the people
reporting to me is the supervisor of the consulting office.  We would
very much like to hire today's generation of hackers to work in the
Consulting Office parttime as I and other hackers did in days gone by.
But we are finding it harder and harder every year.

My observations:
- easy access to source is not a prerequisite to "hacking".  The people in
  my generation/group of hackers were proud of the fact they could frequently
  understand system internals without having seen source.
- easy access to cheap computing is not a prerequisite to "hacking".  Again
  the people I knew spent many hours figuring out how the system worked
  (and in some cases I don't want to discuss -- modified the system) with
  very limited access to the system (three second time limit batch from cards).
- supply of cheap "hacker" time is dependent on demand.  The people I hacked
  with formed ad hoc clubs so as to be able to ask the University of Toronto,
  York University, and George Brown College for computer time.  Representations
  were not always successful, but sometimes they were.  As far as I know,
  there are no groups hanging around at the University of Toronto any more.
  No groups make representations for computer time that I know of.
  With demand down is it any surprise that the available supply is to?
- although the number of people using computers is on the increase, I do not
  think the number of people capable of programming (let alone hacking) has
  gone up proportionitly.  At the University of Toronto Computing Services
  (which is the central facility providing computer services to many
  departments), we have seen a very strong trend away from programming.
  Today's users of the IBM mainframe appear to be using SAS, a highly
  procedural language, and Fortran, to call prepackaged subroutines.
  Those coming to us for consulting on micros appear to be using canned
  packages such as text formatters.  It is rare to see someone writing
  a program.
  This fact might therefore account for the fact that although the
  total computing power available in the community is up, the relative
  amount of "cheap hacker time" is down.  No doubt the absolute available
  "cheap hacker time" is constant or up.  (What is today's equivalent 
  powered machine to the one you hacked on?)


Alex Nishri
 ... utcs!nishri