154 DEAR HACKER

154 DEAR HACKER

the use of all sorts of gizmos like extenders, PBX systems, voicemail, and the like, there was a plethora of new worlds to explore. We couldn’t have started publishing at a better time.

One invention that was first published in our pages probably turned out to be the biggest thorn in the side of the Bell operating companies in their entire history. That, of course, would be the guide to converting a Radio Shack tone dialer into a “red box.” The tone dialer was simply a little box Radio Shack sold that emitted touch tones for completely legitimate purposes. With a little modification that most anyone could manage, the circuitry was altered to emit the special tones that made a payphone believe that you had just inserted money. Every kid in the country was using one of these converted boxes and the only thing the phone companies could do about it was completely change the insides of each and every payphone. It was an absurdly simple system they had designed (one beep for a nickel, two for a dime, five for a quarter) and its cracking was a victory in the fight against artificially high payphone rates. We don’t think of it today, but back then “long distance” was anything more than

20 miles away and the rates were astronomical. But naturally, phones weren’t our only obsession. Computers were changing just as fast and people were starting to actually get their hands on ones they could bring home and play with. So all of a sudden, it became less essential to dial into someone else’s computer (with or without permission) to play around and experiment. People began to put together their own systems and words like Linux began to be spoken with enthusiasm. Once it became easy to actually communicate via email on the

edgling Internet, the need to call far away BBSes to accomplish this became much less of a necessity. So much of the illegal nature of hacking faded away because we wound up getting what we wanted: cheap/free communications and lots of technol- ogy to experiment with.

None of us could have ever conceived of our device-crazy society of the present, where everyone seems to have a computer and a cell phone. Well, maybe we saw it in our imaginations, but I don’t think any of us really believed it would come true. New technology certainly didn’t solve all the problems, and all sorts of new ones wound up being created as a result of its prevalence. There were legal issues, privacy concerns, even the fun of the Y2K bug that was fodder for all types of discussions in the hacker world.

If there was a device of some sort, you can bet somebody wrote a letter to us about it. Everything from traffic lights to garage door openers, from surveillance cameras to grocery carts—the letters section was the place to theorize and share knowledge.

TECHNOLOGY

Granted, we didn’t always have the answers—one writer’s assertion that a grocery cart cost $2,000 went completely unchallenged (they actually cost around $75)—but we did our best.

I think you’ll find that the tone of these musings on the new technology of the time is pretty standard for the hacker mindset: discover, mess with, share results, and move on to the next toy. That’s really how we managed to get so far in such a short time.