A Tale of Hacking, Before the Internet Existed

The Montreal Metro subway went into operation in 1967, the year of Expo. Bus tickets were coated with a magnetic strip, but the transfers were punched with holes like computer paper tape. The holes represented the date and time the transfer had been issued. I gathered discarded transfers, studying the pattern of holes.

Within a week, I had identified the coding scheme. To test my theory one day after school, I took a transfer that had been issued in the morning, taped some holes shut to represent the current time, and marched up to a turnstyle. With my heart pounding, I shoved the doctored transfer into the slot. Clunk! went the machine as it accepted the transfer and released the gate. What a thrill! I was a hit with my classmates as I issued them with counterfeit tickets. The amount saved was minor. It was the fun of outwitting the system that gave me satisfaction.

I prepared a template from a folded strip of tin can. I pre-drilled all the positions, then used a 5/32" bit to punch out daily transfers. The grinding soon enlarged the holes to the point where they were out of registration, so I ordered a custom punch from the U.S.

Our local public library put its card catalog online accessible by direct dial. It ran on a microVAX. I'm on it one day and somebody picked up the phone while i was connected. A burst of high bit characters found me looking at the root prompt.

Being a good guy I printed out some stuff as proof and brought it in to him. :D It was a simple fix but man he just about crapped himself when told he was hacked!

Back in the 70's my high school library installed a magnetic anti-theft system. I don't remember all of the details, but it involved a small metal strip in each book that was demagnetized when books were checked out and remagnetized when they were returned and reshelved.

It was possible to return a book from within the stacks. This made a neat hack possible: find a book with multiple copies, check one out (demagnetizing it), bring it back into the shelves, reshelve it with the library card from its mate, and then return the mate from within the stacks. There would then be a demagnetized copy sitting on the shelves.

We were good kids, so we didn't steal anything, but it sure was fun to demonstrate to the staff that one could walk into the stacks, grab a book, and walk out right past the magnetic alarm without setting it off.

The standard ploy for a room full of terminals was to write a program that presented fake login and password prompts, collected the data, then printed whatever the standard "wrong password" message was, then exit.

I have a similar tale of crashing the University mainframe. We had a CDC 6600 and then later a CDC Cyber model that was software compatible with 6600. This system had a front end from Modcomp. All the terminals were on this system and connected to the NOS OS on the CDC.

During a project to build a microprocessor (6809) based Front end to the front end I got permission to use additional features of the Modcomp. With Modcomp manuals in hand and 6809 code ready to go into "Transparent Mode" I ran my code for the first time. Nothing happened, or at least not what I expected. The RJE station on the floor had tradition of Turning off the lights if the 6600 was not accessible. I checked and they were dark. Dam my bad luck, Just when I was testing my code. Fifteen minutes later with the connection back I ran it again. Again nothing and yes the lights went out again. I slowly put 2 and 2 together and made a phone call, reluctantly. They screamed at me, ... a lot, but I did have permission. I gave them my code. Several days later they told me to run it again. Suddenly nothing happened again but the good news was the RJE lights stayed on. My code never ran right but at least I wasn't Crashing the Mainframe.

I like the 2600Hz phone phreaking stories, how people could whistle the codes into the phone.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_box

One of my favorite stories is about when Marconi was demonstrating his new wireless telegraph, and someone came in on the same frequency sending insulting messages about Marconi. Not only did the interloper illustrate that radio is vulnerable to interference, he committed one of the first examples of trolling on electronic media.

"Before the Internet existed?" You make that sound like such a long time ago!! Meanwhile I see there's another Ycombinator news item in which someone discovered the "HERE IS" key on Teletype ASR-33s (which I believe one pressed to automatically read the already-punched papertape with the code to identify your "Station".) Again from pre-Internet days when mighty dinosaurs still roamed the earth writing games on Teletypes on IMSAI-8080 computers and pirated copies of Microsoft 8K Basic.

I had the book in the picture as a kid or one very similar to it. I was too young but my older brother used to type those games into our Apple 2C and we'd play them. Later my older sister taught me how to make madlib programs on the 2C and I'd make those for my friends when they came over. They taught me everything about computers and somehow I'm the one who ended up a developer. :) I remember how much it used to bug me when I'd forget a step in my BASIC programs and have to insert a step on the '5'.

No mention of early hacking is complete without someone chiming in, saying what an excellent read Steven Levy's "Hackers" is - starting off with the shenanigans of MIT Tech Model Railroad Club members in the fifties, he follows the hacker movement - if one can call it that - Captain Crunch, Marvin Minsky, Woz - it reads like a who's who. Lots of amusing and at times educational anecdotes, all written in Levy's eminently readable prose.

Would love to know which university this was. Having grown up with a parent working in a university computer service through the 70s & 80s I do wonder if this is close to home.

I too had a Game Genie :)