Slashdot Mirror
Slashdot's Top 10 Hacks of all Time
A lot of people pointed out in Slashdot's recent coverage of an article run on C|Net called "The Top 10 Subversive Hacks of All Time" that 8 out of the 10 so-called "Hacks" listed were merely website defacements and not deserving of the "Hack" label at all. Here's your chance, as the Slashdot community, to set the record straight!
C|Net, perhaps in some kind of bizarre response to millenia fever, has lately been printing a few "Top 10 Lists" of sensational-sounding topics but rather lame content:
The Top 10 Technology Terrors - Billed as "10 products that will scare you to death" complete with a cute little Grim Fandango-esque skeleton as a mascot. Of course Back Orifice is on the list. Are you terrified yet?
Top Ten Terrors That Scare Web Builders - I'm not even sure where this article is supposed to be going. I know when I'm building a website I'm always "scared" of the Y2K problem as it relates to interfacing with my mainframe...
Ten Tricks for Digital Pranksters - Which I'd hoped might be at least slightly amusing, but turns out to be amusing in the same way that going to a K-Mart, finding the Commodore 64's on display, disabling BREAK and writing that BASIC program '10 PRINT "K-MART SUCKS "; 20 GOTO 10' was amusing when I was 12. (But then, it's not a "Top Ten" list, so I shouldn't complain.)
Given the trend, one wonders when their "Top 10 Pr0n Websites That Will Make Your Child Grow Up Into A Pervert If He or She So Much As Thinks About The URL", "Top 10 Most Violent Video Games Guaranteed To Make The Flesh Of Your Flesh And Blood Of Your Blood Turn Into A Deviant Sociopath Who Will Probably Shoot Up A McDonalds By The Time They're 25" or "Top 10 Really Annoying Top 10 Lists That We've Broken Up Into One Page Per Entry To Maximize Our Banner Ad Display" lists will show up.
Regardless of whether or not C|Net gets it in general, (I think I've made my opinion on that clear by now. :) they surely dropped the ball on their "Hacks" article. Rob and the gang at Slashdot liked my suggestion that the question be put to the Slashdot community and find out what you consider a "Great Hack."
So what is a "Hack"?
A lot of people reading that article were disappointed that C|Net decided to more or less define "Hack" as being equivalent to "website defacement", completely ignoring the traditional, more creative and useful meaning of the word. (Notice here how I deftly sidestep the whole 'hacker' vs. 'cracker' debate...) How should we determine what's a "Great Hack", much less the Top 10 of All Time, then?
Eric Raymond's Jargon File defines "Hack" in the first two meanings as:
"1. n. Originally, a quick job that produces what is needed, but not well. 2. n. An incredibly good, and perhaps very time-consuming, piece of work that produces exactly what is needed."
(Which are entirely contradictory, but hackers never let mundane things like paradoxes slow them down.) He further refines the meaning in Append ix A, "The Meaning of Hack" as:
"Hacking might be characterized as `an appropriate application of ingenuity'. Whether the result is a quick-and-dirty patchwork job or a carefully crafted work of art, you have to admire the cleverness that went into it."
If you'll notice, nothing in these definitions say anything about a "Hack" being computer-related. There have been many great Hacks that are not computer-related; it's just that people tend to associate the word "hack" with computers.
Adding to the ideas defined above, an "All-Time Great Hack" will probably also have:
- longevity - people should still be talking about it 20 or 30 years later, or even beyond.
- social and/or technological impact - it should change some aspect of life, either by directly changing every-day life or indirectly by changing how people view the world
- "eleganc e" - note however, that this does not necessarily equate simplicty. (Some people may consider the Saturn V booster a truly moby hack, as it got its job done precisely well with no doubt as to its purpose, but was anything but simple.)
- that not-easily definable quality of "I shoulda thought of that!" A Great Hack doesn't have to be "not immediately obvious" - it may just be something nobody else has done yet. For example: the WWW - there's nothing "unobvious" about defining a set of page layout macros that include text and graphics and a way to transmit and view them, but it didn't become commonplace until Tim Berners-Lee made it a big deal.
Some examples of things I would consider "Great Hacks" by these guidelines:
- Putting Apollo 11 on the moon - the NASA engineers at the time of the Apollo project are, to my mind, some of the greatest hackers in history. When you consider the state of technology at the time, what they accomplished is amazing.
- Ken Thompson's "cc hack" - No explanation necessary. A truly elegant hack that is already part of computer folklore.
- Both the "development" of AT&T UNIX into BSD UNIX and the way BSD was distributed, essentially creating the first widespread market demand for "open source software."
- Of course, no Slashdot feature article would be complete without mentioning: the development of the Linux Kernel, both for what it is and how it was/is developed.
But wait, there's more!!
In his Appendinx on "The Meaning Of Hack", ESR also says:
"An important secondary meaning of hack is `a creative practical joke'."
and MIT's Gallery of Hacks defines "hack" as:
"The word hack at MIT usually refers to a clever, benign, and "ethical" prank or practical joke, which is both challenging for the perpetrators and amusing to the MIT community (and sometimes even the rest of the world!)."
A sure point of dissent in this definition is going to be the "ethical" clause. I'll take the easy road out and leave this point to be decided by the audience - if enough people think a particular hack is a "Great Hack" regardless of ethics - then into the pot it goes.
On the other hand, the closest thing I can think of to a "Great Hack" that skirts ethical boundaries is the Robert Morris Worm. It's an event that will live in infamy in the lore of the Internet for all times for the problems it caused, but that it could accomplish what it did shows an incredible understanding of the way the systems worked and how they were interconnected at the time it happened.
It's still not entirely easy to think of "All-Time Great Hacks" that fit this definition, including the "ethical" clause:
- The canonical example is usually the MIT hack of the Harvard-Yale football game in which MIT students caused a six-foot weather baloon covered with the letters "MIT" to inflate at the 40 yard line during a pause in gameplay
- In the Slashdot article, "Uruk" pointed out that Orson Welles' broadcast of "The War Of The Worlds" in 1938 is arguably the best example of this definition of "Hack" that the world has ever known
So we have two definitions to deal with: The "Classic" Hacks, and the "MIT-Style" Hacks. It may or may not be worthwhile to separate these out into two distinct categories - I think we'll have to wait to see if there are enough unique entries in each category to require two lists.
What now?
In this feature, I would like you to list what you think are the "Greatest Hacks of All Time" and after a time to let enough people enter their suggestions and comments, I'll come back and gather up the most popular/frequent responses. Those suggestions will go up as a Slashdot poll, and the top ten from that poll will be officially listed in a subsequent feature article: "Slashdot's Top 10 Hacks of All Time" along with a bit of background on each one; rather like C|Net, except we'll put them all on one page for you.
There is only one restriction I would like to impose on suggestions: they have to be able to be documented somehow. I used to know a guy who could make his TRS-80 machines play music with software that somehow buzzed the floppy disk motor at different rates, which is a neat hack, but as I have no idea where he lives, if he still has a copy of his software, or even where to find a TRS-80 to play with anymore it's not a good candidate for this.
I've defined what it takes for a hack to be a "Great Hack", I've given some examples to help "seed the idea pool", and now it's your turn: what do you think should go on Slashdot's list of the Top 10 Hacks of All Time?
ph1r5+ p05+ j00 muth@s!!!!
Z3r0k3\/\/l859@AOL.COM
Alright "hacking" as was the popular understanding of it was really dead back in the early days of the internet. With various crypto schemes and security measures it has become increasingly difficult to do anything very effective. Modern operating systems like linux/*BSD/*nix, etc have allowed for very rigid system security. I guess the only places left are windows boxes.
Slashdot social engineering at it's finest
One of the top hacks I would like to see is the cracking of the RSA? encryption. This was quite the fascinating hack, and I feel that it is well deserving to be placed on the list
Buy the ticket, take the ride.
Abbey Hoffman has pulled off some of the greatest hacks in all history, but I don't think any of them involved computers. Boy did he stick it to Ma Bell.....
The more participate the more succes a project has!
First Post?
I know this is pretty big for a hack, but would anything else have been possible without it?
As a host on C|Net's Builder Buzz I'm not exactly an employee, but I do spend a lot more time around C|Net and C|net folk than I'm sure most /. readers except the employees and I have to say with the "Top Ten Subversive Hacks", or "Top Ten Things that scare Web Builders" they're not trying ot be frightening or sensationalist, they're more trying to be interesting and a little funny.
When they did their "Top Ten Clients from Hell" on builder.com they had goofy little graphics on those too, as they do most of their articles. It should be obvious to most of you (esp. the web builders) that they're not saying these types of clients ARE literally from hell (Just as Back Orifice isn't literally "terrifying), they're just trying to give all of us who have GONE THROUGH that kind of thing a little laugh and some help for dealing with these people.
You guys take C|Net too seriously, and I don't think they deserve the criticism you give them.
Esperandi
Deep Blue II was a very elegant hack, incorporating a wide variety of technologies for one stupid little purpose.
-John
See the jargon file entry
"Evil will always triumph over good, because good is dumb." - Dark Helmet (Spaceballs)
Anyone remember the Second Reality demo for the PC in 1993? Amazing, right? Well, the only thing that could possibly top that would be...
:) and it ran fine on vice, with a little tweaking. :)
Second Reality for the C64 in 1997! I was amazed, the sound was very good (and the video somewhat limited for obvious reasons
---
pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
The U.S. Constitution is one of the top ten hacks of all time!
Balancing states' rights, balancing power among three branches, with a guarantee of a free press to keep them all in line... User-modifiable, but only if they really are sure about what they're doing...
The question is, what percentage of the really good cracks do we actually get to hear about?
I mean, the major companies would put people under pain of death for leaking any information about the really dangerous interesting non script kiddy stuff. I think there are many more out there than we know about, and probably some very rich people because of them. It's just impossible to tell.
Of course, it's funny how people can actually use being cracked to their advantage. As with the UK Conservative Party who last night announced that a 'hacker' had tampered with their accounts, coincidentaly the same day as a major newspaper revealed that the Conservative Party had been fidling their books for the umpteenth time in the past few years.
Slightly suspect I think
This is one thing which comes to my mind when I think of a great (in this case, hardware) hack. Compaq used the annals of law and engineers to reverse engineer the IBM PC's BIOS and general hardware interactions. It was clever, they worked around the clock, and it was a marvel they got it working right.
"In individuals, insanity is rare, but in groups, parties, nations, and epochs it is the rule." -Nietzsche
The legend of Woz coming up with the floppy controller for the Apple II on a napkin, and implementing it in an insanely short amount of time is definitly a legendary hack.
Hell, for that matter, the Apple II entirely was a hack. Name another commercial PC which was designed by one person. And, I believe, he wrote the first OS for it, to boot.
Perl and Python, of course! The former is of course more widespread but the latter is much more elegant (in my humble opinion).
I'd nominate TEX - well designed, elegant, usefull, and 100% bugless! Perhaps the only bugless program in existance.
also GNU emacs is quite a hack.
Ballerinas have fins that you'll never find
I think the recovery of Apollo 13 was a much better hack than Apollo 11. True Apollo 11 was a magnificent piece of work. Achieveing exactly what was desired. But Apollo 13 required true ingenuity by most parties involved. And using the ship in manners not really expected. Just my opinion.
-cpd
If I recal, the intel microprocessor began as strictly a simple adding machine and some crazy guy somewhere realized that hey wait a sec... this can do more... such as run an operating system and hence the birth of computers........ I will do some research and add more as a comment. Anyone else who know, please feel free to add
Thanks, The Mole
Perl.
;)
A simple text processing language gone haywire
Seriously though, a simple hack that went from a tool to produce reports has become a driving force behind the web.
"We hope you find fun and laughter in the new millenium" - Top half of fastfood gamepiece
"Fighting the underpants gnomes since 1998!" "Bruce Schneier knows the state of schroedinger's cat"
patch.
:)), but it does a damn fine job under the circumstances, and is used by an awful lot of people - myself included. Thanks Larry.
Without this small hack of a utility bringing peoples changes to widely distributed sources would be a never ending pain. Of course patch isn't perlfect (yes, I did spell it wrong on purpose
Things I don't consider hacks: Linux 2.0+, emacs, XFree (!), enlightenment, gnome, kde.
Matt. Want XML + Apache + Stylesheets? Get AxKit.
These are my suggestions for greatest hacks:
1. The so called bombes, developed by polish scientists and improved by Alan Turing & co, that broke the german enigma codes during WWII. This was truly advanced stuff in those days!
2. As was stated in the article, putting Apollo 11 on the moon is truly amazing stuff.
3. Xerox's invention of the desktop metaphor, which was later used by Apple, Microsoft and of coursse X Windows. This way of using computers will probably be dominant for a long time yet.
The mars pathfinder was, IMHO, a truly elegant hack. It was, to coin a phrase, better, cheaper and faster than other Mars missions, it did everything it was supposed to (and more) and -- this is important -- it was cool. It landed on the planet in a big ball and bounced to a halt.
Innovative technology and bouncing probes. Coolness epitomised.
If it was designed to do what it did, it definitely wasn't ethical. If (as seems almost certain) the massive infestation was the result of bugs, and it was not intended to spread so fast or to act as a DoS attack on infected machines, then it didn't do exactly what was required...
rant
Who could forget the Star Wars R2D2 "hack" of the Great Dome at MIT right before the Phantom Menace came out? I think this counts as a hack, even if it isn't computer related (it certainly is geek related). Here's some links for those who forgot this one:
http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/nr/19 99/r2d2.html
http://slashdot.org/ar ticle.pl?sid=99/05/18/193234&mode=flat
Anyone who doesn't know the story should check the BeDope story, the User Friendly story, the segfault story, or one of the stories at /.
Paranoia isn't an infectious condition, it's a way of life
-Denor
If anything, systems have gotten more complex, with more actual and potential security holes. With the dozens of daemons machines run these days, as well as various infrastructural mechanisms such as RPC, scripting languages, and systems made of lots of complex components interplaying with each other, security is a lot more tenuous.
The greatest hack has to be the cradle-to-grave total immersion virtual reality system created by the malevolent cyber-intelligence for the purpose of placating the human race while our life essence is farmed to fuel the Matrix's campaign of domination in the real world.
Do you really think that is air you are breathing?
Morpheus.
Someone has already written such a list. I just wish I could remember where I saw it :-) It was circulated in the pre-web days. I remember one entry describing a program someone wrote that fit in ~100 bytes of spare memory on a pioneer space probe, and it discovered a new moon around Jupiter. Anybody else remember what I am talking about?
My reasons:
Ok, so it hasn't been around for 20 or 30 years. But I believe that it will be. And did it have an impact, well there was an article on
Look, it was done with patches. It wasn't until they realized that they had a full web server that it became a program. How more elegant is that
may just be something nobody else has done yet. For example: the WWW - there's nothing "unobvious" about defining a set of page layout macros that include text and graphics and a way to transmit and view them, but it didn't become commonplace
until Tim Berners-Lee made it a big deal.
Hey, right after WWW became big, I should have wrote a "free" web server and I could have been famous!
There you have it. Thats my vote for one of the Top Ten Greatest Hacks!
Way to go you Apache guys (and gals?)!!!!!
Steven Rostedt
Steven Rostedt
-- Nevermind
If we're talking about hacks that are still being talked about, then how about the worm
written by Robert T. Morris that brought down most of the Internet in 1988?
MacGuyver!!!
Who can deny the greatness of a man who can build a sports car out of nothing more than:
You know it to be true...
How about the cold war, surely one of the best hacks around?
It did wonders for the world economy and scared the **** out of most people at the same time.
Sure it could have lead to a complete world disaster that could have destroyed the planet, but what the hell. It was all good clean fun and kept people in jobs for years!
The linux kernel, and the work done by NASA during Apollo 13, involving the creation of a device to filter out CO2 from the air(remember, the square filter to round hole design)
* - The Viking Longboat was no ordinary boat. It was designed to be sailed up a low-lying beach, picked up by the oars, and carried to where the raid was to be. Treasure could then just be thrown into the boat, by the raiders, allowing them to take more than they could possibly have done, if they'd had to shove the loot into pockets.
** - The DeHaviland Mosquito was an equisite hack. To improve speed and survival odds, it was built entirely out of pressed plywood, using the same techniques as the old biplanes. This was the first time anyone had tried using those principles to build a large aircraft.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Top 10 hack: The British Empire. Perpetrated by Gandhi in the early 20th century. He drove out one of the most powerful countries on Earth by sitting down and not eating. I'd call that clever.
Anyone who has ever debugged comms stuff will dig this - especially when the reset switch for the other box is on the other side of the solar system...
dean
The M16 rifle is the very definition of a hack in hardware. It is elegant, and it gets the job done extremely well, even under the most adverse conditions. Ditto for the Glock 17, which can fire underwater if need be. Two truly elegant hacks.
There are a few essential elements that make up a "hack" in my mind that seem to have either been glazed over or not given due importance in the definition presented.
A hack is performed in a situation where no tool currently exists for the job, and the custom tool winds up being built out of peices at hand (usually grossly inadequate) or completely from scratch. As much as I hate those kinds of shows, McGyver (sp?) would be a prime example of this. I can also think of numerous trail fixes while on a motorcycle or in a 4-wheel drive that were complete and total hacks, getting me back to civilization with bailing wire and duct tape.
A hack is often performed under a time crunch, thus a large reason for the lack of documentation and/or the job being done properly. A lack of planning also seems to be a common element, but this is frequently due to the nature of completely unexplored territory -- hard to plan for what you don't know about.
Very frequently, large amounts of caffiene and/or nicotine are involved. I really don't think I need to expound on this one.
The job makes you incredibly proud of something that is often horribly ugly, and that the majority of other people view as something akin to magic (have no concept of how such job could possibly have been done or what was involved).
There is something intangible about a hack that will have a different meaning for everybody. But I do think that the most important element was hit upon in the article: CREATIVITY!!!
Can't wait to see the list and the nominees.
I also second the nomination of Gnu emacs.
The earliest example I'm aware of is "Mock Lisp" in Gosling's Emacs, but there are probably others. A rather recent example is Script-Fu in GIMP etc.
Anyone know where the concept originated?
I read the cc hack page...but I don't see what is so great about it. It seemed that since the old compiler didn't yet know what a given escape was, the ascii code was substituted for it. Is that the hack?
The replicating bugs was interesting...but I'm not sure I understood what the point was in showing it was possible to create compilers which introduced bugs. woo
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
Clifford Stoll made an amazing application of ingenuity if there was one; the book about how he got the crackers is a must.
'An intrusion? Nah, ours is a secure shop'
Most real hacks have absolutly nothing to do
with computers. Using a pen spring to hold open
a broken choke on a '74 jeep while your
co-hacker sits on the radiator and pours gasoline
down the carb because the fuel pump is busted too
is a hack... No where near worthy of a top
10 list, but a hack anyway.
Apollo 13 as a top 10 hack? Given the state
of the technology at the time, getting there
was amazing. Getting back when things went
sour was incredible.
tmroper
I'll second Perl and the Constitution. I'll add, the Panama Canal and the Hoover Dam, the Mir Space station (OK, it's falling apart, but it was cool for it's time of inception), pennecillin (sp??). Just for good measure, cracker jack, Jolt cola and caffinated penquin mints;) H
Actually you'll probably find that the top ten "hacks" as C|Net define them have not yet been discovered.
:)
If your "hack" is discovered then it obviously wasn't very good
Perl is probably the most elegant language of all time - not so much how it looks (modem line noise, et al) but in how easy it is to get stuff done in it.
That "there's more than one way to do it" for pretty well EVERYTHING is the window into Perl's elegance.
It took English to produce a Shakespere - and Perl is the English of programming languages.
Whether you're pro Windows, pro Mac, or anti both, you've got to admit that Steve Wozniak had one of the greatest hacks of all time with his Apple I. Without it, chances are no one would be reading this besides large corporations. His hack put the computer in the hands of common men. It definatly fits the quality of having a lasting effect on people.
-- "Our job is not to make the incredible possible. Our job is to make the impossible credible."- Jerry Olivieri
Made by John Carmack in a day on a bet.
Makes me think, "damn, that guy is good"
Yes, it's from Microsoft. No, this isn't flamebait. Paul Allen's DEBUG.COM remains to this day IMHO the best software MS has ever produced.
Runner up: the F0 0F bugfix.
-- Robert
This is one of the forgotten hacks.
Now, perhaps the TRS-80 croud had something like this as well, but I KNOW that there was a program for the Commodore 64 called "1541 Music" that allowed you to reprogram the 1541 Disk Drive to play "Daisy" (A-la H.A.L. from 2001) by slamming the Read/Write head against the hard stop at different frequencies. I know this, because I ran it at our school's computer lab back in the day when a computer lab was 10 C-64's and 2 1541 Disk drives (Ooooh, networking!) The teacher about had a heart attack :)
Nipok_Nek
Why choose white shoes?
Gee, I've always thought Phillip Dick was the greatest hack of all time.
And when talking of hacks, who could forget
Piers Anthony, the hack that keeps hacking.
Be insightful. If you can't be insightful, be informative.
If you can't be informative, use my name
Things like VNC deserve to be on the list. As do some other truly innovative tools. PGP comes to mind. That single-chip WWW server that we slashdotted about two months back.
A port of Linux to a Rolex would be nice too. Linux on anything analog..
We really should extend our definition of 'hack' to beyond the computer realm, at least for a top-ten list.
While not hacks in the computer sense, the practical jokes that go on at MIT also deserve mention. I mean, turning buildings into giant VU meters for a concert... That's just plain COOL.
Mars Pathfinder (and Apollo 13 while out there).
The Blair Witch Project was a great hack. Both in the 'crude' sense of the word (badly made movie) and in the 'tweak' sense of the word, since the marketting was so subversive as to make many people BELIEVE it was a documentary.
-- What you do today will cost you a day of your life.
I think a great hack was debugging the code in the Mars Pathfinder/Sojourner Rover after the vehicles had deployed on Mars. This was possible because the debugging tool had been built into the final software load and sent along. Running a debugging session with a many-light-minute delay loop was a really bold thing to do.
Dog is my co-pilot.
This famous sci-fi radio broadcast had everyone in America running for their lives, fearing an alien invasion... was probably a catalyst that produced increasing realism in the genre as well.
The GPL should definately be on this list.
Jim Buchanan
I haven't seen it mentioned and don't know a good link for it, but I have heard this one from several sources.
Something about the code for a program being put on a drum that the computer would read. One guy had code that did a jump that noone could figure out why it was doing that, but the code worked fine.
Turns out, where the code needed to jump from one part to another was right where the end of the drum and beginning met, therefore it kinda just ran into the needed code.
.. because sh/ksh/csh are *evil* for anything more than a very simple job. The bugs that creep into shell scripts are subtle, and sometimes don't show up for years.
.. but of course, you can also write buggy Perl.
I think the "beads" piece at the start of the (Camel|Llama) book (I forget which), sums it up -- Larry combined the "awk bead", the "sed bead", the "shell bead", a few other influences, and came up with a new bead which was more powerful than the sum of the other beads.
It was a great hack, and the Perl community has done a great job of taking the hack, and fixing the problems which came about as a result of its hacky beginnings.
--
...someone had to give at least one:
;-) ;-) Mach 3.62 is nothing to sneeze at...
/.ers will care ;-(...
The SR-71 Blackbird. It may not be a "classical" hack, 'coz Lockheed's Skunk Works had an unlimited budget to throw at the problem, but considering the technology at the time, it kicked some ass... Some stats, for the non-plane freaks out there:
* Total time it took to design it and built a prototype: 6 (or maybe 8?) months. There are software programs out there that took a lot longer than that
* It still (~40 years later) holds the title for the fastest *production* aircraft out there (err... at least non-classified
If you don't dare consider an airplane (i.e. a complete system) as a hack, consider the following:
* The damn thing was almost entirely built of titanium alloy --only material available back then that could handle the temperatures involved. Problem: noone before was able to machine titanium. The Lockheed guys built an entire machine shop from scratch.
* Titanium, as any metal, expands when heated: the planes had to have 'seams' in the wings that were closed when the sheetmetal expanded: the SR-71 leaked fuel (120 octane fuel) while parked on the runway!
* The Pratt&Whitney (I think) folks had to come up with an engine that could change modes of operation in mid-flight: they made the first and only combination turbojet-ramjet engine. The Lockheed people had to make them work at any angle of attack. Yeah, it's esoteric, but the implementation is a tour-de-force to this day.
* The poor Russians had no way to intercept these aircraft although they knew they were flying overhead and photgraphing everything (at Mach 3.62 the SR-71 could outrun any rocket or bullet at the time, and I it still can). So they build the all-steel Mig 29 (another great aircraft). But the -29 was too damn heavy to fly as high as the titanium-only -71, so the Soviets flew formations of -29s *under* the -71 to obstruct its camera's view...
I highly reccommend the excellent "Skunk Works" book to anyone impressed by this... I just don't think most of the
I guess I have to put in a computer hack as well. Hmmm... : FSP (yeah, that's an 'S').
engineers never lie; we just approximate the truth.
1. The Macintosh
2. Linux
3. Woz's floppy drive(the first one that didn't cost an arm and a leg, if you don't know how it worked, then you are no longer nerd.)
4. The Alto
5. Pong. It's just PONG. hail PONG
6. BSD
7. ARPANet
8. L0pht crack
9. The Blue Box
10. the RISC architecture
HAL 7000, fewer features than the HAL 9000, but just as homicidal!
What about the intermingling of those amino acids that resulted in the first single celled organisms on the face of the earth. I think that was truly unique, especially since it had never been done before (on this planet)...
First, to Shimrod: you didn't finish reading the main article before you posted, did you? The author specifically mentioned this already.
/the/ spaf) wrote a couple of analysis papers of the Worm, after the code was decompiled. (His homepage is http://www.cerias.purdue.edu/homes/spaf/ if you want to download the paper(s).) One of his conclusions was the author(s) didn't really understand what was going on, because so much of the code was buggy, broken, or "dead" (i.e., unreachable). It is likely that a number of other people wrote the small intelligent bits, and that Morris (or whomever) just glued them all together.
Second, to everybody: the Worm did not show any wizardly understanding of how everything worked. Gene Spafford (yes,
You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)
In the early versions of Unix, there was a hack in CC so that if someone compiled a kernel, it would insert a backdoor so Ken Thompson could log into any Unix machine! Not only that, but it could also detect if the compiler was compiling itself so it could add the backdoor-producing code into the new compiler. Whew! Now that is some pretty complicated stuff. And oh-so-cool.
Kind of leaves you thinking if there is something like that left in software today...
"Evil will always triumph over good, because good is dumb." - Dark Helmet (Spaceballs)
Pro-Logic surround sound was (and still is) a slick hack. 4 analog channels folded into 2, and non-Pro-Logic equipment treats it as a normal stereo signal.
I just saw this on TV. It was amazing what a small auto company was able to do with spare parts. The Jeep exceeded ALL expectations and become ubiquitous throughout all land operations from WWII until the Gulf War and the introduction of the HUMV.
Duff's device
Your design to a real part online: Big Blue Saw
What about the Trojan Horse? The original one, used to capture the legendary city of Troje(sp?).
..ofcourse it's not clear if it really happened, so in that case I'll nominate the person who first made up the Trojan Horse story.
The imp hits!
This was an IBM 360/67 operating system that supported multiple guest operating systems running on virtual IBM 360s. It was the predecessor of VM/370. Users could run multiple versions of different operating systems and develop/debug new operating systems on a single machine. Tom Van Vleck wrote The IBM 360/67 and CP/CMS, a short history of the system.
This article is fucking boring. Slashdot - wake the hell up.
-------yaaaaaaaankee
How about Microsoft's hack to stop Windows 3.x from running on top of DR-DOS.
It must have been very easy. It had a huge impact on DR & Novell. I'm sure the guys in Redmond thought it was funny.
This is definitely an "MIT-style" hack- it does not involve computers, but is firmly embedded in the folklore of Rice University.
The Rice Campus is built around a large, open "quad" surrounded by six of the major buildings on campus. In the center of the quad is a statue of William Marsh Rice, who provided the money for the school to get started. The statue is a slightly life-sized bronze of "Willy" sitting in a very large chair. I'm sure it weighs several tons, and is on top of a square stone bier over six feet tall which allegedly contains WMR's remains. (See here for a picture).
One morning in the late 80's, the students awoke to discover that Willy's statue had been perfectly rotated 180 degrees, with no trace of the equipment used to do it.
It turns out that a group of engineering and architecture students had built some sort of inexpensive tripod-like "crane" that was lightweight, portable, and could be assembled *very* quickly. There were some nice subtlelties to the hack:
1. The entire rig could be carried in the back of a pickup
2. Willy is illuminated by a bright mercury vapor light at night. The students started turning the light off at 2:00am for a week prior to the planned rotation to reduce suspicion.
3. Before the actual rotation, the students did a practice run on a previous night, where the statue was simply lifted a couple of inches off the pedestal and set back down again. Which means they effectively got away with it twice.
One of the more humorous parts of the story was about what happened afterwards. The administration was *not amused*, and hired a professional contractor to turn the statue back around. The contractor damaged the statue in the process, and the university billed the students for the whole thing.
Of course, they didn't have any money, so they created a tee-shirt about the rotation. They sold so many that they not only paid the bill, but netted an additional $7,000.
Today, the statue is firmly anchored to it's base.
Can any other Rice alums fill in the details I missed?
To me, a true hack is when somebody figures out how to use hardware and software to do things it isn't supposed to be able to do.
I once found a C64 program in Compute's Gazette that could play audio casettes using the Datasette tape deck.
Somehow, the program was able sample the audio recording, and play it back through the SID chip. As you might expect, the sound was pretty scratchy and terrible, but the fact that it worked at all was pretty impressive.
The Mitsubishi engineers wanted a certain level of performance out of his Zero, mostly very high maneuverability. They found that they couldn't make his design because using the materials handbooks, it would end up too heavy.
So they bypassed the engineering materials handbooks, retested the materials they wanted to use, discovered some were underrated in the handbooks, and designed the Zero.
When the Allied forces tried to reverse engineer the Zero, they discovered it was an impossible plane, it performed better than it was physically possible. But then, they used the old handbooks.
I recall reading this in an old Air and Space Magazine, but no luck finding a link.
Bonus airplane hack,the P-51.
One, the wing.
Wind tunnel tests showed that for certain shaped airfoils, laminar flow could be maintained far back along the wing, resulting in much decreased drag. The Mustang has these wings, giving it less drag, higher speed and greater range. Of course, they had to be kept clean of bugs and debris.
Two, the radiator.
The radiator/oil cooler was positioned to add a little more thrust to the plane, cool air came in the front, removed heat from the oil, became hotter, and became a primitive jet engine.
George
In one 90-minute presentation at the Joint Computer Conference in San Francisco on 9 December 1968, Doug Englebart and his team from SRI simply turned the computing world upside-down. Not only did that demo introduce the computing world to many great Englebart innovations, but it presented an even more radical concept: the computer as a tool to augment an individual human being's ability to manage the increasing complexity of his/her world. My vote for the top 10 great hacks of all time.
...disavow all knowledge...
During World War II after the attack on Pearl Harbour the Japanese were a bit annoyed that the US could attack the Japanese mainland but Japan couldn't reciprocate. It wasn't logistically possible to mount a traditional attack against the United States. Japan did know of the jet stream while America and its allies did not. The way they exploited it is a macabre but grade A hack.
They started a cottage industry building balloons from rice paper and potato based glue. These 32 foot balloons were filled with lighter than air hydrogen gas and released. Inside the balloons were a series of aneroid barometer controlled switches which would fire off in series whenever the balloon fell below a certain altitude. The first N switches dropped ballast allowing the balloon to rise again and continue on down the jet stream. The last switch would drop incendary devices as well as ignire a demolition charge to destroy any evidence.
Japan's intention was to start massive forest fires. Fortunately they didn't quite understand the climate on the west coast and were launched during the rainy season. Only a few people were ever harmed by these balloons.
This is (as far as I know) not common knowledge. The American media agreed with the Military to suppress information about the balloons. After a minister's wife and five kids were killed by one of the balloons some information was released. They needed to avoid a mass panic however, they were worried that panic would result from fears of anthrax laden balloons raining down on US cities.
This could be a damn urban legend, so maybe someone can help me... but I remember a story of a student at Harvard that for his Senior Research Project decided to do an experiment based on Pavlov's beahvioral conditioning.
Essentially, for 2 months in the summer he got up early in the morning, donned a black and white shirt and walked over to the fields with a large bag of bird seed while blowing a whistle. Of course he was very well loved by the birds of Massachusetts. He stopped right before football season officially started.
So on the opening game of the year, the referees get on the field, blow the whistle and 100's of birds descend down onto the field. The game is delayed for around 20 minutes just to get all of them off.
Beautiful in its simplicity... "Wish I had thought of that"
If it ever really happened.
---
This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
I'd say that Starwar and ITS are among the top 10 hacks, not counting the numerous non-computer related hacks.
Aviation continued to be one giant hack for many years after that. For a time, no two airplaces were alike, because they were all built by different guys, in their barns.
In Charles Lindberg's autobiography "We", he mentions how he used to fly around the US, and one day in the fall crashed in a farmers field, and broke his prop. He spent the winter living with that farmer, and bought a beam from his barn and carved another prop with his jack knife, and flew away in the spring. *THAT* is a hack.
yadda
I nominate Archimedes' use of mirrors, lenses, and sunlight to burn the Roman fleet at Syracuse.
Also, does cracking the Enigma machine qualify? It was an incredible achievement and of huge importance, but is it a hack or just applied research?
AFAIK, Robert Morris' Internet Worm was an accident rather than planned i.e. he did not plan on his program stuffing the net, merely generating useful info back to him.
Anyone know the full story or got a link to it?
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
I have to second the above nomination of Apollo 13 as one of the greatest hacks of all time. The ingenuity involved in keeping those people alive and getting them back to earth with the spare parts they had is intense. Many people can take soemthing apart and make something else out of it, but how many can do this while leaeving its original function intact and the people inside it alive, from sevreal hundred thousand miles away?
"There's one born every minute." - Steve Case
So:
Any others I've missed?
--
I was in a store that had a touch-screen monitor that printed out coupons. I noticed that when people used it the hourglass was the same for windows 3.1. So I touched the screen in the upper-left where the close button was... and the computer exited to DOS. It was funny watching people go up to the coupon machine that only said
C:\>
And tried to figure out what to do....
Genius hack that changed the result of the war between the Greek and the Trojans.
In fact there a numerous battles and wars won because of some unexpected hack. Some made history.
-- Fur is worn by beautiful animals and ugly people
AOL's use of a buffer overrun to block MS clients from using their servers. They used what was at hand in a creative and unconventional way to get a job done. You may not agree with the job that was performed, but you have to admit that it was a sly hack the way AOL did it.
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
I can't believe no one has suggested that yet (or maybe they have and I missed it).
Despite all the myths, that most likely really did happen, and would have to go down as one of the greatest hacks of all time.
This was a C compiler for the 8080/Z-80 running CP/M and was written by Leor Zolman. It was unbelievably fast and useful. It was the first microcomputer C compiler that many people used. It was inexpensive, reliable and beautifully designed. It was a perfect match to the hardware of the day.
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Its big, tells you where and when the sun will rise, it is a circle, simple and elegant, took alot of very careful effort to build, and may be over 4000 years old by some studies.
There's a book, possibly now out of print, which I might still have my copy of, which details some great MIT and CalTech hacks. My favorite, for elegance and simplicity, was someone who visited the football field regularly in the off-season with birdseed and a whistoe. He'd blow the whistle and toss out birdseed.
The birds became conditioned to expect good food, and lots of it, whenever they heard the whistle.
Now along comes the first football game of the season. And the first referee blows the first whistle...
--
Infuriate left and right
I am too lazy to find references but I will include:
- The first computer virus. Self-replicating code that goes memely from program to program. Or was it from disk to disk? Was it inspired by Core Wars or independent? It had to be very tight. It was not useful but...
I second that RTM worm as well.
- Von Neumann architecture, I mean stored program instead of hardcoded. The program is data.
- The process (first in Algol, Pascal?) by which you program a minimal compiler in assembler, and, from then on, you code the compiler in the high level language until you have it full.
--
__
Men with no respect for life must never be allowed to control the ultimate instruments of death.
GW Bu
During WWII, they had these Lancaster bombers fly low (60 ft) at night, and launch a spinning cylindrical bomb towards the base of German dams in the Ruhr valley. Thse bombs would bounce on the water (like skipping stones - Tiddlywinks, anyone?), skip over the nets and anti-torpedo lines, and finally sink down to the foot of the dam before exploding.
Ethical issues aside - we could argue the morality of busting dams to flood the Ruhr valley, but I won't - this is a supremely ingenious implementation of technology to get around an obstacle... I nominate the Dam Busters as one of the best hacks ever.
"I will take the Ring," he said, "though I do not know the way."
You know, the device he built in WW2 that cracked enigma's encryption... Pretty much it was a mechanical computer... Built out of necessity, in a relatively short period of time. It did onething, but one thing good. That's got to be on the list somewhere, because if it weren't for that, we'd be living in a much darker world.
Sure. Just start your standard Unix TeX and baffle it with the following input: \def\x{\the\x}\x If a Microsoft program could be brought to such behaviour, you'd complain like mad and scoff.
I believe the Jeep has got to be one of the greatest hacks ever, with one of the largest impacts.
4 7/qid=943458780/sr=1-34/102-9399911-034726 6
I don't know how many folks actually know the history of the Jeep, but the beginning is actually a pretty good story.. The first Jeep had to be designed and a working prototype built and delivered to the gov't in 49 days. And of course had to meet a gov't spec, which was next to impossible at the time.
But, American Bantam, with the help of a talented engineer named Ken Probst succeeded in producing a prototype.
Check out the history:
http://www.fourwheel.com/jeephist.html
http://www.off-road.com/~early/history.html
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/08734156
The history channel has some good specials on Jeeps too.
The Jeep was said to be one of three advancements that helped the allies win WWII, and continued to serve in the US Military until the HUMV came along..
There is only one (OIIIIIIIO)
While I was reading the article, the printing press immediately jumped to mind, so I will add my vote for the printing press as the alltime greatest hack. After all, consider its longevity!
If it works in theory, try something else in practice.
" This is Orson Welles, ladies and gentlemen, out of character to assure you that The War of the Worlds has no further significance than as the holiday offering it was intended to be. The Mercury Theatre's own radio version of dressing up in a sheet and jumping out of a bush and saying Boo! Starting now, we couldn't soap all your windows and steal all your garden gates, by tomorrow night...so we did the next best thing. We annihilated the world before your very ears, and utterly destroyed the CBS. You will be relieved, I hope, to learn that we didn't mean it, and that both institutions are still open for business. So good-bye everybody, and remember, please, for the next day or so, the terrible lesson you learned tonight. That grinning, glowing, globular invader of your living room is an inhabitant of the pumpkin patch, and it your doorbell rings and nobody's there, that was no Martian...it's Halloween.
The one and only inovative thing that created Microsoft; Paul Allens 8080 simulator for DEC that he hacked when they had 30 days to show off Gates cut'n'paste basic-interpreter on a computer they didn't have available. Oh, and the bootstrap he hacked hacked on the plane so they could boot the same box. Two great hacks that never have been repeated later by MS. Imagine the company MS could have been if Allen had got CEO...
Reference: History of the Microcomputer Revolution, What good is a computer without Software?
If one is considering elegant and purposeful technology as "hacks", the SR-71 blackbird is impressive. Built by engineers in a rather quick amount of time without computers. Even on its retirement flight it set a cross country speed record.
:)
And of course, da Woz is da Man! I saw mention of his work on the floppy controller in an earlier post. I also vaguely remember a story about one of his earlier video controller designs. Not one but two great hacks!
"Dogs and cats, living together...it's mass hysteria!"
The Viking Mars Lander cameras built by Itek Optical Systems. (Their ability to do stereoscopic imaging is what helped TRW to debug their crummy robot arm.)
--
I gave my boss a reality check. It bounced.
What about the plow? Simple and elegant, it changed the way we live from hunter/gatherers to a farming society. This allowed for the growth of excess food, thereby permitting the distribution of labor and the development of modern society.
I think the greatest hack of all time would be the wheel. Since back then, they didn't have computers or math or science or much of anything else.
=
One that I haven't heard yet was the inflatable tanks thet the Allies used to fool Hitler on D-Day.
The Germans had a LOT of respect/fear for General Patton. They were certain that if there was going to be an invasion of Europe, it would be old Blood 'n Guts who would be leading the charge. So what happened was the contacted Hollywood and had their wonderfully adept set crews make a large number of inflatable and wooden tanks. They set all of these psuedo-tanks up at the point in England that was closest to France, which would be the most likely staging ground. The German air reconnaissance, especially with the foggy weather, revealed columns upon columns of tanks in this fake launch point. Hitler decided that any such force, especially one lead by Patton, would have to be the main invasion force.
Even when we were shipping tens of thousands of troops in through Normandy, Hitler still clung to his belief that the real invasion was coming from Patton, and that this "invasion" was just a diversion. Patton wasn't too happy about being left out of D-Day, but you really can't argue with the results...
"I refuse to join any club that would have me as a member" - Groucho Marx
The amount of pure genuis that forward-thinking that went into this game was amazing. Somebody had the brilliant idea of writing a networked game using the MIDI ports that were standard on all Atari ST computers. And, unbelivably, the game he came up with was essentially multi-player DOOM: eight people running around in a 3D maze shooting each other. In 1987!
For those not familiar, Planck introduced his constant to resolve the "ultraviolet catastrophe", the fact that thermal radiation intensity drops off at high frequencies.
Why is it a hack? Well, Planck had no conception of wave-particle duality, or quanta, or any of that stuff. He just knew his calculus, and that integration over discrete energy values, rather than a true continuum, would give the radiation curve like that observed. He just crunched the numbers to come up with the value that fit, and voila! It worked, so maybe it's right.
When Einstein showed that he just happened to be right, it set off quantum mechanics, thus allowing us to figure out lasers, nuclear energy, and semiconductors.
A truly righteous hack.
"You can't get something for nothing." - my grandfather, on the stock market and Reaganomics.
Hah, that's nothing! There have been programs to play music on floppy drives, by moving the read/write head. I used to have one for my Amiga.
booch (not logged in)
Hacks that effected more people, and showed us that by design MS is to busy steal code and buying inovation from poor startups.
Ping packets that were of Max size, send to any MS product would lock it up. Windows 3.1 timeframe and tcpip for dos.
WinNuke: Yea its lame, but damn was it simple. Anyone remember logging into a IRC channel and having someone nuke the whole channel of 300 plus users?
Win 95 time frame.
Brute Force WinNT password file: Since they made it everyone readable and made Guest accounts default. BLah, this was just dumb.
And my very favorite that by design very funny, since it was something that should have been caught in the RFC stage. SMURF attack, You ping a subnet broadcast address such as 10.10.10.255, where 255 is the broadcast that all machines respond too. With a ping of 64k size, and then forge the return address. This one was such a obvious flaw in the design of IP, that it is just sad they never caught it.
Now these are now very scripted or obsolete, but from effect, the discoverers, of these really were doing something.
Later
2. Error correcting codes (same as above, but for information, not energy).
3. Sub-carriers, particularly NTSC color TV, combatible with B+W.
4. Covert re-programming of the U of Washington card section at the Rose Bowl by Caltech students (circa 1961).
5. Ghost and phantom telephone circuits.
6. Circularly polarized antennas.
* Titanium, as any metal, expands when heated: the planes had to have 'seams' in the wings
that were closed when the sheetmetal expanded: the SR-71 leaked fuel (120 octane fuel)
while parked on the runway!
Actually, it was a special jet fuel, incredibly thick. A friend (who used to drive U2s back in the '50s, and has a son who drove SR71s) describes the leaks thusly: "It forms a drop, and the drop sloowwwlllyyy droops down until it breaks off. Then it starts again".
My nominations for the aerospace hacks: Apollo 13: building a CO2 scrubber from duct tape and report covers with the atsronaut's lives at stake is the epitomy of a hack. (The mission team assembled in a room with the goodies available in the spacecraft. They had to adapt the squarish Command module scrubber cartridge to the LM's round one.)
For aircraft, I'll nominate the U2. Take a close look at a 3-view of the U2, espcially from the top. Repeat with the F104. Yup, the fastest, orneriest fighter of its age donated its fuselage to the U2. The Skunk works really knew how to build them well, and build them cheap.
Pete
I would considering bring back the apollo 13 crew alive one of the greatest hacks.
go NASA!
Plus, many of the engineers went on to hack out the apollo stuff at NASA
Clive's mission was to design a computer which would run BASIC, store programs to cassette tape, hook to your TV with no additional equipment, use only standard parts found in any electronics store and sell for $200 US.
He did it.
At the time my friends and I were building communication aids for the handicaped. Our thought was that this little computer was much cheaper than the single-board industrial controlers of the day. So if we could interface into it we could make our equipment much cheaper.
I reverse-engineered the electronics and found that any attempt to modify the machine would destroy it. Data lines were being used to control the character generator, which was in the same ROM as the BASIC interpreter. Address lines were being used as data. One address line was, I believe, tied to the CPU interupt line so that the video frame would generate after every so many instructions.
In short, everything was tied to everything else and nothing was being used as the chip vendor originally intended. You couldn't modify this without breaking it.
I left that project with the required "Oh wow, that was NEAT! What was he smoking when he designed this?" feeling.
I am not anonymous. Slashdot just keeps ignoring my account. I am:
Bob Washburne rcwash@concentric.net
I hear greatest hack... I think of the balloon popping out of the middle of the football field during the Harvard-Yale game. But then I'm biased... I went to MIT
As far as digital pranks, my best was done to a poor computer at Walmart. I wrote a 2-byte com program that was interrupt 13 (reboots the computer under DOS). I named it win.com and dir.com. I then edited the file with the dir reference(forgot which one it was... been a long time since I mucked with DOS) so that dir would run dir.com (don't forget to make sure it is in the path!) I always would giggle thinking of some poor guy trying to run windows and then when the machine rebooted trying to run dir to see what was up.
1) The discovery that the Captain Crunch whistle made a 2600 Hz tone, and What That Means To Telephones.
2) The way Sir Earnest Shackleton rescued the Endurance expedition. You gotta read the story, you won't believe it.
I think that one of the greatest hacks of all time.
Is Einsteins General Relativity.
Made by one man and describing
how matter, energy, space and time interact.
I also have a website with revolutionary technology.
Here you can find many grate hacks.
Knud
Was really science fiction, but lots of people missed the disclaimers and started to panic.
Sergeant Pepper in many respects could be regarded as a hack (in the Jargon file sense) , technically and musically Technically because, let's face it, many recording techniques were pioneered on that record and musically because it sounded like nothing before it. Just my tuppence worth
Try reading it again. You need to understand what "bug1" and "bug2" are.
Bug1 is "if I am compiling 'login', add a bug which enables Ken to login with a secret password at any time, whether or not he has an account"
Bug2 is "if I am compiling 'cc', add bug1 and bug2"
The trick is, once you've written these two bugs into cc, you compile your new cc, delete the bugs from the source code, and compile your clean source with your *hacked* cc, which silently and secretly passes those bugs along. Now, any copy of "login" built with this compiler, or built with any compiler built by this compiler, or any of its descendents down the line, will allow Ken Thompson access to your computer, and you'll never know about it because it's not in the source any more.
The '\v' stuff was just to introduce you to the notion of altering a compiler to extend its ability to understand and respond to patterns, and how once you've done it once longhand, future builds can use the shortcuts you've taught it.
Speaking of strange loops, I think a definite candidate for one of the century's most beautiful hacks is Godel's Incompleteness Theorem.
I'd also have to give nods to Einstein's Relativity theories, and the recent proof of Fermat's Last Theorem, both of which I only rank below Godel *as hacks* because they don't have the same marvelous seems-obvious-once-you've-done-it-ness of Godel's feat.
--
perl -e '$_="06fde129ae54c1b4c8152374c00";
s/(.)/printf "%c",(10,32,65,67,69,72,
$_="06fde129ae54c1b4c8152374c00"; s/(.)/printf "%c",(10,32,65,67,69,72, (74..76),(78..80),(82..85))[hex $1]/eg;
"We'll save 50% of memory by only storing the last two digits of a year." "This software will be replaced long before the year 2000." "The same minds that shorten the name of this problem to 'Y2K'". $365 billion dollars, an interminable publicity campaign, glassy-eyed survivalists, and awful made-for-TV movie later, it goes on.
I think the old transmeta website was a pretty damn cool hack. Minimalistic, elegant, and yet perfectly achieved the desired purpose of making everyone interested in them. Hacking the perceptions of their audience: how can you improve on that?
Actually, I thought it was built of plywood mainly because steel was a very precious commodity during the war. Either way, you're right, it was a very creative design.
In the same vein, I nominate the Sherman "Hedgehog" Tanks of the Normandy invasion. Normandy is (or at least was) full of large hedgerows, or "Bocage". Whenever a tank rolled over one, it would expose the thin armor on its underbelly, and the Germans quickly learned to place anti-tank guns on the other side to dispatch them.
After losing quite a few tanks, the legend goes that some Sergeant got the bright idea to cut up the steel beach obstacles (if you've seen "Saving Private Ryan", they're the ones shaped like children's jacks) and weld them to the front of the Shermans. These forks would lodge into the front of the hedgerow and the tank would bust on through going fast, straight, and level, with the much thicker front armor facing the enemy.
So aside from the sheer ingenuity level, it has the added irony of using the German's own obstacles against them, enough to qualify as an all-time "hack" in my book.
That's where the intro about the beads is. I actually pulled it out when I was making my original submission just to verify the depth of the hack ;)
"We hope you find fun and laughter in the new millenium" - Top half of fastfood gamepiece
"Fighting the underpants gnomes since 1998!" "Bruce Schneier knows the state of schroedinger's cat"
The Crystal Palace
Paper money
The Cape Girardeau and Southwestern Railroad in Missouri, which was required to run its first train over its right of way by a certain date or else lose its franchise. After their track was about 1% completed, their competitor, Jay Gould, refused to sell them rails or to allow rails to be transported to them. So they ran the train to the end of the line, tore up the track behind, laid it down in front, and repeated the process until they had completed their first run on time.
Turing's team even managed to build a functional replica of a coding machine they had never seen, just from reverse-engineering the encoded information!
Well, there was that hack that me and my buddies did about ten years ago, which brought down the Berlin Wall, all of communist Eastern Europe, the Warsaw Pact and the Soviet Union.
...
Uh, but I'm not really supposed to be talking about it
Always keep a sapphire in your mind
The sad state of affairs is that there aren't that many good hacks anymore. The people who break into computers nowadays tend to be too stupid to realize what a good hack would be. Creativity and the script kid tend to be an Xor situation.
If you take a look at Attrition.org's mirror of web page defacements you'll notice that both the Senate's Teleconferencing Server( Mirror ) and Michigan Public Sexual Offender Query ( Mirror )were broken into in the past week or so. Imagine the fun that could be had with the two servers. Imagine the damage. But these geniuses (rackmount and ieet respectivly) decided the best use of access to these systems was to replace the homepages.
I hope that there will be hacks worth hearing about, instead of what seems to be the standard defacement. I guess actually programming is too hard for these script kids.
--
Why can't I moderate something "Wrong" or at least "Grossly Misinformed"?
Well put.
My personal definition of a hack is more along classic lines... something done cheap and quick. IMHO, Apollo 11 and Xerox's PARC coming up wth the classic GUI do not fall into this category. Granted, Apollo 11 was done in a short amount of time (for what it actually acheieved) but consdering a measureable amount of the GNP of the US went into the feat, I don't really consider it it cheap. Ditto for the GUI design. It wasn;t done that quickly, and Xerox dumped tons of money into PARC.
I'm not disputing that these were legendary technological achievements, but they really don't fit the category of a "hack" (in my sense, at least).
Howard Owen hbo@egbok.com Everything's Gonna Be OK Consulting
"Even if you are on the right track, you'll get run over if you just sit there" - Will Rogers
This "modest" piece of software made an obscure set of Swiss software protocols into a trillion dollar international financial feeding frenzy. It made its mediocre author and sponsor billionaires. It brought down the richest man in the world and his predatory company that tried to crush it.
So what about the Relativity Theory?
Ok, the whole thing is big and complex, but the initial idea that speed of light is constant and the existance of ether is not important must be one of the most simple yet clever ideas ever!
Or what about the way Archimedes found out that his king's crown was not made only of gold? Now, THAT'S CLEVER!
However I don't know it this can be considered benign, because I guess the guy that made the crown ended in prison if not something worse...
Angel
I had written an application in the mid-80's on the PC using Turbo Pascal 8087 edition. It required a math processor to operate. One customer had an early '286 laptop, without a '287, and couldn't run the app.
In two days I hacked together a suitable 8087 emulator... (simtel, emul87.zip).
This was the technique... I noted that Turbo C supported '87 floating point, and could emulate if the math processor wasn't available. I noted that there was a pattern in the INT instructions used to replace the floating point instructions.
I wrote a very simple TSR, that enabled the emulate trap, and reversed the transformation usually done, then dispatched to the Turbo C library. Total of 50 lines of code!
It worked beautifully. I consider this my best computer programming hack. Of course it doesn't qualify as anything close to the "Top 10".
Ratboy666 F. Weigel.
Just another "Cubible(sic) Joe" 2 17 3061
IMHO, the Caltech hack of the card section at the Rose Bowl was the greatest and better than the MIT football game hack. (This one's also listed in the Jargon File.)
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
The bad guys always seemed to lock them up in a room handily appointed with welding / cutting torches and an abundance of materials to create anything from armored vehicles to oxygen bottle missiles.
.plan comes together!
I love it when a
A gaming dialup bulletin board morphed into one of the largest and richest InterNet portals. Deftly out-manuevered Bill Gates, Paul Allen, and its own internal incompetence. AOL has became a synonym for tackiness much like "plastic" or "Made in Japan".
#1 ENIAC.
;)
:)
I'm sorry, but you'll find absolutely NO larger hack! (And I'm not talking just size here, either.)
#2 Linux
Take one part Minix, one part frustation, add hundreds of thousands of lines of code from all over the place, cobbled together, and you get Linux. Definitely a hack if there ever was.
#3 NetBSD/OpenBSD/FreeBSD
Not to discount the BSDs in comparison to Linux, but they're not as big a hack. They all follow a fixed set of standards, but they've got bits and pieces of code from everywhere!
#4 Sun Microsystems
Yes, I'm nominating a company. Take a few gurus, some people with money, build a machine, capitalize on it's popularity, remove all gurus, and still remain popular through marketing. The ultimate business hack.
#5 Windows 98
Bite me, folks. It's a hack plain and simple. Start with MS-DOS. Put Windows 3.0 on top. Then add Windows 3.1 code. Then add Windows 3.11 code. Then add Windows 95 code, and a few million more lines of code, and you have Windows 98!
#6 The Internet
Vint Cerf doesn't remember the first time they made two computers talk to eachother. It was cobbled together. To this day, it's cobbled together and held together by bailing wire and duct tape. Let's hear it for the world's biggest hack!
#7 godhatesfags.com
The man is the ultimate literary and legal hack. He's been banned from practicing law multiple times. Hacks don't necessarily HAVE to involve computers; computers just help to expose them.
#8 slashdot.org
C'mon, Rob. Don't bother denying it. slashdot is a cobbled together pile of code teetering on the edge of either brilliance or total system meltdown. Embrace it! Be proud of it!
#9 Mandrake Linux
Cheap Hacks'R'Us. Take existing distribution. "Extend" existing distribution. Put in other stuff. Relabel with new flashy logo and name. Sell for same price as competitor. Speaks for itself.
#10 WinModems
We can emulate old PCs on our dual pII-450's, why not emulate hardware, like UARTs and DSPs? Now *THAT* is a hack if I ever did see one!
The opinions above are mine and mine and only mine and thievery of opinions or frags will be met with fierce resistance. Thank you drive through, offer not applicable in all areas, while supplies last, no purchase necessary, call 1-800-NOT-REAL or send SASE to NO SUCH CONTEST, RT 666 BOX 1, COUDERSPORT, PA, 16915, sorry we're all out of Pokemon.
your company here.
shelby != ford
If we don't restrict ourselves to human-created hacks, how about the development cycle of human infants? We are born incrediably small to avoid killing the mother, and have ~18 years of physical development ahead of us.
An elegant way to bring incoming air moving at Mach 1+ down to subsonic without too much of a performance hit.
A gently concave curve throws lots of little shockwaves into the air flow, each shockwave drops the air speed a little bit, and eventually you get subsonic flow into the engine.
Come to think of it, the F-104 is pretty elegant, it can almost reach space, depending on your definition of space. And it was used to train astronauts for orbital maneuvers.
George
This book in my mind is the greatest example of human ingenuity and the evolution of knowledge out there. I read this book over and over as a kid.
;) )
This book (the movie, while good doesn't do the hacking justice) truly shows how necessity is the mother of invention.
I especially like how early in the war, both the methods of escape, AND of escape detection while often ingenious, were crude compared to the methods employed by both sides at the end.
Just some examples (the whole book is like this):
The prisioners started digging tunnels once going over the wire was made too difficult by the employment of efficient guard turrets and redundant fencing. The camp personnel began driving weighted wagons around the camp to collapse the tunnels. The prisoners dug deeper, the guards moved the fences further out, etc.
AND
The German Camp administrators, in an effort to stop prisoners from tunneling out from within the barracks, put the barracks' on stilts.
The prisioners, to get around this began tunnels from the only parts that weren't lifted onto stilts--namely the shower room, and the stove foundation.
Also fascinating was their security (both sides); the prisoner's adaptation of military uniforms to civilian clothes; the use of sound detection equipment by the Germans to listen for digging; and the forgery of documents--by hand and in poor light that were in some cases more realistic than the examples! A good example of relative ethics--forgery here was a good thing(to the prisoners anyway
I have cited this book on several occasions as an example of why there is no such thing as a perfect system, and how we shouldn't concentrate on who's to blame when security is breached, but instead focus on the inevitable evolution. Also pointless in my mind, is to think that a perfect solution to any problem can ever be found, but that the seeking of the solution is what is paramount.
This book gets my vote.
We are agents of the free
Folks,
If you're talking a "hack" in the classic definition, the ones done at MIT and CalTech make computer hacking seem like a minor incident in comparison. (^_^)
The ones done at MIT--namely the "R2-D2" modification to a building, the famous "VU Meter" during a Boston Pops concert, and the weather balloon with "MIT" emblazoned on it that popped up in the middle of the field during a Harvard-Yale game--require a LOT of ingenuity and planning to pull it off. The same applies for the legendary hacks at CalTech: the placard modification on a cheering section that when displayed read "CalTech" or the sudden modification of the electronic sign board at the Rose Bowl some years ago.
I still think the great college "hack" of all time was that placard display in the cheering section during the football game that when displayed read CALTECH. This is an incredible feat of genius, especially since the hack was done well before the days when there was easy access to computers and someone managed to quietly change the cheering section placard display without everyone ELSE knowing about it.
Raymond in Mountain View, CA
Politician pay lip service to them, but break half of them.
Using ancient hardware and software from the late 60's and early 70's these two space probes have been sailing through space and relaying back data at somewhere around 1.4kb/s. Perhaps one of the most fault tolerant computer systems that man has ever created. And reprogrammable at that.
If Ken Thompson created the cc hack today, he'd be fired, sued and probably prosecuted by the government. The computer industry has changed, and not all for the better. You stupid fucks.
I don't understand why noone seems to have mentionned RMS designing the GNU GPL as the greatest hack of all times:
* longevity
* social and/or technological impact
* elegance
* that not-easily definable quality of "I shoulda thought of that!"
Votez ecolo : Chiez dans l'urne !
First off, I have to nominate Kepler's elliptical planetary orbits. Everyone in the history of the world had been using some variation of circles and he comes up with ellipses. Truly a hack.
Someone already mentioned Archimedes. I second them.
Then there's Newton, previously nominated for the catflap, but I think Calculus is pretty important, too. Not to forget gravity or inertia either. They seem pretty obvious now.
And anyone who has worked through the derivation of the special thoery of relativity comes away with an appreciation of a truly monumental hack.
And finally an actual computer hack: Seymour Cray punched in the bootstrap loader for an early computer by hand, from memory, and got it right the first time. Wow.
The HST should definately be considered one of the greatest hacks of all time! NASA launches an expensive telescope and didn't grind the lens correct so what do they do? They build a contact lens for it. Whoever thought of that idea is a genius. What simplicity!! And the satellite has been beaming back beautiful pictures ever since... well.... until it's gyroscopes failed. But no one is perfect.
Anyone remember that old Apple ][ program (came on a Beagle Bros disk), that would:
h uga--Chuga-Chuga-Chuga.
;-)
Alternatively start and stop the 2 floppy disk drives, eventually decreasing the time before switching to the other drive.
It sounded exactly like Chuga----Chuga----Chuga---Chuga---Chuga--Chuga--C
The only thing it missed was the train whistle
One of the funniest (and most useless) hacks around.
Cheers
That must be THE GREATEST HACK EVER, according to the article, because:
Angel
You try taking:
enriched flour (niacin, iron (ferrous sulfate), thiamin mononitrate, riboflavin), water, sugar, corn syrup, high fructose corn syrup, partially hydrogenated vegetable and/or animal shortening (contains one or more of: canola oil, corn oil, cottonseed oil, soybean oil, beef fat), eggs, and dextrose, and also containing no more than 2% of modified food starch, whey, leavenings (sodium acid pyrophosphate, baking soda, monocalcium phosphate), salt, starch, yellow corn flour, corn syrup solids, mono and diglycerides, dextrin, calcium caseinate, sodium stearoyl lactylate, cellulose gum, polysorbate 60, wheat gluten, lecithin, flavors (artificial, natural), artifical colors (yellow 5, red 40), caramel color, preservatives (sorbic acid)
and come up with something better. Can't be done.
Twinkies also stand up to the tests of science. Check out this site for more information on that: Twinkies Project.
When I heard this in 1976, it evoked the same feeling as Donald Trump, Warren Beatty, or Jesse Ventura becoming president. All has-been celebrities of eccentric political idealogies.
The original "War of the Worlds" radio broadcast that created chaos as listeners thought the earth was under invasion. From an era when radio information was gospel, this changed broadcast regulations forever.
Ezra Cornell founds a university out in the middle of nowhere, at a place with the worst weather in the Northeast, and convinces students to go there.
Now, that's a hack!
...Or does a hack imply a hacker?
As neat as the amino acid thing was (I'd include the wonderful replication ability of the ribonucleic acids in with that one), it seems that it just sorta...happened. A unique combination of the right energies with the right raw materials, thrown together by random chance. A hack without a hacker.
Unless you're of the religious persuasion, in which case the Creator(s) would be the ultimate hacker(s).
I'd say Robin Hood and Friar Tuck is the best hack.
I also support Stonehenge, everything MIT, and the turning of the Rice statue.
I think that Dan Ingall's Smalltalk-72 implementation, first for the Nova and then for the Alto, is certainly one of the top hacks of all time.
You can try a Smalltalk 72 emulator that runs in Squeak Smalltalk. But remember that this is a hack, so don't expect it to be either easy to run or to understand.
--Jecel
TV shows are "software", huh? Launched five decades of mediocre programming and endless repeats.
I was there. I read the post. *most* of us recognized it as clever, and immediately began speculation about how it was done.
However, a good number taken in, and they were hysterical. Remember, this was during the end-game of the cold war (though most of us still thought it was the height of the coldwar). The gullible folks (was it Stalin or Lenin that called them "useful idiots") that bought it hook, line, and sinker, decried it has a horrible thing, as it had been a great step forward for peace.
This was also during the time that you could read the *entire* newsfeed in under two hours--all 30 or 40 groups.
I don't know about your M16, but every one I used (mostly M16A2) would jam and hang up if it was anything but pristine
There are many other weapons that aren't as flakey
- Rig up two hobby servo motors so they control rotation and elevation of a Phantom Menace Obi-Wan toy wielding a light saber.
- Control them with a RS-232 servo motor controller.
- Modify xeyes so that it spits out (on stdout) the byte sequences necessary to control the servos.
- Use stty to set the baud rate on the correct
/dev/ttyS*, and redirect xeyes >/dev/ttyS*.
So now, Obi-Wan points to the cursor on my screen. I don't run it all the time because I didn't bother to hook up a power supply, and besides sucking batteries, it's very distracting to have a Jedi Knight brandishing a light saber at my screen.-russ
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
The first computer (the "difference engine") created in the days before electronic circuts... So mechanically sophisticated, it required engineering capabilities that were not available in his time. It had to be built after his death. Need I say more.
trying all the combinations 'till something works is not a hack .... just like distributed.net's trying all the RC5 keys is not a hack ..... (now on the other hand organizing all those people to run their distributed crack engine is a wonderfull hack)
Don't feel bad, I actually tend to read articles bottom to top usually skipping back and forth. I have no idea why. I do it on anything technical or that is news coverage but not with stories. I guess I'm impatient or something. I hate when text has links in it as I end up reading the linked page at the exact same time I'm reading the original and end up with about 20 Netscape windows open at once. Lots of eye candy mixed into text also annoys me as it grabs my attention as I'm skimming back and forth through text. If anyone ever looks at my web pages they usually appear sort of dull but the text is always formatted to be read and understood quickly. Much more quickly than my Slashdot messages no doubt. I actually use decent grammar on web pages. ;>
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
Ever heard of how the developed the SR-71 blackbird spy plane. Most amazing engineering thing I've ever heard of.
The ultimate hack. When will the solution fall apart into chaos?
Having spent a few years at MIT, I'd like to put in a word for the ethical requirement.
A great hack should be a thing of wonder and beauty, something only somebody with the moral equivalent of a tin ear could fail to appreciate. It needs to be perfect in every way -- no detail is so small that it can be overlooked, down to the donuts and styrofoam cups in the police cruiser. Contemplating a great hack makes you feel happy to be alive and sentient. True hacks are profoundly pro-social acts, a way to use your gifts to make the world a better place.
Pranks that damage, deface or defame cannot rise to that standard of excellence. They're the moral equivalent of physical bullying -- ugly, and funny only to the hopelessly dull or morbidly insecure.
Every smart kid needs to go to a place where being smart doesn't define him (like MIT or CalTech or others). Such places (and I'm sure many others) drive home the truth of what the Wizard of Oz tells the Scarecrow, "Anyone can have a brain -- that's a very mediocre commodity." Hacking isn't about asserting you're intellectual superiority, it's about combining originality and hard work.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
There is a txt document called "Real Programmers don't write pascal", it contains a quote like so:
Allegedly, a Real Programmer managed to tuck a pattern-matching program into a few hundred bytes of unused memory in the Voyager spacecraft that searched for, located, and photographed a new moon of Jupiter.
check out the whole file here, it's pretty funny otherwise too...
A friend of mine made a file system out of ICMP packets - put data in ping packets and bounced it out, using lag as a storage medium. hehe. was neat. he could store a few k out there.
Admittedly, it *was* a security hack - however, it was the one, true, neat security hack.
Thompson changed the world for the five percent or so of people who can understand why his accomplishment is scary.
My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
processes named RobinHood/Friar Tuck would restart each other when one was killed -- I guess it was really hard to get rid of them -- anyone know the full story?
Some obscure temple clerics in an equally obscure middle eastern city (which is almost never mentioned in the records of its more famous neighbors) wrote down the legends and traditions of its culture to stop the recurring back sliding into the idolatry of its neighbors. These were the Jewish Deuterometrists. Several more chapters were added to first five, plus two millennia of endless Talmudic commentary. Led to two sequels- the New Testament and Koran- three major world religions, endless inter- and intra- religious warfare, the fundamentalistic mental-shackling of half the worlds population in three relgions for 2700 years.
I see... The attempt at humour was made painfully obvious by the statement - "The hackers wrote of their own "rooting" exploits (that is, hacking the root directory of a server)"
The actual top three hacks of all time are probably:
One amazing thing about all these hacks is that they reflect intricate design, but no designer. Man's achievements still pale by comparison. Think about it.
--Brian
The most rabid believers in American Exceptionalism are the exact same people whose policies are destroying it.
For my money the voyger probes have got to be one the all time great hacks. Not so much the probes themselves (although they've long since proved themselves to be hacks in their own right) but the trajectories. If we launch at -this- time we can go here, here, here, and here, and then fling ourselves out into deep space with a tiny little probe. That's the quintessential elegent hack to me.
... with eskimo chains i tatto my brain all the way...
Definitely. In the world of computing, there are very few hacks as well-done as this, at least as he reports it in the book.
I believe Mr. Stoll deserves a place in the computer top-ten list.
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
One of the best hacks was when DVD encryption was cracked. Anything that allows me to watch The Matrix on my Linux machine is worthy of being known as a good hack. Or maby this is more of a crack??
-- Any comments seen here are not mine, but a mixture of alchohol and lack of sleep.
If that is the case then I'd like suggest the following have merit and deserve consideration...
some of the games chosen qualify under the longevity clause and I could argue that they have played a major part in the development of computing. Some of them were great hacks, as they stretch what computers could do at the time to the limit and beyond.
Even Microsoft gets a look in here!
* Pong
* Space War
* Asteriods (Atari)
* Space Invaders (Atari)
The sound of marching Invaders will linger on in my memory forever.
* Trek
Launch Photon Torpedoes!
* Star Raiders (Atari) or Elite (BBC/PC)
Great Space War/Space Trading games
* PacMan
* Zork Text Adventures
* Minesweeper & Patience (Microsoft)
How many productive hours have been consumed by these programs ?
* MS Flight Simulator
Continously wins most realistic flight sim
* Falcon (Spectrum Holobyte)
Still the combat flight sim of choice.
* Wolfenstein 3D
* Doom
* Quake
Do I really need to justify the last three?
Runners Up
==========
I was also tempted by
* Civilisation as the protypical God game.
* Wing Commander as the definitive games with lots of bucks and FMV. The early cartoon ones were good fun too.
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
I think Lizzy Borden should get all of the top ten slots for her hacks. They are among the most infamous hacks of all time.- ----------
-----------------------------------------------
The story of Jesus . . . son of god/died/resurrection.
Compare this to other prophets in world religions and the significance of that event over the last 2000 years.
Does this fit the definition of "hack"?
I'm not a Christian, just a farm boy, so please don't flame me.
Yes, I have every intention of being Anonymous with this post. I may be a farm boy but I am not stupid about human behavior.
I think the thing that makes Perl a great hack is that it's not just a computer hack or a language hack, but also a subversive cultural hack. It turned Unix philosophy inside out and made it portable to other platforms. There was an article about the subversive history in Perl in a recent ish of Linux Magazine, but it doesn't seem to be online yet.
the third story on this page, to be precise. The page also details the MIT football-game hack described above.
-- Arm yourself when the Frog God smiles.
Check out the history of the first subway system in NYC.
The folks who built it wanted to build a subway. But, they couldn't get permission. So, they instead got permission to build a pneumatic tube network (commonly used to exchange documents and such).
Once they'd gotten it, they slowly made it wider and bigger until it could carry subway cars. Then they sprung a pneumatic subway on the city, and the folks who denied permission for the original subway couldn't really do anything but sit there sputtering.
That was a *great* hack, technologically and of the legal system!
(I got the info from a documentary on the History channel, btw.)
One of the oldest (classic) hacks. Still used today. Who hasn't thought "anyone could have thought of that"!
Best hack: NT (they converted VMS into this crap) Worst hack: x86 Archecture. If you knew anything about uP design, you would understand.
Disclaimer: I'm main author of it and there are lots of things to do. Only time will tell if my intuition is right here.
Current status of Atlas
Linus, on of the top 10 hackers of all time? I'm sure my emailbox is going to get crammed for saying this, but Linux is only Unix, which was already invented, cheapened with free source.
Yes, it's a great OS. Yeah, it's pretty cool that it made source code widely available to people. But he didn't really create anything... Even the development model was already established before he did what he did.
Okay, so he may not be a great hacker in a programming sense, but I think he's nailed it in the social engineering sense.
Sure, OSS software development and Unix may have existed before the Linux kernel, but Linus -- unintentionally or not -- brought the two together in such a way that its effect on modern computing has yet to be calculated. How many people will end up running Linux on their desktops in the next 5 years? 10? How many servers will be chugging away, either on Linux or one of the *BSDs?
As the article said, "Man! I wish I'd thought of that..."
Jay (=
IMHO, one of the greatest hacks of all time is the breaking of the German Enigma cipher by Alan Turing and a group of other British scientists. Not only was this an amazing display of reverse engineering, but it is one hack that is above ethical reproach. _sh
IMHO the best (MIT) hack ever. Some people still don't get the joke!
P.S. If you want to send me hate mail, you're one that doesn't get the joke.
functional, in many different forms, extremely useful (for catching thse nasty skid marks), and yet who invented it?? It was one of the first open source projects!!
This in itself is the best thing students have done, in the guide of the Church of the Lady of the All Night Tool, overnight transforming MIT's Lobby 7 into a cathedral. The hack was so good that a handbinding marrage cerimony was performed in it.
---
Another non-functioning site was "uncertainty.microsoft.com." The purpose of that site was not known. -- MSNBC 10-26-1999 on MS crack
--
# Canmephians for a better Linux Kernel
$Stalag99{"URL"}="http://stalag99.net";
1. Unix. No question. Ken Thompson writing an OS to play games on a PDP-7 that turns out to be (one of) the best available is pretty cool. I'm surprised this hasn't been mentioned yet. 2. The internal combustion engine. 3. The telephone. (Come on, where would we be without electronic data transfer?) 4. Sputnik. 5. The allies cracking Enigma. (Maybe I've just been reading too much _Cryptonomicon_ of late.) 6. EMACS. Or vi. Take your pick. Visual editors are cool. 7. Deductive formal logic. Doing proofs is sort of like writing assembly code, but without alignment bugs and clobbering the stack. 8. Inductive proofs, because the mechanism is not at all obvious, but makes so much sense once you've learned it. 9. TCP/IP 10. Netrek.
I always thought of a hack as a quick and dirty way to get something done either due to time constraints or lack of skill. A hack is duct taping two pieces together when they should have been drilled and pop riveted.
Therefore the most succesful hack of all time is MS-DOS followed by MS Windows.
I just can't bring myself to think of something carefully designed and brilliantly executed, like putting man on the moon, as a hack.
When I played hockey we would refer to someone who would make up for a lack of skill by aggressive play (read: slashing and chopping with his stick) as a hack.
Air bags in cars are another hack for people who won't buckle up.
My personal favourite ever is Orson Welles (sp?) rendition of HG Wells' War of the worlds. --If you have nothing to say, say nothing... ...I'll just shut up shall I--
I don't suffer from insanity- I enjoy it immensly!
The Colossu s machine (used to break the German's "FISH" code during World War II is (in my opinion) one of the greatest hacks. The complexity of the project and the speed at which they brought it to light is admirable, and quite amazing to boot. All designed by a postmaster, too. Who knew?
I believe it was Orson Well's radio story about martians invading the planet. This threw a good portion of the population into panic. This was much before my time. But I've always thought it was a 'once only' hack - being that this would now be impossible.
...just as I take anything on ZDnet with a grain of salt. Those of us that are, shall we say, more technically inclined/informed know what is supposed to be "interesting and a little funny."
The problem is when the less-informed public reads these articles. They don't know any better. I'm not saying they are stupid, just ignorant. Most likely, when John Q. Average reads these sort of "humorous" articles, he will think them to be serious-minded and well-researched. And that is most definitely not the case.
paranoid.android
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
The Good Times "social virus" is one of the best examples of an effective, low effort hacks.
People who disagree with you are not automatically evil, greedy, or stupid.
- The program that played music (usually Daisy) via RFI picked up by a nearby AM radio. I first encountered an 8080 version of it, but it may go back further than that.
- The ZIL (or whatever it was called) engine that ran Zork and all the other Infocom games on every platform known to man in the early-mid 80's was a nice hack. Plus, it inspired some minor hacks in the form of some track loaders we used so that we could buy the game in one format (usually something oddball like Tandy 2000) and transfer the game data to another format.
- Emulators are interesting in that it's impressive that they work at all, and amazing when they work well. I'd give the most credit to Magic Sac, which was, I think, the first "hostile port" of the MacOS to another platform (Atari ST); to UAE for doing the "impossible" by emulating the Amiga; and to MAME for the sheer scope of it.
- PARNET was a "network" for Amigas that ran over the parallel port and actually worked well enough to be useful.
- The Amiga hardware included a number of clever hacks and inspired still more: Hold-And-Modify mode graphics; copper-list-dependent graphics modes (SHAM etc.); overscanned desktops; parallel floppy duplicators (that actually "broadcast" the data to more than one drive at once); scan doublers/flicker fixers; the A2024 monitor; lack of cut-and-paste worked around by OCR'ing the frame buffer...
One thread that runs through most if not all of these hacks is that they make a computer work in some way that was never intended by the original designers. That, to me, is a key ingredient that distinguishes a hack from a non-hack.the definition of a word is whatever most people SAY IT IS! lots of words have changed their definitions over the years. the words 'geek' and 'nerd' are good examples. so what if the word 'hack' changes its meaning?
There is a classic story of a tiger team penetrating a secure military computer that illustrates the danger inherent in binary patches (or, indeed, any patches that you can't -- or don't -- inspect and examine before installing). They couldn't find any trap doors or any way to penetrate security of IBM's OS, so they made a site visit to an IBM office (remember, these were official military types who were purportedly on official business), swiped some IBM stationery, and created a fake patch. The patch was actually the trapdoor they needed. The patch was distributed at about the right time for an IBM patch, had official stationery and all accompanying documentation, and was dutifully installed. The installation manager very shortly thereafter learned something about proper procedures.
Yes, this is slighly off-topic, but Slashdot won't let me start a new main thread, and this is a space-related hack.
Once upon the time, the military decided it would be really great to know exactly where you were anywhere in the world, say by just pressing a button on a hand-held unit. The geeks in the backroom found out a way to do this, using satellites (this alone was quite a hack, actually...) Now, lo and behold, we can all use GPS to find out exactly where we are.
Well, not exactly. The military realized it would not be a great idea to let just anybody have such nice positioning information. It would suck if Saddam Hussein knew exactly where all his tanks were during a battle, too. So the GPS system also has a built-in method to screw up the signal to a greater or lesser extent depending on who you are and whether or not we're fighting a war.
Now comes the real hack: a bunch of geeky geoscientists (or is that redundant?) decided that they could track tectonic plate movements using GPS...if only they could obtain more accuracy than the generals would be comfortable with. So what they did was design a method that all but ignored the "for the public" tracking information you could get from the GPS system, and instead focused on analyzing the inevitable phase distortions of the carrier frequency itself to achieve better than 1 cm location accuracy, after lots of post-processing. A crude analogy here would be to come up with a system that would do something useful with TCP/IP packets by ignoring the "useful" contents of the packets themselves, but concentrating on the quirky bits (like the TCP finger-printing people) or the weird statistics of packet arrival times.
None of this is exactly what the military had in mind, but this is (so far) only useful for surveying applications, an most notably the study and identification of known and unknown faults in tectoncially active regions of the world. You can look at some of the more recent data at this JPL site put together by Michael Heflin. The next time somebody asks you how we know that plate tectonics really works, just send them here. :-)
Babar
How 'bout the water trap in drainpipes. It has made indoor plumbing practical by blocking gasses, odors and microbes from escaping sewer systems. This device is simple, effective and has a long-time effect.
Imagine a large office/apartment building without this feature.
Its got to be Guttenberg's printing press.
I submit the following list of all time great hacks, in roughly chronological order:
Pyramid at Giza
Stonehenge
Gutenberg's Press
Tesla's AC motor
Bell's Telephone
Hughes' Spruce Goose
Sikorsky's helicopter
Nasa's Jetpack
Kubrick's "2001: A SPace Odyssey"
Apple's Macintosh
- Abby Digital -
compare loading Caldera to loading any Windoesn't
Any TRS-80 CoCo fans remember Tom Swift(?)'s game "Grabber?"
It played multi-channel music on a computer than theoretically couldn't.
That's a wicked hack.
Along with the Apple ][ "Castle Wolfenstein" talking Nazis, and anything the Beagle Bros. did on the Apple ][.
Ah, such simple days...
(PS If anyone can get me a copy of "grabber" let me know! I Love that game!)
Pope
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
Sweet little bug that even the biggest f***ing nuclear bomb can't kill... and they do strange sound when you walk on them!! That the greatest hack of all time and we talk about it even after 10 billion year...
I don't think this has been posted yet and I believe it qualifies as a very impressive hack on the entire investment world. Billions of dollars were lost as a result of a small group of people and carefully crafted plan that very few people saw coming. The effects of which were felt world wide.
strain
I used to think I was indecisive, but now I'm not sure
Any TRS-80 CoCo fans remember Tom Swift(?)'s game "Grabber?"
It played multi-channel music on a computer than theoretically couldn't.
That's a wicked hack.
Also, the Atari 400/800 used cassette tapes for loading programs, and played the damn binary data directly through the sound port, meaning it would come out the TV speaker. Everytime you loaded a program, you had to turn the volume down. That was stupid, the Vic20 and C64 didn't have that problem. Some genius figured out that you could put music on the unused audio tracks, and Voila! Music while you loaded the program!
Along with the Apple ][ "Castle Wolfenstein" talking Nazis, and anything the Beagle Bros. did on the Apple ][.
Ah, such simple days...
(PS If anyone can get me a copy of "grabber" let me know! I Love that game!)
Pope
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
Taking something and making it more than it was. Yet another definition of hacking.
Here's a sweet example of that. Color TV.
TV seems pretty mundane and simple... till you start looking into it's origins.
Here's a cool link that goes into the history of color TV.
Imagine being tasked with the job of creating color TV - and then being told... oh ya... it has to work with the thousands of black and white TV's that are out there too. Doh!
Very cool hack.
Check it out.
History of Color TV
Man - today we are spoiled. Super powerful processors that crunch the heck out of digital data. Imagine if we could redesign color TV today? Oh wait a sec - isn't that what HDTV is all about? Ah, forget it. Too much red tape bs.
Grin
If you must have a civilian flightsim, you've no business citing MS Flight Simulator when 'X-Plane' exists. The latter uses blade element modelling to simulate all airplanes by actually simulating them- no lookup tables in this one- on a home computer! Ten years ago (never mind twenty) this was unimaginable.
On the other hand, if you cite MS Flight Simulator you should really be citing the source it came from- SubLogic A2-FS1. At least that's how I knew it, I understand it was a crossplatform product. A graphical flight simulator on an Apple ][ was truly a great hack, and my understanding is that MS flight simulator began with a purchasing of the SubLogic product. Regardless, Bruce Artwick was there first. (apologies if I've got any facts wrong)
Duff's Device
A nice little hack that embeds a do/while loop somewhat non-inituitively in a switch statement. A true C hack. Although the stated purpose was to force the compiler to generate efficient assembly code, I think the assembly would have been more straight forward and clear.
:) It really kicked ass, didn't it? It ran great on my 386SX25 with 2MB of RAM, so...
:P
Yep! That's because most if not all of the demos in those days were completely written in assembly. Remember how tiny they were? I guess they didn't call the parties Assembly '9* for no reason. Jeez.. so much memories... VECTOR BALLS rule! lol
The relevant part of this is that why aren't today's coders opt for the effiency and technical challenge of the early day hackers rather than pumping out messy stuff quickly? There's something to be learned in this nostalgia trip.
the constitution is certainly an excellent document, but as long as we're talking about hacks -- why don't we just nominate the bill of rights?
i mean, it's a patch!
it says what it needs to say in terse form.
it's timely even now (with some exceptions. i think the third ammendment is a bit outdated. and explicit mention of the figure "$20").
and it's certainly more popularly known than the full text of the constitution. (although, i'd be willing to bet that a large number of people think that the bill of rights == the first amendment, and that it applies to everyone, not just the federal government).
also, we may want to include the 14th amendment.
am i spelling "amendment" wrong? bah.
- pal
Linux has to be one of if not the greatest hack of all time. Bits and peices of code from all over the world originaly put together by Linus because he like many of us could not afford a comercial *NIX package. So he hacked his own version together, and whats more he gave it to everyone for free, including original source code. From this one hack that has not even been finished yet spawned many of the other great hacks, making Linux the father of the majority of the hacks from today. Not even Lopht Heavy Industries l0pht-crack put as much fear into Microsoft as Linux has. I think Linux is well deserved in the title 'GREATEST HACK OF ALL TIME'
time: a measurment of how much time it takes for time to pass.
Sometimes its the little hacks of or on bigger things that stick out.
* Hubbles corrective lense.
(heck for that matter Hubble Space Telescope is a good mention as well.)
* Unix. A Hacked up version of Multix just to play what video game?
* Z80 CPU. A 'clone' of the 8086 that is still in wide use. Just noticed one on my SCSI controller yesterday!
Why not? They've created an entire generation that believes:
And in the process, they've taught a whole slew of people to rigorously defend their right to use crappy software. (Well, they do have the right to use crappy software; it's just funny that they want others to do so as well.)
So come on, give credit where credit is due.
Jay (=
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
Maybe nobody will see this late post, but the best hacks I have seen all seem to involve duct tape. After all it IS one of the master substances in the universe (and who knows, may hold some of it together) I have yet to see anything that cannot be fixed with it. Break the handle on your suitecase? Need to keep all those pesky cables organized so that they won't move? Need something to hold your car's bumper on for a while? Duct tape can remedy all of these things. It is quick, does the job, and if you spend some time, can be a work of art too. Nose
Nose -Common Sense isn't.
Besides creating more flameage than just about any other topic, the GPL has led to great software for free (beer and liberty)! Seems to be a great hack to me. Joe Larkin
I always thought that the Apple lowercase hack was pretty brilliant.
The early computers didn't do much, and they were all more of a 'hack' for hackers than a productivity tool.
The Apple ][+ default text display was 40X24 and there was NO LOWERCASE. You had to buy a special aftermarket PROM to support display of lowercase characters. Moreover, the *&%!# SHIFT KEY DIDN'T WORK ON LETTERS! So... some wordprocessing companies came up with the brilliant idea of wiring the paddle button from the connector to the shift key and using the 'paddle button' as a shift key!
Imagine trying to sell a computer today that didn't have lowercase!
pr#6
Man I used to do that too! Hehe, but for full effect yiu have to add a few commas after the print statement in order to stagger the text ;)
...
10 PRINT "K-MART SUCKS ",,,
20 GOTO 10'
K-MART SUCKS
K-MART SUCKS
K-MART SUCKS
;)
just = (My)Opinion.toCents();
although the bouncing thing was extremely neat, it wasn't exactly original. in fact, the soviets used it quite a lot -- they just never got anything to work afterwards! (which I suppose means that the NASA version must have been different, at least. cooperation yields many dubious benefits)
you should see some of the mars rovers they've got now -- very sweet, innovative hardware (the one I worked on was actually bought from russia) and software that will make them able to do actual WORK once we send em there.
Lea
Here's a funny one! Enjoy. In the spirit of the MIT hacks, here's a Waterloo Hack!
The Great Water Tower Caper
Apparently, there was a group of students who wanted to turn the HOLLYWOOD sign into a CALTECH sign. "Each of the 9 letters in the sign is 5 stories tall and 33 feet across. They are also surrounded by razor-sharp concertina wire, and patrolled by the park service."
They were originally going to cover it with burlap, but decided to go with plastic instead. They were given $200 by the University, by calling themselves the Prank Club and requesting club funds. They made giant templates to cover the H, part of the O, turn the L to an A (with white plastic), etc.
The job started at 1 a.m. and was finished by 5 a.m. In the morning, TV and media types had flocked to it. "One TV report featured a pair of German tourists asking how old the CALTECH sign was and trying to get directions to the HOLLYWOOD sign."
Now that is a great hack.
-----
-----
"A man is judged by his every word." -RW Emerson
"They misunderestimated me." -GW Bush
I met Stoll once... Very thoughtful guy, almost killed someone with a yo-yo too. Definetly cool.
What does this button d$#%* NO CARRIER
Hey come on now. We all know there in only one tecnological terror in this universe and its the DEATH STAR!!!
1. The Bible - Damn! You know those towel-headed bastards are still laughing in their graves!
;) instigator could have foretold.
2. Stonehenge - "Hey Thor! Remember that chick who wouldn't go out with me? Check out what I did on her Dad's front lawn! Hehe!"
3. The Original(TM) Trojan Horse - others have mentioned this and they're right. The concept has infused itself very solidly in pop and computer culture. This has to be on the list.
4. Orson Welle's War of the World's radio broadcast. No explanation neccessary. Brilliant.
5. Linux - Gnu, BSD, yes I know, but THIS is the one that captured the imaginations of millions of different folks, to grow farther and further than anyone, let alone it's lowly
6. Milli Vanilli - They've suffered enough. Give those guys some credit!
7. The Spanish Inquisition - 'cause NO ONE expects the Spanish Inquisition!
8. The First Apollo Moon Landing - No event has ever captured and congealed the public's imagination as effectively as this. Not even World War II. Well...
9. Alexander Graham Bell's telephone - The very life blood from which so many other, lesser hacks followed.
10. Larry 'Bud' Melman - Propelled to stardom. Who'd a thought?!
**>>BELCH
Actually, the M16 as designed is a spectacularly reliable weapon, however, it was "forced" upon the US Army who preferred the "old school" large-caliber, wooden-stocked M14.
:)
The concepts of small-caliber, high-velocity (ammo is lighter, so you can carry more; round is much higher energy, so it does more damage; lighter round doesn't travel as far, but most infantry engagements happen at 400m or less) were a tough sell to the current generalship. When they were forced to use it, they changed the ammo specification from the very clean burning design propellant to the existing, dirty propellant used in the M14 and M1.
The result - jammed and fouled weapons.
Anybody who had an M16 jam on them in Vietnam can blame that on sour grapes generals attempting to sabotage the weapon. They couldn't stop the weapon's aquistion, so they mucked with the ammo spec instead to give the weapon a bad reputation.
The M16A1 added the "forward assist" to help clear jams - but at the same time, the ammo was respecified back to the design propellant. Bingo! No more jams.
As long as you kept the thing reasonably well oiled, an M16 should never jam. In fact, I've used one (with lots of full mags ready, and an oil bottle handy) as a SAW - firing extended lengths at full auto with no jams.
I've also seen a SAW based on the M16 action that nobody ever bought, the FN SAW being an excellent weapon in its own right.
My favourite version of the M16 has to be the Canadian C7A1, with a thicker barrel, a fantastic optical sight, and a cartridge deflector bulge that allows use by southpaws. It also retains the full auto capablilty of the original M16 (Canadians can apperently teach fire discipline to their troops) Using this weapon, a complete novice can shoot 2" groups at 400m all day.
Comparing the AK47 to the M16 is a Yugo to a Ferrari - except that this Ferrari is a whole lot cheaper. The AK is cheaper yet - as long as you don't have to hit anything at over about 150m, you don't mind the extra weight of the weapon and ammo, and you don't mind it beating the crap out of you when you shoot it.
That's not to say the AK is a bad design - when you consider the requirements, it's a fantastic design - but the M16 is just soooo much better.
However, I don't think either weapon qualifies as a hack in the Slashdot sense.
Have a look at photo.net/bg. The author quotes the book "Hard Drive" in saying that while Paul Allen did write most of the emulator, a Harvard student named Monte Davidoff wrote the floating point operations part. Paul Allen did do some cool stuff, though.
Billy is probably the best hacker to date, NFS, VI and not to forget, Sun, kicks ass.
What kind of grits? Did they have brown sugar on them? That's how I like my grits...maybe a little bit of honey too. Yumm...that sounds good. BTW, wtf does this have to do with the apple ][?
"Come to hate hypocrisy and evil thought; for it is the thought that gives birth to hypocrisy; but hypocrisy is far from
I think that Emacs is possibly one of the greatest software hacks of all time.
;-) )
I think it is possibly one of the oldest and still in wide use pieces of application software there is. It is still featureful, and I in fact still use it on a daily basis.
Just my 1.25p (2 cents
Fiid - Ryhmes with Squid. Software Engineer
A special, and incredibly top-secret task force of, yes, science fiction authors, including Robert Heinlein, Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle and many others was convened for the specific purpose of writing the "Star Wars Bible" which would define the technology that would be used to "develop" the SDI stuff. In this show some of these authors were supposed to have been interviewed and commented about the whole thing.
However, the intent of SDI was *not* to actually develop these things, but to build a believable enough facade of R&D and press release type material that the "Damn Russkies" would blow their budget trying to make their own version of such so they could stay in the race. The only people who knew this was a hoax were the authors and the few government people who put the plan together. Everyone else was told it was legitimate and to do their best to make it reality and given enough budget to make it look good but not enough to break the bank.
This is also the point at which RAH and Arthur C. Clarke were supposed to have had their big split and stopped talking to each other. "RAH" wanted to bust the "damned commies" back to the stone age if possible, where ACC didn't think this was a very moral or ethical application of his knowledge and skills.
One thing that makes me believe this could be a true story is that if you read Niven/Pournelle's "Footfall" there's a "task force" set up to come up with wacky outrageous ideas to fight the alien invaders consisting entirely of, you guessed it, sci-fi authors. They all go by pseudonyms but the behavioural and personalities developed by Niven/Pournelle are obviously a group of well-known authors, in fact the same group of authors supposedly reported to have been involved in the SDI "hoax." I know enough about Niven's twisted sense of humour that it strikes me as exactly the sort of thing he'd do: present a real, but ostensibly top-secret project as a bunch of characters in a science fiction book - obviously made-up.
The other thing is that this isn't the usual "Friend-of-a-Friend" story - a friend of mine claims to have seen the show first-hand and he's not the sort to imagine or make this sort of thing up. In fact he called me the next day specifically to tell me about the cool TV show he'd seen the night before.
Does anyone else have any references that could corroborate this story? If so, it sure sounds like a "Great Hack" although also possibly one of the least ethical and most destructive hacks I can think of as there were also supposed to be many Soviet military and government types on the show who reported that they had sunk a large amount of monetary and human resources into trying to develop their own SDI program, which, while surely not the single cause, contributed at least in part to the Soviet Union going bust and collpasing.
-=-=-=-=-
-=-=-=-=-
My mom's going to kick you in the face!
How about the original IBM PC?
It has developed a life of its own. It has influenced the design of virtually all small computers in the world today. Almost 20 years after the thing was developed/hacked together, we are still living with its design defects/choices:
* It has influenced the design not only of later computers, but even chips. All modern Intel processors after the '286 was called "brain dammaged" for its incomplete emulation of the 8086/88 have had complete binary compatability with the 8088.
* the "real mode" (related to the above)
* the 640k DOS memory segment and the corresponding memory hole between 640k and 1M.
* The system ROM located in the midst of the system RAM.
* The ISA bus.
* The resolution changing monitor (o.k., that was a later "innovation", which if it isn't clear from my tone, I have zero respect for. I much prefer that the computer would power up in one video mode/resolution, and STAY THERE!).
* The shortage of available interupts.
* DOS: The OS that won't quite die.
I'm sure with a little thought, we can all add to this list...
The only question is, was it a hack? I would argue it is, based on the apparently rapid development, the lack of careful planning, etc. Your call! 8-)
Nick.
is this guy's euphemism for masturbation. He's been doing it a lot lately....
+&x
Think about it. Larry Wall took the standard tape / full source distribution method and turned it inside out. One tiny program that cut to the heart of the problem: that code users only care about the changes once they have the source. It made distributed incremental development (and thus the modern Open Source movement) feasible.
Yup. The whole voyager project was that way. The voyager programmers and engineers deserve a big trophy for that!
"Let's take advantage of the trip to collect data on something else, like 2 other planet flybys" and then they upload new machine code to do more.... They hacked maximum useage out of those little buggers, and they did it from such a great distance. And they're still going!
JPL link
--willydog
We still have three of them here at work. I keep trying to convince my boss to give me one or two of them. He even has the origonal manuals here!!
Imagination is more important than knowledge. --Albert Einstein
Admittedly, I'm an aircraft buff, so they weigh pretty heavy in my list: 1) Apollo 13. Can't add much info to what has already been said. 2) Linux. Nuff said. 3) Perl. Nuff said (again). 4) Voyager. Burt Rutan's round the world un-refueled aircraft. First drawings were on a napkin (typical for Rutan) in a diner in the desert. Aircraft flew all the the way around the world (after damaging it's wingtips on takeoff and being brutally slammed 90 degrees on it's side in a thunderstorm over Africa) and still landed with something like 20 gallons of fuel. 5) SR-71. See previous posts. Damn near anything Kelly Johnson worked on kicked ass. Starting with the p-38, up to the stealth fighter (although the stealth fighter is the ugliest thing he ever created). 6) Unix. Gotta love the shear simplicity behind unix. Truly the reason for it's strength and beauty. Can't think of any more at the moment
Personally its not God I dislike, its his fan club I cant stand (bash.org)
It's also in the Jargon File rev 3.0.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
Is the English language itself. Just ask anyone trying to learn it. And yes it is amusing sometimes
"Ford, you're turning into a penguin. Stop it."
Anyone remember the episode where he DIDN'T have one of the afforementioned cutting torches, and had to get the two security guards out of the locked armoured car before the bomb inside went off?
:o)
He built one (cutting torch, that is,) out of a barbeque lighter and a 10-speed bike!
So it wouldn't matter if the bad guys left him with a cutting torch or not..
If the Apollo space program can be considered a hack, then I nominate the pyramids of Egypt.
People are still impressed by them thousands of years after they were built.
The Collossus was better. It was designed and built by a guy from the post office (name was Flowers I think), who was somehow related to the project because they used speciall runners to carry messages back and forth. Anyway, this guy decides to use vacuum tubes to build a computer. Everybody thought he was crazy, but he actually did it, and IIRC it contained @1500 vacuum tubes, way more than the number of rollers in Turing's bombe (well, not really Turing's). Turing seems to be credited with all this great stuff. Anyay, the Collossus was used to crack the new German modulo2 arithmetic codes. It only took, like 15 minutes to crack a code, instead of DAYS of people working around the clock. Really great, really an ingenious good hack.
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
I know it's not "technical", but it does fall under the MIT definition of a "hack".
What was more brilliant than this?
...anactofgod...
---anactofgod---
"Equal opportunity swindling - *that* is the true test of a sustainable democracy."
a hacker's dream...
getting me back to civilization with bailing wire and duct tape.
I anyone has fixed a malfunctioning computer solely with Duct Tape, please raise your hand (and ignore curious stares).
*raises hand*
+&x
Bill Gates faked out IBM that he could write an OS by buying the QDOS CP/M plagarism from a fellow Seattle hacker. Faked out the rest of too, laughing all the way to the bank.
-Newtonian physics -general relativity -quantum theory(uncertanty and all that)
I mean think about it. Could you have come up with all this shizatch on your own. When you were a kid, did you think, hey I am attracted by gravity to the ground in an amount directly proportional to the product of my mass and the earth's mass, and inversely proportional to the distances between our centers of mass. Or maybe the idea that light is the universal speed limit, that matter is another form of energy, and that the amount of energy in a given amount of matter is the mass of the matter times the square of the speed of light. And so forth.
This is the reason I'm trying to figure out Calculus without any books.
Remember without all of these there would be no moon launch, no computers well you get the idea.
I used to run a multi-user multi-tasking operating system on my old Tandy Color Computer called OS-9. It was very cool for the late 80's. I had a c compiler and a basic programming language called Basic-09.
;) It makes a linux kernel compile look as easy as typing sys a:\ under dos.
It also had a native windowing interface as well as Desktop Enviroment called "Multi view".
You have never really used a computer until you cobbel your own custom boot disk
--fatboy
On top of that, the plane was so far ahead of its time there STILL aren't any faster planes... 30 years later.
I recall reading a program listing in "Creative Computing" magazine that when poked in and run would cause the computer (mebbe a TRS80 or Apple II or earlier) to emit EMI signals that could be detected on an AM radio placed atop the computer. (At that time, my Rockwell and many of my friends' TI calculators could be heard on the AM band when you told them to calculate large factorials.) The article said that this program would play the Minute Waltz on your AM Radio.
I just need to find an attic wherein is stored a stack of '78 vintage computer magazines.
Tesla (not the band, the inventor)
another
Remember the story about the new york police station shaking so bad stuff was walking off the tables, and they eventually figured out it was a machine Nikola was testing in his lab, blocks away?
It seems like morse code would be up on the list...to take an almost arbitrary sequence of sounds, assign them to letters, find a way to transmit and recieve, and then make it a standard is pretty impressive....
This hack (MIT style) happened it Boston, I believe it was MIT (My dad told me about it, he was at harvard in the late 60's) What happened was that when a commuter train pulled up to a station some students were waiting and promptly welded the wheels to the tracks while it was stopped.
Let me suggest the old original Spacewar (pdp1x version), probably the first interactive video game and a great program that wasted almost infinite amounts of everyone's time and taught some folks some good programming lessons.
How about this story about magic? Don't know if it could be called a "hack", but it sure is interesting:
s tory_about_magic.html
http://www.netmeg.net/jargon/hacker_folklore/a_
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
Les Paul and Leo Fender made it what it is today.
Search for more
I nominate Woz's (and to a much lesser degree, Jobs') Blue Box. The full account is detailed by Woz at his web site under the "Answers to letters" or something like that, but in a nutshell: Woz and Jobs managed to get into Stanford Linear Accelerator's library. While rummaging around, they found an AT&T technical manual about the phone system. Woz then took the info and made a digital device that could trick the telco's hardware into giving away free phone calls. As I understand it, they actually managed to get the circuit boards manufactured, they sold so many around college. The previous methods of phone hacking (phreaking) involved using ad hoc devices like whistles from Captain Crunch boxes.
S.R. Russell working with McCarthy noticed that an interpreter for the new programming language they were working on, Lisp, could be created by simply hand coding the function eval. He did that and poof an interpreter was born.
o de3.html
Now where's that calculation for an infinite improbability drive?
See
http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/history/lisp/n
for more details.
Enjoy!
-Nathan
*sob*
the sinister mister earache.
I'm going to confine my list to computers just because I can.
Eunice -- Kashtan proves a point.
The Morris Worm -- rtm implements the ideas in his Unix vulnerability paper, plus a couple more.
Xerox Star/Macintosh -- Xerox invents windows and the networked personal computer, Apple builds it.
The Altair -- Small is beautiful, and the masses love it.
The Analytical Engine -- Even though he never built it, Charles Babbage executed an astonishing design hack.
The Turing Machine -- Alan Turing gives us a way to think about general computation.
ENIAC -- The first general purpose electronic computer.
The Internet -- DARPA lays a golden egg.
The Transistor -- William Shockley may be a dough-head racist, but he sure helped computer technology along.
The web/HTTP/HTML -- Tim Berners-Lee has changed our lives forever.
-=-=-=-=-
-=-=-=-=-
My mom's going to kick you in the face!
The greatest hack in the Apple ][ was Woz's disk controller card. Now *that* was a masterpiece.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
The story of Mel. I'm surprised in all the hundreds of comments here, noone's mentioned this classic hack.
I tend to favor the "using technology for a purpose for which it was never intended" definition of hack. A lot of the suggestions I've seen so far seem to me to be just examples of really good engineering.
My first nomination has to go to GOD. To create a universe from just the word of mouth...ouch! And man from dust? Talk about an unusual use of system resources. All this in six days to boot. Now before I get people e-mailing me about evolution vs. creationism, look at it this way. If creationism is wrong, then my second nomination has to go to the guy (St. Peter?) who started modern organized religion. To come up with these ideas and then get half the world to believe it - truely remarkable.
" The hackers wrote of their own "rooting" exploits (that is, hacking the root directory of a server) "
oh rooting is hacking the root directory? shucks, wtf have i been doing looking for that superuser account!
At the University of Toronto, it is traditional that the graduating engineering classes errect some sort of prank for people to remember them by. Every year, the mechanical engineers seem to find some creative place to put an old car. But one year they came up with the ultimate hack.
Walking up the main road into campus one day, I noticed that a tree was growing up through the centre of a parked car. Doing a double take, I realized that this maple tree was at least 10 years old, and unlike the car, it had been there the day before.
It took very close examination to figure out how this car came to be parked with a tree through it. The facilities staff assigned to getting rid of the car didn't figure it out, and ended up chopping the car in half with cutting torches in order to remove it.
The car had no engine in it. The frame had a tree-trunk sized slot cut through it, starting at the centre of the front bumper. But before cutting this slot, the hood, front grill, windsheild, and bumper were removed. So to install this work of art (late at night), the perpetrators simply had to wheel the U-shaped car around the tree, and then quickly re-install the windshield, hood, grill and bumper. They did this quickly enough that the regular campus police patrols never even noticed.
I have read through almost all these posts and notice that one marvelous piece of equipment is missing. Considering that this piece of equipment is in almost every home and used everyday, but forgotten from here says something about much we take it for granted.
The refrigerator.
Cold beer anyone?
I just remembered this clever hack...
A few years back, there was a controversy over a talking Barbie doll which included, among other phrases "math is hard!"
Well, a bunch of folks, fed up with the stupid blond stereotype, decided that Barbie needed a bit of motivational therapy. They bought some of the talking Barbies, and some talking GI Joes, and proceded to do a brain transplant.
So, you'd have Barbie barking orders like "we must attack the enemy headquarters!!!" while the emasculated GI Joes would suggest having a pjama party...
Some years ago the students of the Helsinki University of Technology (teekkarit) did this "hack" of buying a single park bench from the City of Helsinki and subsequently carrying it arround Helsinki on 1st May evening among the festivities.
They were stopped multiple times by the police, but every time they showed the receipt for owning the bench and eventually the police circulated the information of the "prank" the students of HUT are doing by carrying their own bench arround the town.
Now this radio broadcast was monitored by the students and right after it a crowd of them was assembled and every bench in Helsinki's parks were carried away into a giant pile in the middle of the central park of Helsinki.
Correct me if I messed some detail up, as I wasn't there at the time.
Was it the bit about Larry 'Bud'? I'm SORRY!
; )
-kent
**>>BELCH
Gandhi virtually invented non-violent protest. That is quite a hack giving that no one knew of doing that at the time! Martin Luther King Jr was infuenced by Gandhi and is one of the reason's the civil rights movement worked so well.
I'd definitely give Gandhi a slot on the top ten list.
One of my college professors, Dr. David Bradley of IBM, was one of the 12 original designers of the IBM PC. He gave a presentation during one class that included a slide show of pictures taken during the early stages of the PC. The picture of the original PC was not done in a board. It was completely wired tied. I saw the picture. It was even done with all one color wire, white. Now that is amazing. I have wired up a few boards in my carreer, but I could not imagine trying to wire that thing up. It was amazing that it worked.
http://ghg.ecn.purdue.edu/vax/paper.html
This was not only an impressive feat of engineering, but also economically sound, since George basically produced a machine with twice (benchmarked at 1.9) the computational power as an 11/780, with none of the maintainance costs (George did all the computer maintainance for PU). The additional cost in materials for this increase in performance was 22% of the cost of a new computer.
George was famous for ditzing around with hardware. The HKN lounge in the EE building at Purdue was filled with formerly broken arcade games like Red Baron, Tank and Vortex that George had bought (or just plain carted away as a favor), fixed, uploaded the code and done some alterations that he thought made them more fun. George also won an Ig Nobel prize in chemistry in 1996 for lighting a charcoal grill to cooking temperature in 3 seconds.
Including one to make water run uphill (The Archemedes screw.) IIRC, he invented the steam engine too, and was told to drop the idea by his Upper Management ("What will we do with all the slaves?") (I may be thinking of someone else.)
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
If you want to talk about esoteric computer hacks, this one blew me away when I first saw it and I still find it amazing to think about. If you don't know what I'm talking about, it's having graphics in the borders of the Commodore 64, in space that simply isn't addressable. It was done by hitting hardware registers at exactly the time the electron gun is aimed a certain pixel, which turns off the border to show sprites that are hidden there. It required writing code that was so timing critical that if the cpu was off by a clock cycle it wouldn't work. Ahhh the glory days....
I'm not sure I'd count the first NES emu as a hack... At least not a technological hack. (It was an important social hack, since it reminded the public that "software" is information, not floppy disks and cartridges.)
On the other hand, UltraHLE was quite a hack. As I understand it, the creators of UltraHLE ("High Level Emulator") basically gave up on trying to actually duplicate an N64, which would be prohibitively complicated, and instead concentrated on emulating the most visible parts of the system. In other words, UltraHLE is kind of like Eliza... it doesn't actually emulate an N64, it just fakes it.
Of course, this also means that UltraHLE could never really be improved upon significantly without rewriting it from scratch.
(I apologize if some of my info about UltraHLE is wrong... I haven't paid attention to the emu scene in quite a while.)
MSK
Some 2600 'features':
Read this Case History from 1983 in IEEE SPectrum for some more insight into 2600 development.
Also see this interview. Best quote: "The early games [...] were 2K games and the old programmers looked down on us kids for using 4K because only a wimp would need 4K :)"
Wouldn't the ten best hacks of all time be the ones that got the most access to the most information without _anyone_ _ever_ finding out about them?
OS/2's windows support was a great hack. I know, I know they had access to the windows source. Even still, Program Manager on the OS/2 desktop was an achievement. They even made it seemless by having the mouse icons change from OS/2's to Windows when the mouse went over a windows window! OS/2 Warp could run a windows app, a dos app, or an OS/2 app from the command line.
They had true virtual dos emulation with a config.sys and everything for these apps. Even better than NT's support now, IMO. I remember programming under OS/2, causing a segfault in the unprotected memory space of windows and getting the register dump that meant reboot for windows users everywhere. I just ctrl-esc, killed the process and started it again! Ahh, Those were the days....
-- Moondog
I think this one represents exactly the concept of hacking.
Sorry, I forgot the most important part: I don't think the first console emulators count as great hacks because emulation in and of itself really isn't all that clever... It's just programming to conform to an interface, which is something that programmers have to do all the time anyway. It actually comes pretty naturally.
MSK
If /. wants to recognize great hacks as a rebuttal to C|Net, I say go for it. But wait a minute, what about the people behind the hacks? Obviously, the Internet was one of the greatest hacks of all time, so let's give Berners-Lee the recognition he deserves. For example, Thomas Edison & co. His Menlo Park laboratory turned out a tremendous amount of inventions (read: hacks) in an extrememely short period of time. Many of his inventions were great, like the phonograph, which led the way to CDs, and the light bulb, which is obvious. If there are only 10 spots for the greatest hacks, then how can we do justice to innovators and inventors like Edison. I propose an alternate list, one for hacks, and one for the hackers themselves. The criteria for the hackers will probably be different from the criteria for the hacks, but I'll live that up to the wisdom of the /. masters to figure out. "The greatest good will come from the technical improvements tending to unification and harmony." - Nikola Tesla (1856-1943)
Psychic spies from China try to steal your mind's elation.
Sorry about the venting, but I get annoyed at seeing all of these myths about Apple stealing the GUI PARC being perpetuated. Pirates of Silicon Valley was about as factual as a Popeye comic...
The desktop metaphor, in which icons on the screen represent objects such as files, folders, etc., was invented at Apple for the Macintosh and Lisa projects. The SmallTalk-based windowing systems developed at Xerox used icons to represent ACTIONS (verbs). Apple also was the first to implement pull-down menus, and the ability to resize and move windows with the mouse.
The actual origins of the GUI date back to Jef Raskin's 1969 dissertation on Quick-Draw. Raskin arranged for Jobs to visit PARC in order to convince him to give the go-ahead for a GUI for Mac and Lisa.
For a more in-depth exploration of the origins of the GUI, complete with email from some of the original Mac team members (originally posted in a discussion on the Semper.Fi mailing list), take a look here.
Before anyone else brings it up, yes, the inventor of the mouse demonstrated using the mouse to cut, copy, and paste in a word processing environment in the mid '60s, but it was still a text-based system.
www.slaI say keep this computer related! Mostly anyone here would admire a computer hack vs a real physical "hack" like going to the moon and junk like that. Hack more fits todays day and age as being something done on a computer.
I had forgotten about the placard display...yeah, that was cool. In addition, the scoreboard was done in 1984 by members of my Hovse, Blacker Hovse. We have t-shirts commemorating the event :-)
:-)
I think the greatest hack of recent memory would have to be the modification of the Hollywood sign to read "CALTECH". This not only satisfies the requirement of ingenuity, it also satisfies the requirement of being _extremely_ visible.
We haven't had a good hack in a long time...I know some of us are trying to come up with something to do for the year 2000, but there are no definite plans as of yet. But if you see something about Caltech on New Year's Day, don't be surprised; we're just begining the new year with a good start
Nick Knouf
nknouf@cedric.caltech.edu
Hi, How about the original Trojan Horse? After all, the trick is famous enough to have coined an english phrase... Richie
That at the time, the only country that produced titanium in the quantity that was needed was the soviet union, so they setup a front company somewhere to purchase the stuff. So the plane that the soviets could not stop was made from soviet materials.... =]
How come noone has mentioned the R7 ?
It's the rocket that launched the Sputnik 1,
Gagarin and of which a modified version
with added upper stages is still being used to launch
the Soyuz and Progress spacecraft .
If this doesn't qualify, I think
the Mosquito was a pretty nice hack.
And perl. Don;'t forget perl.
I have to point out that the CNet "Ten Tricks For Digital Pranksters" article's #4 trick Inter OS relationships involved adding a mac look to windows and windows look to mac. The suggested "counter attack" to this trick was "Download and install Linux"
~~~ They call me Little John, but don't let the name fool you...in real life I'm very big.
That c64 rendition of Second Reality really blew my mind! And I thought 2ndreal for the pc was the best... :) Makes me want to get my C64 back out of the closet, this does...
F0 07 C7 C8
When Tesla set the world record for man made lightning he used the PLANET EARTH as part of his tank circuit !!!!
And he did it in 1899 to boot.
A good description can be found at:
http://209.207.141.249/en/0996/tesla9.htm
Brought to you by the makers of Bob(tm) the friendly desktop! Visit us today at Microsoft!
The best (funny, thought-provoking) hack that I'm aware of is the MCI hack on AT&T regarding "1-800-OPERATOR".
Remember that? AT&T spent MILLIONS of dollars advertising their new collect calling system, then suddenly dumped it, changing the name to "1-800-CALL-ATT".
Millions of dollars of wasted advertising money, even more millions lost to MCI's "1-800-COLLECT". Why?
The story I heard is that some bright boy at MCI realized that some percentage of the American public is unable to spell "operator". MCI went off and got the phone number "1-800-OPERATER", routed that number to "1-800-COLLECT" and quietly stole 14% of AT&T's business.
I vote this story as the "Best Corporate Hack of All Time" and hope the guy at MCI got a fat bonus. Not because I have anything against AT&T, just because I laughed for ten minutes when I heard about it.
Brad Silva
Vovida, OS VoIP
Beer recipe: free! #Source
Cold pints: $2 #Product
During my sophomore year at the U.S. Naval Academy, we completed a pretty large "mission" if you will. In previous years, mascots had been stolen by both sides. But there was always a spare mascot to bring to the game (Navy has a goat, and Army has mules -- yeah yeah tradition I know :)).
Anyhow, this particular year, we managed to steal ALL 4 of Army's mules prior to the football game. This was planned out a year in advance, with the assistance of one of our company officers (he's a SEAL, in fact). The planning was needed, since the mules are kept on the USMA campus, which is, in fact, a military base.
We had a civilian travelling on their campus as a tourist, driving a horse-carriage vehicle. At the same time, we had subdued some of their people at a gate, and replaced them with our own (in full Army uniform). This was possible mainly because we had observed the watch rotations for a long time in advance.
Some of our other people, in a separate vehicle made their way to the mules and broke them out. They were then loaded to the carriage which drove NORTH to Albany for awhile. This was to avoid the helicopters which Army sent out to search for the carriage. The rest of us headed south, back to USNA.
Finally we joined up with 4 mules, quite a successful rally, and the only time in the history of these two schools that ALL mascots were stolen from one side. Unfortunately some of our superiors would not allow us to shave NAVY in them before returning them for the game :-)
Best regards,
SEAL
The entire idea of using record turntable scratching to create music is, i think, one of the greatest "hack"s of all times. of course it's not a single identafiable hack but an entire methodology of music .. but still, its pioneers need some recognition.
m l
The first record by the ultraindustrial group Coil, "How to destroy angels", deserves _some_ kind of recognition as a hack. I have never heard this album-- i wish i had-- but from what i've heard, it was apparently all noise-- noise so heavy that certain record players were unable to play parts of it. It also supposedly contained a grooveless song-- that is, there were no grooves to hold the needle in place, making it impossible to play as the needle just skitters across the surface. a search on Google just now turned up:
http://www.brainwashed.com/coil/music/angels.ht
i'd also heard of a humor record released by Monty Python called "Matching tie and hankercheif" or something, where it actually contained two seperate concentric grooves. That is, there were two completely different recordings on one surface, and depending on which of the grooves your needle happened to fall in you'd hear something different.
I'd also like to take this moment to give recognition to all the great useless mac extentions i was so addicted to once upon a time. This is "hacking" at its purest-- short, quick, dirty little things for a specific task with no practical value. The obvious ones are things like Zipple, which made the little apple in the apple menu be animated. But that's so _obvious_! the great ones were the truly _wierd_ ones-- Kilroy, which made the wierd bald little "kilroy is here" guy pop up over the top of the window with eyes that followed the cursor if you went a preset amount of time without clicking. "Mittens Touch Typist", which would inperceptably change random keystrokes into typos, driving you crazy. I'm trying to remember some others but failing- it was so long ago. My personal favorite in terms of sheer niftiness value though was one called "sdrowkcaB". This patched basically every routine the mac os had for displaying text in such a way that any string that a program tried to print to the screen through the toolbox was reversed before being displayed. So that the menus said "eliF tidE weiV" and so on. It worked beautifully.
And of course there was the famous NetBunny-- you secretly installed an extention on every computer in a computer lab or office, and then those extentions would lie in wait for a particular signal from the host program. Once that signal was sent out, the energizer bunny would walk across each screen on the network one by one, in an order you set up to make it appear he was walking from screen to screen.
And what about Cthugha? that had a DOS version did it not? the program that would turn music input from the CD into shifting shapes on the screen? the oscillator on acid?
sorry.. i'm being overwhelmed by nostalgia here.. -_-
i also have a program i wrote which i'm proud enough of that i'll have the egotistical audacity to mention it among these others.. it's called "recursive mirrors" and it uses a mac function called "copybits" to copy the contents of the screen into a window. Except in copying the screen it copies its own display window so you get this cool staring-into-infinity tunnel effect. Or a totally different effect depending on how you have the settings set.. i dunno. check it out if you're bored. http://home.earthlink.net/~mcclure111/prog.html
and as long as i'm rambling.. another great hack would be the idea in WW2 on the japaneese front of using Navajo indians speaking in Navajo as the one truly unbreakable code.. the japaneese never figured it out.
-mcc-baka
i will show you fear in a handful of dust. --t.s.eliot
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
The encryption used for the old C64 GEOS :-)
environment has got to be the most elegant piece
of software protection I've ever had the honour
of cracking. The way they used that pseudo-random
noise generator, and instruction timings to XOR-
decrypt the code, brilliant. And a real bitch to
actually crack.
Whoever designed that, please, get in touch with
me...
--Toby.
weingart@tepid.org
(I'd vote for napster too, www.napster.com)
Amazing magic tricks
What about Monica's hack? The best of the Century...
Mig25 was the one russians built to chase sr71, and unsuccessfully i must say. It wasn't until mig31 was deployed SR71 was continuing russia overflights. There was an incident when SR71 was locked by multiple Mig31s, that's pretty much led SR71 into retirement.
It's still a point of contention whether or not Archimedes actually did the burning mirrors trick.
To wit: the earliest source I've found for this information is the Book of Histories by John Tzetzes, in the 12th century. He describes the mirror as a hexagonal mirror, with six square mirrors attached to the main with hinges and leather straps. This way, the mirrors could be focused.
Now, is this accurate? It was written much more than a millennium after the event, so it may have been legend becoming fact. He didn't have a parabola of any kind; I think Diocles was the first to come up with the parabolic mirror (one century after Archimedes), and he wrote about it in the book 'On Burning Mirrors'. I guess it's possible that, over the centuries, people got the work of Diocles and Archimedes a little mixed up (seemingly easy to do, since Diocles based his work on Archimedes). But enough speculation - I'm neither a historian nor a scholar, just a kid with too much time on his hands. So, let's hear what someone else has to say.
The best (and only, to date) refutation of the event I've seen is by D.L. Simms, in the book 'Archimedes' weapons of war and Leonardo'. I have no idea about this guy's reputation, and I've never read the book... but going off of a second-hand source (Dr. John Leinhard at the University of Houston), here's what is said :
'Simms thinks the story hangs on the edge of plausibility. Archimedes might just barely have known enough optics to make such a mirror. It's conceivable that he could have made it with an adjustable focal length. He might even have been able to keep a beam fixed on one spot long enough to ignite wood. But beyond all those terrible if's was the fact that the burning mirror didn't appear in the earliest accounts of the battle. The first versions tell us only that Archimedes's ingenuity had something to do with winning the battle and that fire was involved.'
Well, there you have it. Like I said, decide for yourself whether or not to trust these sources... but it is something to think about.
I'm interested.
Based on some of the arbitrary limits in the original x86 based pc's like 640k limit, I sorta consider much of the original PC design to be an "Evil Hack" in the spirit of Dr. Evil from the Austin Powers movies. Nobody could possibly want more than 640K memory eh? Bah. Same thing with 2-digit dates. Laziness and bit-picking to save one penny per machine, and now people are getting rich selling $90 RTC cards to people who don't even know if they need one.
There's 2 evil hacks for ya...
Er, if you're referring to PSEmuPro, that really _is_ a true emulator. While it uses a dynamic-recompiling core, it's still emulating the core R3000A, as well as the GTE and other whatnot(instead of aiming for the instructions just used by a few popular games, like UltraHLE). In fact, Tratax(the author) once said that PSEmuPro was born out of a discussion with his coworkers whether it was possible to get a good fast emulation of the R-series CPUs with an x86 processor. ;)
Bleem may be using a slightly different way, but since they're aiming for compatibility across the board I doubt that they've gone the UltraHLE route either.
Also, only the NES used the several-hundred memory map idea. The SNES only had one or two, and there's no indication that the 32-bit and above systems use anything similar(or if they do use such an inefficient system, it hasn't been documented).
And finally, I think you're talking about Marat Fayzullin, although it may be contested. Marat isn't exactly a popular person in the community these days...
--
Just think if how much money Windows 2000 is going to cost for a hacked program
others might argue that it was coming down from the trees in the first place...
Last night, right before I went to bed, I put my glasses on the headboard so that I could find them in the morning when I woke up. This morning, when I woke up, I knew exactly where they were. Isn't that a wonderful hack?
According to this discussion, what the hell on the planet isn't considered a "hack," except possibly for "Ugh. Winbl0wz."
Despite protestations about awkward syntax and "unique" constructs, Perl still leads the charge in producing dynamic web content. It seems to continue to find new ecological niches to fill, including database manipulation and cross platform system administration.
What's Perl good for? Any job in which programmer's time is more valuable than execution time.
All this said, I can't think Perl would be included in any list of top ten hacks. Not even Larry would suggest this.
My nomination for the GREATEST hack of them all:
Written language.
This more than anything has allowed humanity to improve its condition.
Every year (as probably anyone who's actually reading this knows), there's a large parade before "Beer-Bike," where all the colleges basically line up on trucks and go around the Inner Loop, dousing each other with an astonishing number of water balloons and other sundry items. Unfortunately (from my point of view, at least), a couple colleges who lie along the parade route have firehoses (or in one case, a fire truck) which they bring out every year and drench passers-by with. That's one part of the story.
Another part: as, again, most of you probably know, all the colleges are connected by a vast system of steam tunnels underground. It has become increasingly difficult to gain access to these tunnels -- some number of years ago, the administration started installing gates periodically throughout the tunnels and securing them with big beefy locks. PLUS, most of the entryways to the tunnels are either a) manholes, which are hard to use in daylight, or b) in parts of the colleges which are very hard to get to.
The "hack," perpetrated by a friend of mine, was just to quietly go into the tunnels the morning of Beer-Bike and lie in wait; when our group was about to pass by the waterhose-bearers, we signaled him by walkie-talkie and he shut off the water to the offending college for the few minutes it took for us to pass by. The looks of confusion from the people manning the firehose were great. After we had gone by, we signaled our comrade in the tunnels once more, so he could turn the water back on and the other floats could get happily drenched.
This was impressive for a few different reasons. To get in the tunnels as quickly and effectively as he did, the guy who did this had basically cracked the entire lock system at Rice -- this took the better part of a year, but by measuring keys and cores and such, he was eventually able to construct a series of master keys which would open most doors on campus. He also had to get a key for the steam-tunnel locks, which was another story. Finally, he had to spend quite a while tracking down the correct valves and things in the basement -- we wanted to be quite sure we were turning off only and precisely what we needed to. All in all, a good trick. :-)
Well, regardless of whether it's an urban
legend or a true story, don't claim that some
Harvard student could've come up with such a
lovely hack. -- The apocryphal or real student
with the black-and-white shirt and the birdseed was from MIT, dammit! =)
Real or fake, it's made its way into the official
MIT campus tours, though they're probably
the worst retelling of the story I've heard...
I haven't seen the paperclip mentioned here. computers like the apple II and the IBM PC come and go, but paperclip technology has remained relatively constant since its invention. the social and technological ramefications of the paperclip are reconfirmed every time i get a piece of media stuck in a drive. God bless those noble lengths of folded wire.
That wasn't a Mazda 'planned' item, from what I know of the situation...basically it's this--
you've got _1_ major moving part. (okay, not counting valves, not counting the 3 little springy bits used to seperate the 3 chambers)
The design simply doesn't have redundancy...
say, with a V-6...you blow a cylinder, there's still 5 more...
With a rotary combustion engine, there's one main part, and if it gets messed up, it either stops, or you lose 2 of the 3 chambers, which makes it functionally useless.
Now, what I'm surprised no one ever did was to make a 'double' engine, off from each other by 60 degrees, which means there'd be 6 power strokes per rotation, rather than 3. (Mind you, a 6-cylinder standard engine gets 3, as it's a 4-stroke)
Naturally, it also doesn't help that they get worse power per gallon, due to it behaving more like a 2-stroke engine, however, they're ideally suited to small cars, as they're signficantly lighter and smaller than other other engines.
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
Hmmmm, seems like over half of the posts I see are still (#1) computer-related and (#2) not necessarily something that has long-lasting social changes or anything the like.
While many of you may scoff, the concept of Instant Replay in television sports has become one of the best-known "hacks" today. Its original purpose long forgotten, it's now used instantaneously on major televised sporting events to criticize every little right and wrong thing in a cretain play.
IIRC, the first ever Instant Replay was used during a televised Army-Navy football game, with the intent to treat viewers simply to a second showing of a touchdown run in case they didn't catch all of it the first time. There was no slow-motion or frame-by-frame analysis -- it was simply a real-time replay of the touchdown run.
However nowadays instant replay is such a part of sports that leagues like the NFL and NHL have had to institute rules involving instant replay. Sports fans at home even get irritated if there isn't an instant replay immediately available of a certain play.
People like John Madden have made entire careers off running an instant replay over and over again and spouting great insight into a play such as "BOOM!" or "That had to hurt!"... and then John Madden begat Matt Millen who begat (*shudder*)...
The ramifications of this don't just end with in-game broadcast coverage though. It spawned and encouraged the concept of TV sports highlight reels (where would ESPN be without THAT?!) and the like. How many times have we all seen the replay of Joe Theisman's career-ending injury (ow), or of Bill Buckner muffing a grab in the World Series to lose it for the Red Sox? Or of Al Michaels screaming "Do you believe in miracles!" at the 1980 Winter Olympics? Without instant replay, those all-time great sports memories wouldn't be anywhere near as burned into our minds as they are now.
The instant replay is such a standard of modern broadcasting that maybe we take it for granted (probably most of you have no idea the organization it takes to put an instant replay on your TV screen seconds after a play is over).
Thus, I believe that Instant Replay is one of the Top Hacks of our time, because for all its positive and negative effects, there's no denying the impact it has had on both sport and broadcast.
-- Primis.
The whole "we're going to shoot your missles out of the air" Star Wars project that helped bring an end to the cold war was one of the greatest hacks of all time. Reagan threw massive amounts of cash at the project and basically hastened the downfall of the soviet union. Even though there was never a working device, the soviets were convinced that there was but were unable to keep up with the breakneck speed of the spending/research. That should rank somewhere on the list.
---
For politics, getting the Feds to fork over Sagan-esque billions for a state project was stunning.
:)
For engineering, building a huge artery through a
live downtown area and, in some places *next to* the existing elevated highway is amazing.
Of course, the hack isn't done yet.
SUCKAZ!
Orson Welles' War of the World radio broadcast.
.02
My
Quux26
My
Quux26
www.crashspace.net
That should have read "War of the Worlds".
.02
My
Quux26
My
Quux26
www.crashspace.net
Didn't a student at Berkeley notice that a whistle sold in Capn Crunch cereal made the same tone as AT&T's access tone. Great hack...but who gets the credit? Capn Crunch or Gen Mills?
2 neat hacks that I bet most of you youngsters won't appreciate. Microsoft - the first version of DOS that was able to address more than 640k memory, I believe through the use of HIMEM.SYS but it was oh so many years ago that I can't really remember how it got started. Then, give credit to all the people that wrote programs to deal with High and Extended Memory. QEMM springs to mind. Of course now it's obsolete, but it fits the definition of a technical hack -- a little patch that's a cool way to solve a problem that nobody else would have thought of. Microsoft again - writing a driver so the little PC speaker could be used to play WAV objects. For those of us who didn't have sound cards back then, this little hack gave us decent sound quality from a speaker that was barely designed to go beep. --dspyder
The SR71 pre-dates most computer hacks, as the SR-71's design predates most computers...
The expansion problems had to be completely handled by slide rules. The Blackbird was 'pre-heated' by a jet engine to get the seams to seal, before filling it with fuel.
Another interesting fact-- by the time the SR71 was in heavy use as a spy plane, computer controls were used to insure the place was in the proper place for the photographs. The human was primarily there to land the plane.
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
This came up at work today, irrelevant of /., and I discovered it hadn't been posted yet. This would be the fingerable coke machine at cmu that would tell you what was left in the coke machine without you even having to get up and check. (It might still be there, I haven't taken the time to look it up...) It's elegant, it's a bit amusing, and it serves a useful purpose, and pretty much by definition had to have required lots of duct-tape style solutions to get the data it needed out of the coke machine.. [Some MIT hacker I am, voting for CMU's coke machine for a top ten list of hacks...]
Is there another plane that matches its performance? And it is 30+ years old.
Surely Tucker produced one of the greatest hacks of all time.
MCSEs are the stunted children of an overbearing parent; they should be pitied, not hated.
Russia AKM machinegun. Most of the terorists worldwide are armed by this weapon.
There was something about that mission that made me feel like it was the 'peoples' mission-that it was somehow outside the 'government'. I guess it's because it work sooo well and was sooo cool. Also the guy who put the image of the Coke bottlecap into a mars landscape pic was pretty funny and got a lot of attention. Although the pic with Bigfoot was good too.
Sig (appended to the end of comments you post, 120 chars)
a quick job that produces what is needed, but not well,
very well indeed.
C++ is obviously a follow-up hack, as described by one of the following definitions of a hack:
An important secondary meaning of hack is `a creative practical joke'
The fact that both are so widely used in spite of the existence of so much better languages just reinforces the point :)
-- As long as the answer is right, who cares if the question is wrong?
Since E.S.Raymond's definition of hack doesn't specifically mention computers, here is a list of hacks in theoretical physics (and perhaps applied math). I cannot compare these to other hacks (say, the wheel or something) in importance, but these do effect my daily life, and probably yours, too.
In no particular order:
- Calculus (by Newton and Leibnetz)
- Faraday's law of induction (relates time changing magnetic fields to an induced electric field, and vica versa)
- Maxwell relating three equations (including Faraday's law (above)), fixing a bug in Ampere's law, adding a simple fourth law and discovering that light is an electro-magnetic wave.
- The Schrodinger equation - part of the basis for quantum mechanics. A wave equation quite similar to the relation Maxwell found for light (however it relates the time derivitive of the wave to the second space derivitive, whereas Maxwell found for light, the second time derivitive relates to the second space derivitive.)
Of course there were many, necessairy, steps between these events, and many great 'hacks' which are far greater intellectual achievements, but which also don't impact daily life outside the physics labs (or do so in a very indirect way - i.e. if gravity was different, the orbits of planets would be unstable, planets wouldn't form, etc.)
A couple of the inventions I would attribute to fairly direct consequences of these works would be the transistor and the (electrical) generator.
At the time of each of these hacks, many people had the opportunity to make them. Today, to do fundamental physics research most of us need expensive equipment, software and years and years of training; so the real, exciting, frontier of physics is closed to most people, which I find sad.
(On a side note, I recomend visiting the Michel Faraday museum in London if you get the chance. You can see the equipment he made and worked with. The surroundings look like a cross between what I would think a blacksmith and a glassblower would use. When I visited in 1994 I was the only person there at the time!)
a war on terrorism? How can we end a war on a method?
OK, the apollo hacks (11 & 13) without a doubt were good. but just to through a spanner in, what about the MIR space station ?. This is nearer to a true hardware hack in that non of the American investment or research was really avalible and now we have seen some of the problems starting to happen (This thing is years past its sell by date) how its been hacked to keep it together is fantastic.
It seems to me that the first electronic switch, the triode, invented by Lee DeForest has to be the greatest hack of all time. After the triode, all of electronics has been incremental improvements.
Any media prank dones by Joey Skaggs (www.joeyskaggs.com I think). Especiall Dog Meat Soup.
Remember, NTSC color is determined by the PHASE SHIFT of the pixel color signal relative to the colorburst reference. To do this by direct synthesis would require a minimum of a 24 MHz clock, and we all know that nothing in the Apple][ ran that fast!
Another way is to use digital gate delays. But these can vary greatly between individual chips and certainly between production runs and vendors. Gate delays also vary with temperature, and possibly the phase of the moon or looking at them cross-eyed.
So, how did the Woz pull it off? The Apple][ color was rock steady, and worked well even through the crummy video modulators of the day. I'd write the answer here, but as Fermat said, there just ain't enough room in the margin. It took me days of staring at the schematic to figure it out.
The Apple][ video timing is a Greah Hack. The color generator is an Insanely Great Hack!
Most people don't realize the difficulty of this. The guys who pulled this off literally could've been thrown in jail if they didn't succeed. And yet it was a more-or-less non destructive hack.
Color me impressed!
- Jeff
the ultimate hack of all time is the recovery of Apollo 13, by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, specifically Ken(?) Mattingly, astronaut.
Considering that they had to remotely instruct the astronauts to assemble a backup air filtration system from scavenged parts, power up a damaged spaceship in exactly the right order so as to use limited battery voltage, burn thrusters at exactly the right angle and duration to reenter the Earth without skidding off the atmosphere into deep space, or burning on reentry, and recovering the astronauts in the middle of the Indian Ocean, this isn't merely a hack, it's legend.
I'm surprised this didn't even get mention on Slashdot.
_____
_____
The antidote to bad speech is not censorship, but more speech.
First multi-player computer game. Spacewar, written at MIT in the 70's by students and played until "real" games began to appear. Two space ships which followed the laws of physics,(unlike modern games which seem to follow the laws of aerodynamics, even when there's no air), including one variation where a planet, star or other gravity source in the center affected your motion and the motion of your missiles. While the graphics were incredibly primitive, in some ways it was far more realistic than many modern games. For years system administrators removed copies while students kept making more. Could really eat up the CPU time. Yeah, yeah, I know, nobody but us old fogies remember it now.
Controlling Fire has to be number one. not only is it a great hack, it's open source!
It wouldn't suprise me if it started as a practical joke.
"hhm grok hate fire, me make fake fire, scare grok hehe"
[paraphrased]
The Coral Castle originally called "Rock Gate Park", was built by one man, working alone. It took him 20 years to build - from 1920 to 1940. His name is Edward Leedskalnin.
Ed was 5 feet tall and weighed 100 pounds. He worked by himself using only handtools. Each section of wall is 8 feet tall, 4 feet wide, 3 foot thick, and weighs approximately 13,000 pounds.
When asked how he was able to move the blocks of coral, Ed would say only that he understood the laws of weight and leverage. This from a man who only had a fourth grade education."
OK, so now Bill Gates is a pathetic tycoon, but once him and Paul Allen were shit hot programers. The fact that they got a BASIC interpreter working on an Altair using only an emulator they wrote themselves is Microsofts greatest hack.
I first met Mel when I went to work for Royal McBee Computer Corp., a now- defunct subsidiary of the typewriter company. The firm manufactured the LGP-30, a small, cheap (by the standards of the day) drum-memory computer, and had just started to manufacture the RPC-4000, a much-improved, bigger, better, faster drum-memory computer. Cores cost too much, and weren't here to stay, anyway. (That's why you haven't heard of the company, or the computer.)
I had been hired to write a Fortran compiler for this new marvel, and Mel was my guide to its wonders. Mel didn't approve of compilers.
"If a program can't rewrite its own code," he asked, "what good is it?"
Mel had written, in hexadecimal, the most popular computer program the company owned. It ran on the LGP-30 and played blackjack with potential customers at computer shows. Its effect was always dramatic. The LGP-30 booth was packed at every show, and the IBM salesmen stood around talking to each other. Whether or not this actually sold computers was a question we never discussed.
Mel's job was to re-write the blackjack program for the RPC-4000. (Port? What does that mean?) The new computer had a one-plus-one addressing scheme, in which each machine instruction, in addition to the operation code and the address of the needed operand, had a second address that indicated where, on the revolving drum, the next instruction was located. In modern parlance, every single instruction was followed by a GO TO! Put *that* in Pascal's pipe and smoke it.
Mel loved the RPC-4000 because he could optimize his code: that is, locate instructions on the drum so that just as one finished its job, the next would be just arriving at the read head and available for immediate execution. There was a program to do that job, an "optimizing assembler," but Mel refused to use it.
"You never know where it's going to put things," he explained, "so you'd have to use separate constants."
It was a long time before I understood that remark. Since Mel knew the numerical value of every operation code, and assigned his own drum addresses, every instruction he wrote could also be considered a numerical constant. He could pick up an earlier "add" instruction, say, and multiply by it, if it had the right numeric value. His code was not easy for someone else to modify.
I compared Mel's hand-optimized programs with the same code massaged by the optimizing assembler program, and Mel's always ran faster. That was because the "top-down" method of program design hadn't been invented yet, and Mel wouldn't have used it anyway. He wrote the innermost parts of his program loops first, so they would get first choice of the optimum address locations on the drum. The optimizing assembler wasn't smart enough to do it that way.
Mel never wrote time-delay loops, either, even when the balky Flexowriter required a delay between output characters to work right. He just located instructions on the drum so each successive one was just *past* the read head when it was needed; the drum had to execute another complete revolution to find the next instruction. He coined an unforgettable term for this procedure. Although "optimum" is an absolute term, like "unique," it became common verbal practice to make it relative: "not quite optimum" or "less optimum" or "not very optimum." Mell called the maximum time-delay locations the "most pessimum."
After he finished the blackjack program and got it to run, ("Even the initializer is optimized," he said proudly) he got a Change Request from the sales department. The program used an elegant (optimized) random number generator to shuffle the "cards" and deal from the "deck," and some of the salesmen felt it was too fair, since sometimes the customers lost. They wanted Mel to modify the program so, at the setting of a sense switch on the console, they could change the odds and let the customer win.
Mel balked. He felt this was patently dishonest, which it was, and that it impinged on his personal integrity as a programmer, which it did, so he refused to do it. The Head Salesman talked to Mel, as did the Big Boss and, at the boss's urging, a few Fellow Programmers. Mel finally gave in and wrote the code, but he got the test backwards, and when the sense switch was turned on, the program would cheat, winning every time. Mel was delighted with this, claiming his subconscious was uncontrollably ethical, and adamantly refused to fix it.
After Mel had left the company for greener pastures, the Big Boss asked me to look at the code and see if I could find the test and reverse it. Somewhat reluctantly, I agreed to look. Tracking Mel's code was a real adventure.
I have often felt that programming is an art form, whose real value can only be appreciated by another versed in the same arcane art; there are lovely gems and brilliant coups hidden from human view and admiration, sometimes forever, by the very nature of the process. You can learn a lot about an individual just by reading through his code, even in hexadecimal. Mel was, I think, an unsung genius.
Perhaps my greatest shock came when I found an innocent loop that had no test in it. No test. *None*. Common sense said it had to be a closed loop, where the program would circle, forever, endlessly. Program control passed right through it, however, and safely out the other side. It took me two weeks to figure it out.
The RPC-4000 computer had a really modern facility called an index register. It allowed the programmer to write a program loop that used an indexed instruction inside; each time through, the number in the index register was added to the address of that instruction, so it would refer to the next datum in a series. He had only to increment the index register each time through. Mel never used it.
Instead, he would pull the instruction into a machine register, add one to its address, and store it back. He would then execute the modified instruction right from the register. The loop was written so this additional execution time was taken into account -- just as this instruction finished, the next one was right under the drum's read head, ready to go. But the loop had no test in it.
The vital clue came when I noticed the index register bit, that bit that lay between the address and the operation code in the instruction word, was turned on -- yet Mel never used the index register, leaving it zero all the time. When the light went on it nearly blinded me.
He had located the data he was working on near the top of memory -- the largest locations the instructions could address -- so after the last datum was handled, incrementing the instruction address would make it overflow. The carry would add one to the operation code, changing it to the next one in the instruction set: a jump instruction. Sure enough, the next program instruction was in address location zero, and the program went happily on its way.
I haven't kept in touch with Mel, so I don't know if he ever gave in to the flood of change that has washed over programming techniques since those long- gone days. I like to think he didn't. In any event, I was impressed enough that I quit looking for the offending test, telling the Big Boss that I couldn't find it. He didn't seem surprised.
When I left the company, the blackjack program would still cheat if you turned on the right sense switch, and I think that's how it should be. I didn't feel comfortable hacking up the code of a Real Programmer.
I'm not remembering who owned the satellite, but a company paid to have a commercial satellite put into orbit. There was a mistake, and it ended up written off as a loss. It was in an essentially stable orbit, but the orbit it was in was useless. They took their insurance settlement, and now Lloyd's owned a satellite. Someone at NASA, with a bit of spare time, started playing with figures. They took the figures up the chain until they finally asked Lloyds if they could try something. They used some of the remaining fuel in the satellite's thrusters to knock it into orbit around the moon. As it hit apogee, they fired again, and brought it back into Earth's orbit, with a better margin of error and more fuel remaining than had originally been planned.
(I've heard this one a number of times. If someone has an URL with more info I'd appreciate it, since I'm pretty sure I'm not getting all the details).
If I remember correctly, the sampling rate of the CD-Rom spec was somewhat arbitrarily determined. When engineers built the first ones, they were able to create digital video, audio annotation on videodisk and some other correction schemes because of some coincidences. (this is where i'm kinda fuzzy, but i do remember that much was made of this) Much of the digital music & video industry as we now know it owes its existence to the longevity of this hack.
I remember getting the "We Are Under Attack" posting when the worm started flooding the world.
The worm itself was mostly script-kiddy work - the interesting question was whether RTM expected the exponential growth to happen (in which case it was an interesting experimental hack) or whether he should have realized it would do that but didn't.
One of the teams working to stop the worm put up a patch for the various bugs in the worm. They weren't going to post the real worm code, in case anybody else wanted to restart it or modify it, but a bug fix was still worthwhile and indicated that they understood the worm better than RTM himself did.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
I think the grandaddy of all hacks must be awarded to BBN, the little think tank in Cambridge, MA. BBN invented TCP/IP, and, in 1969, built the very first Darpa-net using this protocol. All the other hacks: GNU, BSD, Linux, Apache, Bind, Perl, and so on, needed this primordial soup called the internet to thrive and develop.
See
http://www.isoc.org/internet/history/brief.html
for a brief history of BBN's role in building the first internet.
Is that C|Net appears to be serious. Both in the way they display their content and the way it is written. If the article "The Top 10 Technology Terrors" were named something along the lines of "Ten Technologies That Can Be Used Against You" it would not draw nearly as much flak.
The proplem many computer experts have with the likes of C|Net, Ziff-Davis, CMP, etc. is that they claim to be Really Smart Computer Experts, but write as if they just figured out that "hehe, linux is cool. hehe. snort." instead of "netBSD benefits from excellent network effeciency and speed because of a well developed networking subsystem."
-----
Do you even know anything about perl? -- AC Replying to Tom Christiansen post.
"The hackers wrote of their own "rooting" exploits
So does that mean that the hackers worked at M and Windholes is that way for a reason?
ps. this is an attempt at humor, not troll. humor. laugh.
-----
Do you even know anything about perl? -- AC Replying to Tom Christiansen post.
I would also vote for TeX... I have been using it for 10 or more years now, suggested it to a lot of (satisfied) fellow students and co-workers, ranging from computer experts to novices (saw thousands and thousands of pages being written on it), and never saw buggy behaviour (except in an old commercial DVI driver for HP LaserJets, solved by downloading the free emTeX implementation back then). No other program has been with me since IBM PC XTs and VMS machines until present-day machines with Linux and other Unix variants, since 9-pin dot matrix printers to high-resolution color devices. I still remember my amazement when I first looked at math written with TeX and printed on a 9-pin printer, when I was struggling to write some texts including very simple math on Wordstar (using classical typewriter tactics, of course). When one starts looking at the source, one notices it is more than a wonderful hack: it is truly a piece of fine art, revealing very brilliant, dedicated and educated minds (Donald Knuth and collaborators) behind it. It a pity that, even in academic environments, lots of people are still ignorant about TeX and come out of their offices frustrated about the latest MS Word crash or incompatibility. And The Texbook is a beautiful work (even if takes time to be fully appreciated), as one would expect from the scholarly source of the "Art" volumes.
This was a fine legacy to the mankind, one of the best examples of free software and of GOOD, almost impossibly good software. As a friend of mine quotes, near a link to Don Knuth's home page:
("put off thy shoes from off thy feet, for the place whereon thou standest is holy ground").Woz and blue box count? As long as the media wants true telco stuff the public can digest I think it should.
The "good times" virus hoax that went around and was recycled multiple times is a good example of a hack (prank) that will live on indefinately. It was the most overused, out of proportion social engineering project to have abused lusers.
I'd have to agree with you, those UofT engineers are a bunch of lousy do-no-gooders.
STFU about slashdot bias.
A cabbie from Chicago, no less. They just tacked an artificial rhinocerous onto the front of the tank, and it could just force its way through the Norman hedgerows, which is pretty impressive. I mean, a 6 foot tallpile of dirt with big hedges/trees/shrubs (old green stuff with lots of deep roots) doesn't just fall over...
I second that, though. Fab-oo hack, esp since it was so needed. They hadn't figured that the norman hedgerows would be any different from the little ones that English fox hunters jump over, so they had nothing with which to break them down. Other methods were developed for dealign with the hedgerows, like big piles of TNT, but nothing so elegant as the Rhinos.
Why hasn't anyone even touched on this great hack yet?
If you follow this definition:
"Hacking might be characterized as `an appropriate application of ingenuity'. Whether the result is a quick-and-dirty patchwork job or a carefully crafted work of art, you have to admire the cleverness that went into it."
What better event would fit this definition of a hack than the hacking of the atom by Albert Einstein? It's an application of ingenuity, is a carefully crafted work of art (both the atom and Albert Einstein's equations), and who can't admire Einstein's ability to conquer the atom?
Following john_gault's meaning, it fits many aspects of his description:
A hack is often performed under a time crunch
With Hitler on his toes and countries hearing that they could make a bomb that would leave other countries to beg for mercy, he was certainly put under pressure to research as much as possible.
The job makes you incredibly proud of something that is often horribly ugly, and that the majority of other people view as something akin to magic (have no concept of how such job could possibly have been done or what was involved).
Before the 1900s, there was very little knowledge of what the atom was, and most people refused to listen to scientists saying that something existed that the human eye couldn't see, but was there. If it wasn't for Einstein, no one would have been able to realize the full power they could harness with the atom.
But all the components of the Mac you mentioned were developed at Xerox PARC during the 70s. The Mac may have been an innovative *product* but none of the technologies you mention were. Ethernet, Bitmapped Screens, Laser Printers, Personal Computers (in the modern sense) among other things all came out of PARC. Even then it was the development of other's work (Ivan Sutherland, Doug Englebart pre Xerox)...
"don't fall into the fallacy of believing that Perl can solve social problems. Maybe Perl 6 can, but that's a ways off"
hats off to all the overclockers and the companies that help the hobby (Abit especially). Dual Celerons is a wonderful hack. Kryotech also should get a mention for going the full monty and selling (not just making) the first 1ghz system by putting a refridgerator into a computer to make them go faster (a true hack if I ever saw one)
Most of the terorists worldwide are armed by this weapon.
Incorrect. Most of the terrorists world wide are armed with nothing more than rocks, bottles filled with gasoline, and the occasional home-made bomb.
Speaking of which, the bottle filled with gasoline, also known as the 'Molotov Cocktail' is itself a clever hack, being originally invented by the Finns as an anti-tank weapon used to great effect against Russian tanks during the Winter War.
Think about when and what this little machine did.
At the University of New South Wales, there is a yearly event to celbrate Foundation Day. Examples of what occurs include Ring police, tell police a group of uni students dressed as council workers are blocking one of sydneys major roads. Ring council workers working on one of sydneys major roads and inform that a group of uni students dressed as police will be coming to make them stop work. Project a Pr0n movie onto the side of a building outside the movie theaters of sydney. Fake a ufo landing on Bondi Beach. Inform residents of plans to have their houses acquired by the government, come within a hairs bredth of getting a federal minister sacked. Other incidents which warrent mention are 'that guy' whose name I can't remember who claimed responsibilty for all those crop circles!! Even if he didn't do it, it was damn cool!!
Definitely has my vote. It's a basic legend - half the stories about hacking begin with 2600.
fault-tolerant
- The story of Mel, a Real Programmer.
- The Voyager space probe.
- The Internet Worm.
- Public Key Encryption.
- PERL.
- The login hack.
- The Internet
:-)
Some of these have already been mentioned. Some, like Apollo 13 or Bletchley Park, I'm not going to repeat. Some others, like the transistor and the MP3, aren't really a 'hack' even though they've made a bit impact. And go the revolving statues!Here's a person who was programming in bubble memory, with every instruction having an implicit jump to somewhere else, and his loop apparently doesn't terminate - but it does...
Rather than include a prewired processor, they used a generic microprocessor and included the ability to upload new software versions. In the time that the probe was flying out to Jupiter, they took the black and white image from the main camera, doubled its resolution and made it three colour. They had a hundred spare bytes of RAM at one point, and they wrote a simple object recognition algorithm that would take pictures of interesting things.
Ethical? Maybe not. Nice? Big no there. Clever? It had at least four methods of invading a system, and its only flaw was that the code that was supposed to limit its distribution didn't work. Great power-to-size ratio.
I know it's not exactly a computer hack, but it's revolutionised the process of security and encryption. And the new matrix and polynomial curve methods that are in development will only further the ultimate end of privacy and authenticity in the digital domain.
The sheer scope of the hackery you can achieve in Perl defies description. A language where you can write entire programs without variables? Which can almost be written without use of alphabetic characters entirely? Which has singlehandedly shaped the dynamic content of the WWW? What else but PERL!
I forget who perpetrated this, but his username/password combination would work on most UNIX systems up until around 1985 or so. The login program had extra code included to allow his username/password. To avoid that being hoed out, the C compiler had code to check if it was compiling the login program, and would include the code as necessary. To stop that being compiled out, the C compiler would check to see if it was compiling itself, and would include the code to modify itself, and the login program, if necessary. Ergo, it was impossible to remove without someone remaking a C compiler from scratch...
I know, it's very generic. But from a Military/University project, we now have the global, public, accessible network with open standards (most of the time). Every other attempt at this has failed; the one that succeeds is one not owned by some big telecommunications carrier, or, in fact, anyone
--Reason is a tool. Try to remember where you left it.--
one of my favorites hacks was "Stash" and Jizz, :)
from The Black Lotus (TBL) , please, download it and
see what you can do in 64K (paper is also very good
btw: i want, ehhrm,no, i _need_ to see a new category in slashdot,
DemoScene, and demoscene related news.
Dr. Tommy Flowers, the inventor of Colossus, did work for the Post Office, but in the Research Laboratory. This was the equivalent of working at AT&T's Bell Labs.
This does not make Colossus any less impressive, but saying that Dr. Flowers was _just_ a post office employee is like saying Einstein was _just_ a patent clerk.
--
"L'IT c'est moi!"
When I inserted a 3dfx voodoo graphics PCI card into my K6-2 based computer, the keyboard stopped working. I tried booting up both with and without the 3d card plugged in, and it really seemed this new card was the reason for keyboard malfunction.
I then somehow got a crazy idea that perhaps the metal edge of this expansion card was interfering with the motherboard in some obscure way.
The fix: I put some duct tape along the metal edge of the card to "isolate" it from the rest of the computer, and you wouldn't believe it, everything worked!
-- close but no sig
Tying together such disparate protocols as fidonet, smtp and uucp at the time was a great hack -- raw power. UUCP for such slow dial-up connections actually inciting a community via usenet and email and creating the whole idea of peer support for operating systems (Unix). Way ahead of its time.
When the US was building the first Atomic bomb during WWII they had to build a city to build the bomb in. In less than a year they built the second largest city in the state, and did it under some of the heaveist security restrictions known. At the same time they were building the city they had to develop a new technology that was litterally scince fiction a couple of years earlier, and build it into the three plants that separated the U-235 from the U-238. Less than three years after the project started the first Atomic bomb was used. Regardless of what you think of the product, Oakridge was one of the greatest hacks of all time.
Quemadmodum gladius neminem occidit, occidentis telum est
He won the 1996 IgNobel Chemistry award for this one: he lit a campfire grill with liquid oxygen.
I think this definitely qualifies. Original, clever, and it involves large fireballs.
"Anything will burn if you soak it in Liquid Oxygen."
The Telestrator (although only Madden seems to be able to use it well)
The yellow first down line.
--
"L'IT c'est moi!"
patch lubricated the whole process of distributed open source software development.
rn opened up Usenet news to the average Unix user. And everything else arose from the primordial soup of Usenet news.
I know most of you are anti-Microsoft, anti-Bill Gates, etc. But Bill G. and Paul Allen did have some good hacks in their day. For starters, getting IBM to sign on by telling them MS had an OS (when in fact, they didn't) and then turning around and buying DOS for $50K and subsequently turning that into a multi-billion company wasn't a half-bad hack. Of course, my favorite MS related hack is how Bill and Paul Allen wrote BASIC for the Altaire using only an emulator (that they had coded from the tech manual with no access to the hardware) and then selling it. According to lore, when Paul Allen was on the plane to New Mexico to demo the new Microsoft BASIC on the Altaire, he realized that since they'd never actually used an Altaire they had never written the tape-loader code to actually load the BASIC tape onto the machine. He wrote that on the plane and when he programmed it in on the actual machine, it worked! The rest, as they say, is history.
How about the Eliza algorithm?
It was written more than 30 years ago, but it's still well-known. It "passes" the Turing test, inasmuch as naive users are often fooled by it... at least for a period of time.
Although many programs have been written which attempt to do something similar, none of them are as small and elegant as Eliza.
It was certainly no AI breakthrough -- it was just a nice little hack. :)
2+2=5 for moderately large values of 2. :o)
Animal ethologists long ago worked out how to train birds to attack specific objects. It is really simple. You take a room, put a bird on one side, and a bunch more on the other. In the first side you put something that the bird will attack (say a sleeping owl) and on the other you put something innocuous (say a brand of detergent). The bird attacks, calling out, the others hear the first bird, come to the conclusion that it is the innocuous object and voila! They are trained!
I periodically think that someone should train starlings to attack the waving flags you see on fancy limos, and turn a flock of them loose on an important parade...
:-)
Cheers,
Ben
My usual seat in the cluetrain is at A HREF="http://pub4.ezboard.com/biwethey.ht
One of the greatest achievements was Alan Turing's Universal Turing Machine. With out this there probably would be no computer. This is one of the greatest hacks of all time
Linus and Linux is surely a great hack to the Unix society. It brings Commercial Unix to us!
Interesting. I think Sputnik would be a better
.02.
candidate for a 'great hack' - it gave the impetus
for the Apollo effort.
Just my
Probably not much appreciated outside of Australia, but I'd nominate the Blue Sky Industries version of e, grep, roff, sort which ran on CP/M on a Z-80. The programs behaved like their namesakes because we missed *nix after we left Uni, and couldn't afford the real thing. That was around 1979.
Since we've gone beyond computers, I'd have to say the greatest hack of all time is life as we know it. Think of the sheer mind boggling number of things that must have happened at the same time and in exactly the right way for life to first develop from a few amino acids. Too nobody was around to document it!
1) The last-minute refit of the Lunar Lander to provide gold-foil rad shielding and those big goofy looking feet (the latter in response to ACClarke's "Fall of Moondust").
2) CIDR. Prevented total Internet meltdown at almost the last possible second, although it could not be thoroughly tested before deployment because the Internet cannot really be simulated (it's too big, obviously).
3) The Berkeley Internet Name Daemon. I mean, they really didn't design it the way it ended up working - "hints" anyone? BIND arrived barely in time as the old "daily NIC download" system was collapsing under its own weight.
4) Porsche's trailing arm torsion bar suspension. A unique solution to an old problem - Porsche actually made fundamental advances in automotive design, metallurgy, and mechanical engineering simultaneously. All high-performance cars and most tanks use the trailing arm today.
5) Telsa's universal brushless AC motor. Revolutionized the fledgling electrical industry and earned the undying hatred of Edison.
6) The Subroc missile - a modern sub-fired rocket that fires out of the same tubes as a WW2-style Mk48 torpedo.
7) Ethernet. Obviously.
8) The Vauban star fort. Look it up.
9) LPD/LPR printing. A hideous gnarly hack that has become the basis of many a networked print system. Thank god for Red Hat's printtool.
10) Christmas. Kill a tree for Jesus, hang a pickle on it, anything but attend that pagan Saturnalia feast where people might get naked.
--Charlie
"Okudagrams" (look it up if not a Star Trek:TNG fan)
PC-DOS/MS-DOS (think about it, particularly history and how Bill Gates made himself a billionaire with it)
My journal has hot
That's much more than I knew about it, indeed, but I will say it was my understanding that it was the ships' rigging and sails that were ignited, fire then spreading to the deck.
If true, though, it has the crucial hack elements of ingenuity, dire necessity, and success.
If Archimedes and fire are all that's in first sources, perhaps Greek fire was the tool. I know even less about that except that it was waterproof and burned.
Tech Model Railroad Club. (MIT). It's *still* chugging.
mindslip
Over 600 comments, and no one seems to have remembered this one...
Picture this: Edison was a world famous inventor. But his style of inventing was very organised: Get an idea for a -profitable- invention, something with obvious market potential, then keep trying things until he found something that worked. His famous claim about "1% inspiration and 99% persperation" was right on the money as far as he was concerned. It was known that he had spend years searching for the right filiment for his lightbulb.
But profit was his driving force. He never invented -anything- unless he knew before he started how to make money from it. Except once...
Edison was sitting in his lab, working on improvements to a stock ticker repeater, when he noticed that a stylus on the repeater was making recognisable sounds as the repeating disc spun around.
So he picked up some paper, sketched a simple mechanism, and gave it to his chief machinist to build. Then continued work on the repeater.
The machine comes back, Edison adds a sheet of tinfoil, turns a crank, and shouts into it. On the second sheet of tinfoil (the first ripped before it could be played back), he had recorded the first recording of a human voice.
The phonograph qualifies as a great hack, IMHO, because:
1. It is simple.
2. It has had a great impact, well remembered after the incident.
3. It was the result of clever, innovative thinking, on the spur of the moment, rather than a long planned research project.
4. It was done for the pleasure of doing it, rather than for a profit motive.
3 and 4 are especially significant because it was done by someone who was known for exactly the opposite.
Just myt thoughts.
http://dlitzpower.tripod.com/pokebsod/
A little blatent self-promotion never hurt anyone.
--------
"I already have all the latest software."
To remember Apollo 13? Or have you forgotten. Limited supplies, limited time, life or death. Now that was a great hack.
> about a "Hack" being computer-related.
> Adding to the ideas defined above, an
> "All-Time Great Hack" will probably also have:
- longevity - people should still be talking about it 20 or 30 years later, or even beyond.
- social and/or technological impact - it should change some aspect of life, either bydirectly changing every-day life or indirectly by changing how people view the world.
- "eleganc e" - note however, that this does not necessarily equate simplicty.
Well, it's very simple. Orson Welles' WAR OF THE WORLDS radio skit meets those definitions of a hack:-- ----------------------------------------------
Vive le logiciel... Libre!!!
Woo hoo! 627th post!
But seriously, starting with Guido d'Arezzo in the 6th century (he's responsible for the do-re-mi-... solfege syllables) and continuing on through the early polyphonists and theorists, through the era of the masters -- Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms -- and culminating with the modern and post-modern work of Debussy, Stravinsky, Schoenberg, Ives, Cage, Riley, Glass...
Whew. Long sentence. But my point is there are hacks everywhere: Bach's eponymous fugue in Die Kunst Der Fuge (B was Bb, H was B natural back then), Schoenberg's twelve-tone system, Riley's use of aleatory elements, Cage's silence.
And starting with Edison and Bell, the recording industry is Hackarama. Leo Fender (the "log", the original electric guitar), Les Paul (multitracking on lacquer disk fer chrissake), Bob Moog, Rupert Neve, producers like George Martin and Todd Rundgren. Pushing the envelope.
Anyone know the story behind Ampex? IIRC it was started by G.I.s who brought captured German acetate recording tech back to the States after WWII, displacing domestic wire recorders. Built the first videotape recorders in the late '50s.
I still use Ampex tape (456 and 499).
k.
"In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart." - Anne Frank
It was mentioned in the article above... the cc hack... I was just reading through it now...
The actual bug I planted in the compiler would match code in the UNIX "login" command. The replacement code would miscompile the login command so that it would accept either the intended encrypted password or a particular known password. Thus if this code were installed in binary and the binary were used to compile the login command, I could log into that system as any user.
Communication of the ACM, Vol. 27, No. 8, August 1984, pp. 761-763. Copyright © 1984, Association for Computing Machinery
Reflections on Trusting Trust
Ken Thompson
http://www.acm.org/classics/sep95/
peterrenshaw ~ Another Scrappy Startup
To illustrate:
Kmart (and I always did this on the SX-64 on display):
10 print "kmart sucks! ";
20 goto 10
if you were an efficient basic coder, you typed:
10 ?"kmart sucks! ";
20 gO 10
Or how about the TS-1000's command per key feature... too many damn diffrent cursors in the end...
Note: posting here since not allowed to start a new thread! Jay Miner's AMIGA and its Custom Chip Set (back in 1985!!!) was probably one of the most beautiful pieces of hardware engineering/hacking ever done. Even today the original 1985 Amiga can do tricks that no graphics card or hardware on any machine can do (could you believe you can _trully_ mix different hardware screen resolutions on the same physical monitor screen?). Back in the days of Mac and IBM PC monocrome graphics and beeps, the Amiga offered 4096 colors and 4-channel high-quality stereo sound (up to 8 channels in software). For free they also gave you an NTSC/PAL video output with true overscan support for even higher resolutions than the standard ones. It also came (remember, 1985) with a fully 32-bit preemptive multitasking operating system, and two users interfaces (a UNIX-Shell-type command line interface, and a graphical interface like Windows/Mac/Motif). Also (1985) it had an "AutoConfig" architecture built-in into the hardware and the OS. This meant that you did practically nothing to install hardware and software, as everything was auto-recognized, installed, and configured by itself. This is the way Microsoft's Plug-and-Play was supposed to work more than 10 years later and still doesn't as we all who have a windows machine know. BTW, and you can ask any former Amiga owner about the veracity of this, with an Amiga with 1 MB of RAM (memory could be expanded to 16MB in the early models, and to 4 GB in the later ones), you could run simultanesouly a great paint program (Deluxe Paint), any of the amazing music "MOD" players, the scripting shell, the notepad, dozens of copies of the clock applet, read or write a large file to the floppy drive (just to see things moving), and NOTHING would slow down!!!!!!! (mostly because of the parallel chip architecture of the custom chip sets) AND all fit into memory efficiently!!! I have to admit the Wintel monopoly made me buy a PC many years ago, but still I have not used any Wintel PC which FEELS as fast as that machine was (I'm using a PII 450 Win98 128MB RAM machine now). For more info, go to http://www.amiga.com, and search the web for UAE (the Universal Amiga Emulator), and grab a copy of the best demo you've ever seen on a computer screen, Spaceball's "State Of The Art" (also known as SOTA in some places), you might have to tweak it a little bit to make it run at full-speed on a powerfull pentium system.
The wheel
Slickest little basic program ever. Re-Align floppy drives that got out of alingment from constant knocking (1541's that couldn't find a track would slam their head back in the other direction)... the program just knocked the drive head the other way a little... used sparingly, about once every three months, and your drives stayed good as new!
What about ARPANet? This started as a telephone connection between two DEC PDP's and eventually evolved into what we're communicating with right now.
Then, of course, there's the tons of hacks that were put together so normal people could use it, like sendmail, BIND, etc...
The IBM PC probably qualifies as a top hack, as well, seeing as it was just thrown together to compete with Apple, yet people are still using them (and their descendants) to this day.
Hm... Also keep in mind Thomas Edison, one of the great hackers of all time, and his ideas of electric light and recorded sound, both of which were truly simple ideas (just about anyone can build a wax phonograph or a light bulb, given the right materials). Yet, both ideas created entire industries around them and changed the world as we know it. Notice, I didn't credit him with the motion picture, but that one probably qualifies as well.
Also, in the tradition of Menlo Park, Xerox PARC came up with some hacks of their own, including the desktop computer before it existed in the real world, ethernet, word processing, object-oriented programming, GUI/mouse computing, and the laser printer -- the one thing Xerox actually liked.
Of course there's countless others that are too numerous to list, but changed the course of history.
Medeival monks invented mechanical clocks to get them up on time for their morning prayers, and our time has been divided up into tiny units ever since.
The Wright brothers threw together some wood and fabric and made a contraption that took them off the ground for 12 seconds. Since then, the world has been constantly shrinking.
I'm a big music buff, so I think the Minimoog synthesizer qualifies as a top hack, since it made electronic music portable and affordable, and for the first time available at musical instrument shops, where actual musicians went.
Anyway, those are just a few suggestions for the list...
+++
NO CARRIER
I think transporting boats through continental land is already a good hack. Now if this way of transporting boats saves you the time to travel all around South América then it's a big hack.
--
They work in such a similar way to real life viruses that they deserve the right to be called a big hack
--
You're e-mail address is at woz.org! You're Woz, trying to get us all to give you props (bastard).
As some of you may know, Quake3 is going to be in the stores in the first two weeks of December. Q3Arena is going to be outfitted with a piracy protection scheme that involves authentication on Id's server(s). Basically, everyone who plays Q3 over a TCP/IP connection (even LAN games that use TCP/IP protocol), will have to have their key authenticated everytime they wish to play. This is a powerful tool that is going to be used by Id to maximize CD sales. However, it also creates a vulnerability -- shut down Id's authentication server(s) and you shut down every Internet game of Quake3. You even shut down all LAN games of Q3 unless players use IPX protocol. There is a rumor that some "baddies" view this hack/crack as quite a prize. One thing is for sure, if someone successfully completes this hack/crack, there will be hundreds of thousands of very frustrated gamers. And, on a more ideological note, such an attack would probably kill this sort of "piracy protection".
Ok, so maybe the score wasn't exactly that, but there was the "hack" (for some reason we just call them pranks here) when some Caltech students took control of the scoreboard during the Rose Bowl (since the Rose Bowl is just down the street) and altered it to display the score
:)
Caltech: 99
MIT: 16
or something like that.
Then there's the time that wonderful HOLLYWOOD sign on the hill was altered, using black plastic and duct tape, to say CALTECH.
Note that when UCLA students attempted to do the same thing to the HOLLYWOOD sign, they go in deep trouble. Everyone thought the Caltech students were brilliant and funny though.
What was nice about it is that, very often, the wrecking train that was sent to clear up the mess also had it's own Casey Jonesdevices...
And there was also a clever railroad mine which was detonated when the engine smokestack hit a cord strung some 4 meters high between tree branches. Mine clearing crews were so busy looking down at the tracks that they simply did not think of looking up...
-- ----------------------------------------------
Vive le logiciel... Libre!!!
This could be a really fun top 10.. antihacks like ms win 1.0
or
The guy who hacked a big unix server, put rc5 on it making it send the packages registered in his e-mail (duh)
of course he was caugth. When a server runs @ 100% cpu usage all time the sysadmin is bound to notice..and he set the prog up whit his own email..an otherwize neat hack gone wrong.
I hope I'm not repeating.. from what I see. no one has mentioned the all time great hack by Samuel Morse.
He hacked electricity by being the first person to send a message through a wire of course.
Morse wouldn't know a computer if you dropped one on him, but he would recognize the logic of ASCII... seeing as it is a descendant of his Morse Code.
He was the first person to send data using a series of timed on-and-off pulses of electricity. Exactly how we do today, only at a much faster rate.
We owe everything to Morse. Including a spot in the top ten.
You have paid for a total of 0 pages and so far 0 have been used up (0 today).
Ah! Good old Second Reality, I watched it till every frame was burnt into my screen, I ripped the S3Ms out and burnt them on CD-DA to listen in the car, I downloaded the 14ndreal.zip (SQRT(2) reality) parody and the C64 version (real great one!) If there's one demo I really love, then it's Second Reality!
... Never got it to run :(
;)
Amnesia was something different: I worked for hours fiddling with my memory config, rebooting, starting Amnesia, crash, reboot, change memory config,
But now for the real thing: the demo scene is just way cool, too bad it seems to be disappearing these days. Now I can't really say that I'm oldschool (my first computer was only a 286 and I never had a non-emulated C64) nor can I say that I belong to the demo scene (I'm way too dumb to code in ASM) but I can say that I'm a real fan of those guys who are. You have made these machines do things even their creators never imagined.
Anyway, I really hope that demos will live on because if they won't I'm gonna miss them.
Enough whining now, leave this message and go read something interesting
Just wanted to excuse myself for making you lose a moderation point but when I read this: 'pb Reply rather than vaguely moderate me.' I just had to reply and my 'interesting' moderation point got undone
;)
Have a nice day nevertheless
...with which a radar station in Australia knowns more about traffic at LAX than the Los Angeles control tower itself does. The Chinese followup to Jindalee featured a live track at the opening demo session which (although nobody there said as much) just happened to include a US "stealth" aircraft flying over North China. For less technical hacks I like the bloke from CalTech who went down to a nearby sportsground every day for months, wearing a white coat, to blow a whistle and throw bread to the birds. Guess what happened when the football season opened and the umpire came out to start the first game? (-:
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
This is for real, it really happened. There was a guy by the name of Theodore Taylor who designed nukes for the US government. Well, one day they were going to fire off one for testing, and he happened to notice a parabolic reflector nearby. So he propped it up facing Ground Zero and bent a piece of wire to hold a Pall Mall at the focal point. A few minutes later the bomb goes off, the sun comes down to earth, scientists watch the mushroom cloud rising, and Taylor reaches over, plucks the cigarette from the wire, and takes a puff... Chris
- Planck's black body radiative formula (come up with quantum mechanics in a week);
- Galileo dropping weights from the tower of Pisa;
- Gnu emacs.
Cheers, alfI think that a good example of a Hack is what the one guy did to be able to play Quake on an ascii terminal! Sorry I don't remember the link.
if anything goes wrong, divert it to /dev/null /dev/null anyway
if it doesn't, divert it to
Imagine trying to sell a computer today that didn't have lowercase!
;)
They do. It's called WebTV
-- Gxis! Ed.
Not yet mentioned -- originally programmed to serve as an 8" disc controller, with ideas borrowed from DEC's RT-11 operating system. Minimalist, functional in only a few kilobytes, ubiquitous in the intel/zilog 8-bit world, and heavily influential (to the point of plagarism) in the development of MS-DOS. One of the most useful and coherent pieces of software ever written for microprocessors.
I remember seeing on a TV program called "Revenge of the Nerds" (UK Channel 4) a few years ago, one of the first 'computers' that had no screen or keyboard. It was essentially a box with switches and lights on the front. It could be programed by flicking the switches and would respond with combinations of lights. Somebody giving a lecture on one of these thigs wrote a program (which tood a few hours to input) which when run would play the music of "Greensleeves" as interferance on an AM radio near by. -- Genius, using the timings of loops to play a song by interferance.
Die? Thats the last thing I intend to do!
This is one I remember happening when I was much younger (probably late 70s or early 80s). The BBC has it's main offices at the BBC Television Centre in West London. The building is a huge affair (7 storeys or so) based around a circular courtyard which is approximately 100 yards in diameter. In the centre of this courtyard is a statue on a very large column (think Nelsons Column), which is almost as tall as the television centre itself.
Anyway, one morning the staff arrived at work to find a dustbin placed on the statue, and nobody knew how it got there.
I remember the childrens programme Blue Peter devoting a significant portion of one of its shows trying (and succeeding) to work out how it was done.
I'm not sure if they ever found out who it was. Could anyone shed any light on this?
Find funky gifts
They also used Basque, and other Indian languages. It was something like Monday Navajo, Tuesday Basque,...
Isn't it?
--
__
Men with no respect for life must never be allowed to control the ultimate instruments of death.
GW Bu
FLying, powered flight, wright brothers the printing press charles babbages puter the compass eltricirty, or the actual use of
Future Crew went above and beyond anything that was around at that time. Was it way back in 1993? I remember the first time I watched it on 486, then on a pentium... I almost went out and got a Gravis Ultrasound to replace my SB16, because FC recommended the Gravis. :) Those were the days when MUCH was done with VERY little. I wonder if it will run on my machine now...
I believe it was Skaven, one of the authors of FC's Second Reality, that went on to release Catch that Goblin, a VERY well done s3m.
It has been ages since I last went out demo searching, and I am very sorry to see the demise of hornet. Anyone happen to know where Future Crew's page is now? I believe they disbanded, but kept their presence on the 'net somewhere...
But the guy who figured out the difference betweem a 720k disk and a 1.44 disk was the hole in the upper left hand should be giving SOMETHING. I know it saved me a budle when the differnce between the two was $5.
Thanks Guy!
bortbox
absolutely unordered:
Christof
The Standard Model (SM) of particle physics in it's most simple form (without supersymmetry or strings) was formulated in the early sixties. The model alone was a substantial Hack unifying several ideas and theories that were around at the time and it has stood undisputed for decades.
For those who haven't studied particle physics let me explain a bit. A theory in particle physics means that you define three things: The particles that are fundamental, the way they interact and the symmetries under which everything stays unchanged. The SM does all this very simply but it has a problem: none of the particles you define can have masses if you want to preserve the symmetries. This is (was) a big problem since it was known that certain symmetries existed and the existence of mass was even more evident (just drop an apple on someones head).
The way the masses are given to the particles is to introcuce a new particle, the Higgs, which when it interacts with a particle gives it mass. This is dirty patchwork at it's best. Most particle physicists will agree that the Higgs is a pain in the a..e, it introduces a totally new _type_ of particles to the theory, it's mass is not predictable and it hasn't been found yet and perhaps will never be found. But it makes the whole theory work like an angel.
One of the biggest hacks of all time was using an Air Force computer to house the Dead of Night chat system back in 1989. Remeber that? Probably not, because all you punk ass kids were sucking on mom's teets.
This bullshit about a hack having to do with swift programming ability, well.. sure... but that's not what the colloquailism is and you all need to get over this meta-progammer bullshit.
My dictionary says a "hack" is to cut roughly or unevenly, deal cutting blows to. This would describe an act of vandalism. So a hacker would be a person that fucks with (not even nicely) your shit. I am fairly good at breaking into places where I am not suppose to be. Also very lucky that I have not been caught. The reason I haven't been caught is because I just observe and learn from where I am, not be a total piece of shit and fuck up or change someone's very important records. It is a shame that some people (people ha) have to vindicate their own piddly ass lives by screwing with someone else. Why? Do unto others as you would have them do unto you is a way of life for me and should be taught to kids in school. That's why I also believe that what I do is NOT hacking and I need to find a name to get out of the insulting label of a hacker. Nosey? Voyeur? Trespasser? Don't brag about hacking someone's site to me either because I believe that the person hurting others needs to be hurt in the same way, so as to know what hurting someone feels like, and then stop it. I have no qualms about becoming a hacker and going to their site. Revenge is sometimes the punishment deserved. Don't even get me started about people who create a virus and then pass it to us like it was a Christmas bonus. So basically hackers are like the little kids that graffited my garage door with their gang name. So when I painted "BLOW ME" over it they stopped.
I have a big bag full of two cents and I'm coming your way.
After that intro it is inhuman not to tell us the details! I plead, beg and grovel for more details....
Along the same lines, I came across a small program the other day. You could recreate the files from old C64 tapes by feeding the program a sampled recording of the tape! (I.e. put the tape in your stereo, sample it, and feed it to the app, and *pop* comes the data out!)
m16 isn't that great.
This is my vote (post?) on the best hack ever:
longevity - Its a classic that will be talked about (and used?) for many years to come.
social/tech impact - It has both. Who has never used one of these little yellow guys? And who has never used a digital one?
elegance - It was created by the need to "scratch an itch". It was created using glue that was apparently impossible.
I.S.H.T.o.T-quality - Blah - this is the ultimate example of it. An idea so obvious that anyone could have thought of it and yet...
And the main reason I choose this one is that it is also the easiest way to crack passwords (read postit stuck on monitor) so being the biggest defn. of "hack" possible.*grin*
email: 3->e
"DNA is God's contribution to the Open Source movement"
Immense sociological impact, and about as subversive as you can get. Who would of thought a small thing like moveable type would make such an impression.
has to be One-Click Ordering from Amazon.com.
(Laugh, it's funny!)
--GnrcMan--
This common story is not entirely true.
A system very like a modern network of PCs was demonstrated in the mid-70s, before Xerox PARC was even founded by some Stanford researchers (one of whom is very famous, but whose name I have forgotten). They had a number of technologies in that system that were forgotten and have only recently reemerged - such as videoconferencing (at least in prototype).
Similarly many of the elements of the modern GUI originated only with the Macintosh. For instance the event-based system for repainting (rather than keeping backing storage, or deactivating background apps as the Star did) was a Macintosh invention. Similarly the Star GUI was not very usable by modern standards - there was a considerable lack of graphical images. ParcPlace producst such as ObjectWorks still had this "look" until only a few years ago.
They took the girl band/boy band formula, and bumped the body count up to 7. Hence, they could split into two groups, and overrun two kids TV shows at once.
Genius
--
sorry about replying off-topic, but no new threads are allowed i guess anyway, my top-ten hacks are as follows (in no particular order) open source and the idea of sharing information as it has revolutionized the entire desktop and higher-level industries. the GIMP for all the wonderful nifty stuff it does. einstein's theory on relativity. the transistor - i like having two computers (and more if i had $$) in one room! the linux kernel, it is amazing! the best programming language of all time, C! packet-switching networks, i suppose beginning with the ARPAnet in '69 GL and 3d acceleration (i wouldn't waste productivity any other way) similar ones are amazing hacks too, but admit it, HTML has completely changed the entire world with the "World-Wide-Web." the apollo series of moon-missons (especially 11 and 13), because we got just what we wanted, if not more, out of those. and 13 because it WAS amazing how we recovered it.
Yes I remember Chuckie Egg (fondly).
Which reminds me of another: Elite. A massive game that was squeezed into just 32k - another good hack methinks.
TJ
Owl tried to think of something wise to say, but couldn't.
This kind of reminds me of The Avro Arrow, a completely Canadian-made jet built in the late 1950's that could totally outperform anything the U.S. had built. It got shut down however, due to politics. I don't think the U.S. liked us having something that much better. :)
When I saw the subject line, this is the one that immediately came to mind.
Alan
As the defination first was playing around, at a deep level, with your computer, I think the 'posers' who wanted to sound cool, probably were the people running scripts to break into computers.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
Calculus. Whether you believe that it was created by Newton or Leibowitz, calculus is a great hack. We would not have advanced very far without it, and as any 1st year science/comp sci student will tell you, a very good hack to grok.
In his most recent book, "A Necessary Evil, The History of American Distrust in Government," Garry Wills argues that your history teacher's idea that the Constitution was designed to produce a government which was not efficient is not, in fact, true. He suggests the authors of the Constitution had just finished in an experiment with that kind of a goal (The Articles of Confederation) and were, in fact, trying to fashion a more efficient democracy.
Wills says the ideas we associate with the Constitution (checks-and-balances, co-equal branches, etc) actually come from the thoughts of those who argued against the Constitution. He argues the Congress was intended to be most powerful branch with the judicial and executive branches simply making things run more smoothly.
I don't know if he's right, but this would certainly put the Bill of Rights ahead of the Constitution in the all-time hack list.
Eternal vigilance only works if you look in every direction.
This is an excellent piece, but I believe the author doesn't have it quite right about the way we used to get sound out of the TRS80. It was not the disk drive motor we used (because most TRS80s did not have a disk drive, but settled for a cassette drive).
The way I remember doing it took advantage of a small microswitch which was intended to turn the cassette machine on and off. If you switched this microswitch on and off in patterns, you could amplifly the signal thus produced to get sound out of the machine which had no speaker.
We also used to record sound off the cassette over files which we had created to "digitize" the audio. These files could then be used to create sounds for our TRS80 games and played over little battery-powered amplifiers we bought at Radio Shack.
The most ingenious use of this sound was in a computer game called "Starfighter." This was published by a company which had been formed by a 14-year-old named Scott Adams (I don't think it's the Scott Adams who draws "Dilbert").
This game contained a number of interesting hacks I had never seen before: windows in the dashboard of your spaceship, first-person perspective, sound effects which told you how fast you were going (on a machine without a speaker), an AI that not only reacted to what you did but also changed those reactions based on how dangerous the area you were in was, sprite graphics on a machine which had no sprite graphics in the operating system, and score-based advance in rank.
The game's author was listed as H.L. "Sparky" Sparks, and I immediately thought, "Oh, no! Not another 14-year-old hacker genius." Indeed, this game would itself would qualify as one of the top 10 hacks, if it were not part of an even bigger hack: Its author was was using this hobby to help convince his boss to produce a personal computer of its own which used non-proprietary hardware so that if they balked at his ideas later on he could just go out and produce a competing model himself.
You see, Sparks was a marketing vice president at IBM and the computer he convinced them to build was what we now know as the IBM PC. Later he did go out on his own and formed Compaq, taking with him much of the team responsible for the PC.
That's got to be the ultimate hack: convincing IBM to finance the movement that replaced them.
Eternal vigilance only works if you look in every direction.
The Rotary is not dead!! The new Renesis is a 1.3 Leter, 280 HP, no turbo engine. Mazda just doesn't import it into this country because everyone here wants those damn SUV's, not high-tech sports cars. Take a look at Rotary News
The rotary has 3 moving parts, no valves, rods, pistons, rings, cams, and whatever the other 250+ parts that move in that ancient design of a piston.
1.3L, 3 moving parts, 280 HP, no Turbos, wanna Race? RotaryNe
Don't know if this entirely qualifies as a 'hack' but progressing along the lines of nominating aircraft designs as "great hacks," we ought not overlook the CF105 Avro Arrow built in Canada in the 1950s. Since the program was ultimately scrapped by the Canadian government at the time (citing budget concerns) before the aircraft ever went into full-scale production, it obviously didn't become as famous as it otherwise would certainly have done, but the fact remains that it was a fantastic achievement.
The best website concerning the Arrow is probably the Discovery Channel's Flight Deck which has a good piece on the technical aspects of the Arrow, and exn.ca has some decent stuff as well. There are several other sites which contain pix, specs & plans, noteworthy info and comparisons or narratives (mirrored), and like all obscure subjects online, it also has a Web Ring.
The Arrow was the first aircraft to pull a 2-G turn at 50,000' without loss of speed or altitude - unusual even today. It was also an extraordinary achievement in the amount and variety of weaponry that it carried in its weapons pack, which could include not only weaponry, but also reconansance equipment, fuel, and just about anything else, most of which could be reloaded or swapped in a matter of minutes - still impressive by today's standards. Consider that an Arrow in 1959 could have flown higher at a similar speed (slightly faster, actually) than an F-14D Tomcat did 31 years later... the Arrow is a 40-year-old accomplishment that would compare remarkably well with the aircraft of today - and comparisons with aircraft of its day are in most instances almost unfair, unless you look only at a single feature.
The Arrow contained serveral other aviation 'firsts' and 'near-firsts' and several 'bests' and 'near-bests' - but the truly amazing thing was the way that Avro brought it all together in a single package. The designers' plans for an 'Ultimate Arrow' suggest they were thinking bigger still, despite having made history already - there is really no telling what might have evolved from the project today if had been left intact. After the project was scrapped, many of the design team from Avro went on to work on other projects, so that certain Arrow features apparently began to appear in a variety of places, including (perhaps) the Concorde, the Stealth Bomber, and at NASA, where 32 Avro engineers ended up working on Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo - including Apollo 11 (nominated elsewhere) and I believe 13 (also nominated elsewhere) and the space shuttle.
Penguinista!
You will be un-assimilated. Resistance is just plain stupid.
Actually, there was an election between self-rule, joining the US or joining Canada. When self-rule got a plurality but not a majority, there was a second, unexpected election taking out the US option. Although I'm glad Canada got a chance to join Newfoundland in 1949, we essentially caught the self-rule people with their pants down, having blown their entire budgets in the first (and what they thought would be the only) election. The Canada option was mostly funded by Canadian money.
Cracking of the ENIGMA during WWII by the polish and the british.
The ENIGMA, used by the Germans, was a good encrytion machine. Nevertheless the Polish crackid it, without the use of, then nonexisting, computers. A great hack which has saved a lot of lives.
The original Adventure.
Sexual reproduction
Einstein was just asked by Szlizard and the rest of the boys to write the letter to Roosevelt - He wasn't even informed the Manhattan Project resulted until 1945 like everyone else.
If you're going to refer to physics hacks, start with Bohrs' Copenhagen model of the hydrogen atom.
Perl, vi, the zx81 and demos are really great hacks, but I nominate the Soundtracker and Protracker. They're simple, elegant and efficient hacks.
Is this paintball, historic battle reenactment, a martial art, or what?
Everyone seems to be pretty (surprise) anthropocentric. I don't think anything humanity has ever done counts in the top ten hacks of all time. Even just on this planet.
Some great non-human hacks:
1. Chlorophyll. Totally enzyme mediated, so it can be repeated endlessly. Its output is the 'energy currency' (ATP) of life. It works well, too - the best photocell's humanity can create are 3 times less efficient at light capture.
2. Magnetic direction finding. Down is safety for bacteria, but they are so small their worlds are dominated by brownian motion, not gravity. Solution? Embed little magnets. They follow them (north in the Northern Hemisphere, south in the Southern Hemisphere), which means down (the earth's magnetic field lines point downward at most latitudes).
A truly inspired open source work, alas ruined at last because the GPL had not been perfected yet...
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
if you really think that it was linus' determination/skill/whatever that let you do that you are strongly misled. I'd probably be using FreeBSD or GNU/Hurd if linux wasn't the predominant PC unix. just becaus linux fills that niche well doesn't mean that other tools can't/wouldn't have grown to fill the area because of a void. There is no incentive for most people to replace linux because it works great. there is incentive to use something other than dos/windows on PCs, hence all the devel on linux/*bsd. this isn't such a hard issue to see the motives behind and attributing the free pc unix to one person who just happened to be the first to help fill the void is simply stupid.
The Big Bang was pretty muched hacked together by God, I nominate that as best hack.
The U.S. Constitution isn't perfect though.
For example that silly stuff about the right to bear arms. Imagine that in a civilised society.
The main problem with the constitution is that Americans think it is perfect. It was written by humans. It is imperfect. Just remember that.
According to various papers presented at the following website (it should be noted that these papers are the digital transcriptions of original documents):
http://www.fourmilab.ch/babbage/
I am in error (imagine that!). It should be noted that the engine did have some form of looping capability, as well as an implementation of microcode for the mill (via something Babbage called the 'barrel' - which, I believe (based on other information I have read about other calculating engines), was simply some kind of cylindrical piece of metal with movable stubby projections (like that in a music box), used to effect other parts of the engine based on the codes given by the instruction cards)!
In addition, his son went on to complete the mill portion of the Analytical Engine, starting prior to his fathers death, and completing the mill years later. During various expositions demonstrating the engine, it was ran through its paces to calculate multiples of PI out to 44 iterations (though it must be noted that the value given for PI was incorrect, in addition to the machine, due to various mechanical malfunctions (bugs?), miscalculating successive iterations at the 8th, 9th, 11th and 42nd (?) positions, thereby throwing successive calculation off).
Damn, the more I learn about this engine, the more I am amazed.
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
The Web itself is a righteous hack, of a protocol on top of a protocol, going from "neat idea" to "every business has it" in less than five years. Two years ago, one rarely saw Web addresses in advertising. Nowdays, if you don't see a Web address in an advertisement, you tend to write the company off. Hats off to Mosaic. And to all the porn sites that are the reason the Web is so fast nowdays. And to Amazon.com, even though they've never made a profit.
I'm going to open this little note with two words: The Police.
While 'lawful' in the sense that they are 'the law', the police may decide that you should be detained or your house should be searched without cause. I know the common 'Believe in the System' reply to this would be that the law protects you from such and that there are things such as warrants, it should also be noted that the law can't physically protect you from itself.
I've been in Seattle for a week now, and I've watched The Police act more like a 'military presence' than the militaries of many small countries.
They aren't armed with just sub-lethal though, they are all sporting semi-automatic pistols with extended clips.
Throwing rocks at them, poking them with sticks, egging them, punching them, and yelling derisive things at them will accomplish one or both of two things: Thing one, sub-lethal weapons will be used against you. Either rubber bullets, teargas, pepperspray, or truncheons. Thing two, You will feel alot better after expending the energy. (You may also be arrested but when there is a mob of people doing the same thing it won't matter. Note: I don't neccesarily advocate violence against the police or private property but one has to do what one has to do when one has to do it. I'd rather see someone hit a police officer then see a police officer hit someone.)
Now, lets say you take your fancy 'gun' and shoot a police officer. They're going to put the formalities like sub-lethal weapons aside, and they're all going to shoot you, and you are going to die. And if you don't die, and make an escape, they will hunt you to the ends of the earth(exaggeration) or kill those who are near you who are unarmed and non-violent. Even a large group of people with your fancy guns won't stop them, because they have the National Guard to back them up, and other Government-controlled forces.
Assuming your cause is legitimate, do you think you could muster the forces to physically neutralize all of the police officers in just one city?
Fact: There are 45,000 police officers in New York. Even if one could muster and arm 45,000+ people to oppose them, there are always more waiting in the ranks and, chances are they'd find out beforehand. Where as, if they knew people were going to come yell at them, their response would be quite different.
In conclusion: Your gun alone, or a few thousand guns put next to yours, won't stop the million or so guns they have.
Disclaimer: Not that I have anything against guns, but most of the reasons for owning them just aren't cutting it, or the reasons that people defend them with. Owning a gun for home defense could save your life, it could also take your life or the life of someone near to you. Owning a gun for the purpose of defending yourself from other guns, can be plain old foolery.(This isn't the case everywhere, mind you, I can think of alot of places where guns could do some good. I'm talking about the US, and Government specifically)
Finally: Guns are just more trouble than they're worth.
(Postscript: If you're going to attack this rant don't attack me personally, this is a whole new paradigm for me. Attack the idea, it will help me refine it or possibly change my way of thinking. Attack me, and I will stop listening. Also, I'm in Seattle in a Journalistic capacity.)
--Nimbus Qrygg, The One True Qrygg
OS > Religion;
--Nimbus Qrygg, The One True Qrygg
OS > Religion;
Come dance with the
Cool. So the huge unused portion of our brains are filled with background daemons? Neat.
First, I would like to thank you for responding so eloquently to my previous post. I appreciate debate, and seem to have found a forum, albeit the improper forum, to express my point of view on the subject of the right to keep and bear arms. Due to the fact that this is actually supposed to be a thread on the subject of the top ten hacks of all time, I will attempt to keep my rebuttal short. I do not feel that you fully understood my example of an illegal military presence. The Seattle Police department is not an illegal military presence. The Police are not, in fact, military at all. The Police in any jurisdiction of the United States are just plain old private U.S. citizens. I was referring to defense, by a militia, against an army placed into power after the suspension of the powers of the Constitution, or alternately, an invading army of another nation. Either one being entirely possible, however unlikely. The Second Amendment to the Constitution provides for a "...well regulated militia..." for the express purpose of defence of "the People" and it is our duty to maintain this right. If not for ourselves, then for our progeny. I want to make it clear that I do not belong to a militia, am not a member of the NRA, and I don't own any firearms. I am also not a believer in UFO's and Government conspiracies. I only believe in Our constitution, and it's amendments. If all guns were gone tomorrow, I couldn't be more happy. However, it would have to be ALL guns.