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?
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.....
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.
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
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.
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
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
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...
* - 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.
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 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'
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
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
Even if you get in it dosn't mean you can do anything. Encryption and it's use is one of the reasons you really can't do anything. Most standard servers (think .gov, .mil and other DoD related computing environments) offered the same set of services as they did before just all the easy holes were removed. You can't tell me that say Unix security hasn't increased in the past 20 years can you? If sites are using unix as an operating system then one could easily state that system security has increased from the past. The only things we have left are DoS attacks and things with the network protocols. Most deamons actually (at least in the linux) world are not run with special priviledges or anything. Debian routinely makes things secure. Yes there are bugs but nothing in the past history (in net time) for a while has there been any problems.
Slashdot social engineering at it's finest
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.
.. 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.
You'd be meaning The Story of Mel then...
Paranoia isn't an infectious condition, it's a way of life
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)
Duff's device
Your design to a real part online: Big Blue Saw
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?
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
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
So:
Any others I've missed?
--
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.
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.
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.
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.
* 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 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.
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
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;
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 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
#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
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.
...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 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 think it has. Most security holes are caused by buffer overflows. The dominant language for Unix (and other) platforms is still a language that easily allows for buffer overflows.
Nothing has changed to prevent this.
-- Abigail
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.
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.
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.- ----------
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Well then, hey, why don't we put Bill Gates on the list of greatest hackers? :)
I mean, he hasn't ever invented anything, just integrated and re-sold other peoples work. That in my mind, is not a hacker, sorry... Bill Gates is a great businessman (his ethics may be a little or a lot off, but he's got the worlds most valuable company).
I would probably put Linus more in that category than in the "hacker" category. If in 5 or 10 years, all of the predictions he's made and every other Linux advocate has made come true, then wow! he did something amazing. But I think we're way too much in the early stages of this phenomenon to gauge it's long term-effects.
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.
The early history of Eugene Stoner's AR-15/M-16 was riddled with problems. Close manufacturing tolerances and adverse field conditions (think Viet Nam) caused jams at the worst possible moments.
These problems weren't really solved until the introduction of the M-16A1 with its kludgy "forward assist" (and a switch to less corrosive propellants).
Now Mikhail Kalashnikov's AK-47: that is a hackerly weapon. Five moving parts. Stamped parts instead of milled/machined components. Stranded steel wire instead of springs. Simple to operate and maintain. Fault-tolerant. A village blacksmith can gin up a new bolt carrier/gas piston assembly if need be. It's the one weapon I'd want with me if I ever had to travel back through time.
Kalashnikov picked some of the best features of three contemporary designs (Mp-44, M1 Garand, SKS) and hacked together a design that's still in production 52 years later.
k.
"In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart." - Anne Frank
I must disagree.
Surely a simple lobotomy would have sufficed? In fact it would doubtless have a more elegant solution, since the whole Neo-rebellion thing could have been avoided.
Using humans to process chemical energy into electrical, despite the laws of physics: now that was a hack!
Hamish
"Wise men talk because they have something to say; fools, because they have to say something" - Plato
- 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.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
Oops. I usually preview, honestly I do.
I meant, of course: Creating a process by which the most efficient method of converting chemical into electrical energy involves the use of humans, despite the laws of physics: now that was a hack!
Hamish
"Wise men talk because they have something to say; fools, because they have to say something" - Plato
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)
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
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
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
Well, 60% of your heat is lost through your head, so they say (which is why you must wear a hat in winter boys!). A lobotomised brain would be an less active brain and thus a less prolific producer of heat energy, and those poor malevolent cyber-intelligences would be down on their quotas and have hell to pay.
Of course, The Matrix is a fictional work and so the multi-user VR system described therein is thus not qualified to be regarded as one of the greates hacks of all time. However, interestingly, if it should turn out that The Matrix is not a work of fiction - but, say, a 1st wake-up call from Neo and crew - then all the other hacks described here become fictional works.
Makes you think, doesn't it?
Or not.
Regards, Ralph.
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.
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My mom's going to kick you in the face!
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."
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?
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
Well, 60% of your heat is lost through your head, so they say (which is why you must wear a hat in winter boys!). A lobotomised brain would be an less active brain and thus a less prolific producer of heat energy, and those poor malevolent cyber-intelligences would be down on their quotas and have hell to pay.
Good point, although I can't help feeling that the simulation of earth in the late twentieth century must take up a few cycles!
Of course, The Matrix is a fictional work and so the multi-user VR system described therein is thus not qualified to be regarded as one of the greates hacks of all time. However, interestingly, if it should turn out that The Matrix is not a work of fiction - but, say, a 1st wake-up call from Neo and crew - then all the other hacks described here become fictional works.
Except that many of the hacks described were probably carried out before the war in question. But the crafting of the original AI which was then wiley enough to sort out the whole Matrix would probably outrank them in a slashdot poll.
Makes you think, doesn't it?
It certainly does. I hope the sequel peels off a few more layers (a la Existenz, which was by far the better film, IMHO).
Hamish
"Wise men talk because they have something to say; fools, because they have to say something" - Plato
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
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.
Perhaps what we think of as the 'laws' of physics are all wrong. Ever think of that? We are in the matrix, after all.
We'd need to be in a meta-Matrix, because it is explained to Neo when he comes out of the Matrix that his concept of reality was based on late twentieth-century earth (which they still inhabit).
Hamish
"Wise men talk because they have something to say; fools, because they have to say something" - Plato
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?
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My mom's going to kick you in the face!
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.
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.
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?
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 :)"
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
Vovida, OS VoIP
Beer recipe: free! #Source
Cold pints: $2 #Product
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
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...
--
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. :-)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
Eunice also merits a special mention in the Perl configuration script:
"Congratulations. You aren't running Eunice."
--
"L'IT c'est moi!"
- 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.--
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!"
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.
Even better than that, Andy Kaufmann created a character, Tony Clifton, that everyone knew was Andy, but was played in many cases by Bob Zmuda.
--
"L'IT c'est moi!"
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
The Telestrator (although only Madden seems to be able to use it well)
The yellow first down line.
--
"L'IT c'est moi!"
According to the James Fallows book "The Nation",
the Viet Cong were in the habit of stripping
the corpses of fallen soldiers of anything
remotely useful: belts, boots, etc.
They left behind the M-16s.
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
Yes. The F0 0F bug affects the Intel Pentium (mmx?) processors. It is very severe, in that a user process can execute these nominally invalid instructions, and lockup the processor.
This wouldn't be noticed on a MS-Win9* box, because lockups happen all the time. But on a multitasking server/firewall, it's disaster.
But how do you stop a CPU from running instructions? Well, first the FreeBSD folks then the Linux crew found ways via pagefaults etc. And the F0 0F bug has safe workarounds. It took a few days, tribute to those who hacked it out.
So now everybody can use cheap cast-off low end Pentia for all sorts of good servers without worry. AFAIK, Microsoft has yet to fix NT. I guess they expt everyone running NT to have a P6.
-- Robert
"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
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.
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
Wait, I'm curious now! (this is all I ask on slashdot these days ;) ) How did it work??
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
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
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.
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
--
.... and of course, the US phone companies I hear of (can anyone confirm it's not a myth) who charge extravagant prices, and call themselves "whatever" or "I don't care".
"I'd like to make a long-distance call please, operator"
"what carrier would you like, sir"
"err, Whatever"
"putting you through..."
--
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.
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.
Some people think that you can get around stuff like that...
with your own flavor of *nix, you can make snprintf your standard, or use your own custom library...
So is OpenBSD a 20 year improvement? or should we start writing Linux in Java?