A Hacker Looks at 40
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    Since first posting this page I'm now a bit older than Jimmy Buffett was when he released his album of similar title, but with a nod to one of my favorite musicians, this is a recounting of over half a lifetime dedicated, devoted, fascinated, obsessed with these gadgets born of Charles Babbage's desire for a calculating machine, and which have come to so dominate our lives.

    I do have a life apart from computers -- I'm a writer, a poet, a business man and sometime arm chair philosopher. But I've written hundreds of programs, in BASIC, FORTRAN, COBOL, RPG, SPL 3000, dBase, VBasic, VBScript, JavaScript, CFHTML, CFScript, several assembly and machine languages and miscellaneous macro languages, but never learned C or C++. SPL 3000 is quite similar to C, but what kind of hacker doesn't know C?! I wrote a command module for HP's MPE III OS, but I know very little about Unix! I've been programming since September 1975, but I never once logged onto the Internet until August 1997! I can keep an entire 8,000 line program in my head (and step through it), but I couldn't tell you Novell from a Chevy Nova. So, just what kind of hacker do I think I am? An odd one, to be sure. But then. . .what true hacker isn't a bit odd?

    Well, I can tell you one thing for sure -- it's been one heck of a ride. Let me tell you about it. . . .

    September, 1975. I started my Freshman year at Highland Academy in Portland, Tennessee, about 25 miles from Nashville, and signed up for my very first computer class. There were only four of us in the class: myself, Mike Day, James Biggers and Laurie Hart. Our teacher was Merritt MacLafferty, whom everybody just called Mr. Mac -- a wonderful little irony. He told us later that, most of the time, he was staying barely one step ahead of us -- he'd learn something, then teach us. Sometimes, I suspect, we'd learn something and teach him.

    We had no real computer at first; I wrote my first program on what was essentially a programmable calculator. It was a Monroe, I don't recall the model, and measured about 7" wide, 10" long and 3.5" tall, light gray. The class put together a pretty sophisticated tax calculation program of a couple hundred instructions (machine language, of course), and Mr. Mac taught us the basics of memory, I/O and fundamental program logic, using COBOL on the chalkboard to illustrate what he was teaching us.

    We were not without a computer for long; nearby Volunteer State Community College gave us an account on their DEC PDP 11/70, and loaned us a teletype with a built-in acoustic coupler modem (for those of you too young to remember, that means you dialed the remote computer on a regular telephone, and when it picked up, you placed the handset into a special acoustic cradle. And you didn't have all these newfangled phones back then either, with all their space-age ergonomic shapes and designs. Any phone would fit that acoustic coupler, yessir.) Yes, a teletype. 300 baud -- state of the art, man. We thought it was the greatest thing since sliced bread.

    Later on we had a Hazeltine dumb terminal and were intrigued by the baud rate switch -- it could go up to 1200 baud, and I think there was some other setting above that, that we didn't understand; but it didn't matter, as we still had just a 300 baud modem for it. One day, someone whistling in the classroom happened to hit the exact pitch of the modem's carrier and hold it long enough for the modem to respond. That, of course, demanded further investigation. We finally figured out just what the right pitch was; one person would whistle the carrier, then other people would whistle to modulate it. We had a great time generating garbage on the screen, until we managed to lock it up. Mr. Mac had to call the college ("tech support") to figure out how to reset it. He was less than delighted.

    One day a Highland graduate returned from her sojourns in the after life (Southern Missionary College, actually, near Chattanooga), bearing with her an Olivetti terminal -- I believe it was a P6060. It had a built-in modem (1200 baud!) and thermal printer. Most amazing, it had graphics capability. It could draw a picture of itself! That made quite an impact on me, and I determined that one day I would have one. In truth, I never saw another one after that. As I grew in computer wisdom, I pursued the Sacred Olivetti for a while, but eventually came to realize that they were no longer (if they ever were), on the leading edge of the field.

    The Holy Graduate dialed into the college's computer and so it was that I met Eliza for the first time, and learned of many other great Cyber Wonders. I also learned a concept which has stayed with me in all my computing experiences since; that mighty Computer in that far off land, communing with us over the vast distances...crashed.

    The following year, 1976, Mr. Mac apparently convinced the school board that we needed our own computer. We were visited by salesmen from Apple and Radio Shack. Naturally, all the students wanted the Apple II because of the cool graphics. But Mr. Mac, obviously unaware that Apple would one day produce a computer bearing his name, ultimately went with what he felt to be the more practical TRS-80.

    At that time, the TRS-80 had two options for storage: you could purchase a cassette tape drive on which to store your data and programs, or you could opt for a new, state-of-the-art 5.25-inch floppy disk drive. The floppy drives were back-ordered for a couple months; that and, I presume, budgetary considerations prompted Mr. Mac to go for the tape drive. A few days later, our new system was delivered and set up. Unfortunately, during setup, the tech discovered that the tape drive was broken. There were no additional drives in stock, and it would take several weeks to order a replacement. While we waited, Mr. Mac decided that, in order to go ahead with our programming classes, he would assign each of us a range of line numbers in which to do our assignments, and we would just leave the computer on. This worked fine, and we descended upon our new gadget with enthusiasm.

    It didn't take me long to go beyond the assignments, and to discover the mysteries of PEEK() and POKE(). Ah, the good stuff! I started working on a program to print in big letters on the screen. I wrote a little utility program on the side that would display a cell and allow me to turn each element off and on, to draw each character, then spit out the numbers when I was finished. Then, in my main program, these were plugged into a routine that POKEd them into video memory. I digitized the first few characters, entered them into the program in DATA statements, and fired it up. It worked!!!

    I would like to pause a moment here in my narrative, to note that this was the first practical application program I ever wrote, and the most complex up to that point. It was a major milestone in this long, illustrious career.

    I quickly got to work digitizing the rest of the characters and plugged them into the program. It was great. The rest of the students and Mr. Mac were satisfyingly impressed with my ingenuity. I typed away -- the program could almost keep up with me! Line after line after line. . .all the way to the bottom of the screen. . . . . . .

    Ummm. . .wait a minute. What's this "bottom of the screen" thing here? I don't think I made any provision for that. . .click, click, click, click. . . .clunk. And there it was -- the end of the screen, the end of video memory, and one POKE() too far. In that fatal keystroke, I became the only person I've ever met, to have the dubious distinction of crashing a TRS-80. Deader than a doornail. And, incidentally, taking everybody's homework with it. They were less than delighted.

   

    Well, that's all for now. This story will continue as I have time to work on it. I try to be entertaining, and I hope you have enjoyed your visit. If you haven't been to my personal page, you're welcome there too, and you can see some of my professional work at my business site. Thanks for stopping by, and I hope you'll check back from time to time. Aloha!





































No, really! That's all!