1981: Geeks Gone Bad
This is the 4th in a short series of articles around my 4-decade+ career in software development — for your amusement, edification, and to capture a bit of computing history. They also bring back some memories for me, fond and otherwise.
While at Eleanor Roosevelt Senior High School, Mike G. was more or less the ringleader of our local band of geeks, and was always up for causing a bit of trouble. I no longer recall the target of my first hacking misadventure, but I do remember it was Mike and me working together. Through simple social engineering, Mike had secured the password of our target “Jim,” someone who we both found a little annoying.
Our diabolical scheme: We’d code up a funny application to run when Jim next logged into the school’s HP/3000 minicomputer, just to scare him a little. I no longer have the code, but it would’ve been done in BASIC.
Normally when you log into an HP/3000 under MPE, it shows something like this:
:HELLO JIM.USER
0:02/*S1/18/LOGON FOR: JIM.USER
HP 3000 RELEASE: G.20.00 USER VERSION: G.40.40 WED, OCT 10, 1980, 12:02
MPE IV HP32033 G.10.0 Copyright Hewlett-Packard 1978. All Rights Reserved.
:The colon (:) is the computer’s prompt.
:HELLO JIM.USER is Jim typing to say hello to the computer and have it log him in. He’s presented with a second prompt on successful login.
Mike was able to log into Jim’s account, load our logic bomb, and configure it to run on login. When our evil application ran, Jim’s login would have looked something like this instead:
:HELLO JIM.USER
0:02/*S1/18/LOGON FOR: JIM.USER
HP 3000 RELEASE: G.20.00 USER VERSION: G.40.40 WED, OCT 10, 1980, 12:02
MPE IV HP32033 G.10.0 Copyright Hewlett-Packard 1978. All Rights Reserved.
WARNING: Your account has exhausted all available space. Please step back,
as it will now self-destruct. Countdown starting:
10…
9…
8…The countdown continued slowly, then displayed something like:
*** BOOM ***No colon — the program just kept running (not exactly a tough piece of code to write). And, well, not all that funny and probably a little mean. (Sorry, Jim.) To get to a prompt, Jim would have had to press the Break key available on the HP2640B keyboard.
The day after Mike installed the program, I found myself called on the carpet. I don’t remember who did the rear-chewing, but Miss Verna (my 25-year-old programming teacher) was involved. I remember the standard “we’re disappointed in you” speech along with threats of kicking me off the computer completely. I had to apologize and promise to never do anything like that again.
Mike was nowhere in sight. Like a police station interrogation, they separated the two of us to see who’d rat out the other. Apparently I was the rat-ee. Mike got off easy (scott free, even?) as the mastermind who also did the actual breaking & entry. Me, I just wrote the dumb program.
I didn’t get suspended and I don’t recall any other real punishment. But what they say about shame is true — that was more devastating than anything they might’ve doled out. I never had restless nights about the effect on Jim, but I still regret letting down Miss Verna. And that was my last hacking misadventure.
Morals of the story:
1. Don’t do bad stuff, or stuff that’s even remotely mean.
2. Don’t program bad stuff for other people, including your current employer. You’re still guilty, even if you’re not the one inserting the floppy with malware.
3. Particularly, don’t do bad stuff with others who you can’t trust. And don’t work for companies that want you to do bad stuff.
4. If you’re going to insist on doing bad stuff, make it funnier and not at all mean or immoral.
