The first "hackers" were students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) who belonged to the TMRC (Tech Model Railroad Club). Some of the members really built model trains. But many were more interested in the wires and circuits underneath the track platform. Spending hours at TMRC creating better circuitry was called "a mere hack." Those members who were interested in creating innovative, stylistic, and technically clever circuits called themselves (with pride) hackers.
During the spring of 1959, a new course was offered at MIT, a freshman programming class. Soon the hackers of the railroad club were spending days, hours, and nights hacking away at their computer, an IBM 704. Instead of creating a better circuit, their hack became creating faster, more efficient program - with the leastnumber of lines of code. Eventually they formed a group and created the first set of hacker's rules, called the Hacker's Ethic.
Steven Levy, in his book Hackers, presented the rules:
Rule 1: Access to computers - and anything, which might teach you, something about the way the world works - should be unlimited and total.
Rule 2: All information should be free.
Rule 3: Mistrust authority - promote decentralization.
Rule 4: Hackers should be judged by their hacking, not bogus criteria such as degrees, race, or position.
Rule 5: You can create art and beauty on a computer.
Rule 6: Computers can change your life for the better.
These rules made programming at MIT's Artificial Intelligence Laboratory a challenging, all encompassing endeavor. Just for the exhilaration of programming, students in the Al Lab would write a new program to perform even the smallest tasks. The program would be made available to others who would try to perform the same task with fewer instructions. The act of making the computer work more elegantly was, to a bonafide hacker, awe-inspiring.
Hackers were given free reign on the computer by two AI Lab professors, "Uncle" John McCarthy and Marvin Minsky, who realized that hacking created new insights. Over the years, the AI Lab created many innovations: LIFE, a game about survival; LISP, a new kind of programming language; the first computer chess game; The CAVE, the first computer adventure; and SPACEWAR, the first video game.
TEXT 9. COMPUTER CRIMES
The operations of our businesses, governments, and financial institutions are controlled by information that exists only inside computer memories. Anyone clever enough to modify this information for his own purposes can reap substantial rewards. Even worse, a number of people who have done this and been caught at it have managed to get away without punishment.
These facts have not been lost on criminals or would-be criminals. A recent Stanford Research Institute study of computer abuse was based on 160 case histories, which probably are just the proverbial tip of the iceberg. After all, we only know about the unsuccessful crimes. How many successful ones have gone undetected is anybody's guess.
All but the smallest banks now keep their accounts on computer files. Someone who knows how to change the numbers in the files can transfer funds at will. For instance, one programmer was caught having the computer transfer funds from other people's accounts to his wife's checking account.
A company that uses computers extensively offers many opportunities to both dishonest employees and clever outsiders. For instance, a thief can have the computer chip the company's products to addresses of his own choosing. He can have it issue checks to him for imaginary supplies or services. People have been caught doing both.
There is a trend toward using cards similar to credit cards to gain access to funds through cash-dispensing terminals. Yet, in the past, organized crime has used stolen or counterfeit credit cards to finance its operations. Banks that offer after-hours or remote banking through cash-dispensing terminals may find themselves subsidizing organized crime.
Much personal information about individuals is now stored in computer files. An unauthorized person with access to this information could use it for blackmail. Confidential information about a company's products or operations can be stolen and sold to unscrupulous competitors.
The software for a computer system is often more expensive than the hardware. Yet this expensive software is all too easy to copy. Crooked computer experts have devised a variety of tricks for getting these expensive programs printed out, punched on cards, recorded on tape, or otherwise delivered into their hands. This crime has even been perpetrated from remote terminals that access the computer over the telephone.