ODE TO A SYSTEM CRASH

This story is an account of some of the antics we carried out in our quest to stave off boredom while growing up in the Canadian prairies. Mostly it deals with computer hacking[1], with some phone phreaking, code cracking, and snowmobiling thrown in for context.

There have been some entertaining and informative books written about hackers: The Cuckoo’s Egg [1] and Underground [2] are two of my favorites. As a former hacker, I wanted to write a story from the inside, so others could experience what we were doing, and why, and occasionally, how.

It is told in the first person, as I have attempted to recapture my own perspectives and motivations throughout these experiences. A Glossary is provided in Appendix D to help with some of the computer terms that are used.

I’m not sure everyone involved wanted to be a part of this story, so I’ve used code names, online handles, or nicknames, wherever a person is referenced. These are the actual terms we used to describe these people.

I am also not condoning or encouraging unauthorized use of computer systems. This is just a story!

1. Recruitment

I had always wanted to be a computer hacker. I’m not sure where this idea had even came from, or how it had became such an obsession for me.

Now, looking at this mystery message, I knew I was on to something. I had been poking around, covertly, on a company network, when this sudden interruption appeared. It was a threat, and an invitation at the same time. The hairs rose on the back of my neck. Somebody at CSIS[2], code-named Flamingo, had tracked me, and knew who I was, by reputation, of course. Rather than bust me, they wanted – no, needed – my help.

My mission was to hack into a top-secret facility mainframe, and by manipulating the security system, cameras, and two small infiltration robots; I was to obtain a top-secret document (as secret as the facility, presumably). Could I handle this dangerous mission? Would I accept?

It was a game, of course. Specifically, it was Hacker II: The Doomsday Papers by Activision, which I was playing on my trusty Commodore 64 computer sometime around 1989.

Supposedly it has some shocker ending, but to this day I have never completed it. Some hacker I am, I guess.

Something was funny about this opening message, though. Activision was an American company, they’d probably never heard of CSIS. CSIS also didn’t have the same caché as the FBI or the CIA. Also, what kind of Secret Agent got stuck with the not-very-terrifying code name of Flamingo?

Then it hit me what was strange about it. Somebody had hacked the game. Cracked games, with the copy protection codes removed by one of several dozen code-cracking groups around the world, were common enough in my collection.

This was different. Someone, presumably calling himself or herself The Flamingo, had gone in and altered the essence of the game itself. I thought that was very cool. What a way to advertise!

I also realized that it must have been a Canadian hacker/cracker/whatever. Who else would have bothered to put a Canadian twist on the Hacker II plot? Perhaps it was somebody who, like myself, was fed up with the American onslaught of media, TV, and other influences perpetually threatening to overwhelm Canadian identity.

I had never even entertained the idea of a Canadian hacker; I thought they were all in New York or Germany or Russia. The concept appealed to me, and this Flamingo character obviously had a sense of humor.

Trying to track the source of the game gave no clues. It had reached me through the chaotic network of high school friends who also had Commodore 64s, and everyone else seemed to have this same copy. We all traded these “pirated” computer games, but we were never quite sure where they came from, originally.

***

I had been introduced to computers at a fairly young age, back in 1986. I was twelve years old at the time. I grew up in a “small” Prairie farming town, with a population of around 8,000 people. This was pretty big for the Prairies; our town had the only hospital and high school for three hours in every direction.

The population number is actually meaningless. Of the people who lived in the town boundaries (I later learned how important these boundaries are), about 3,000 of them were reportedly retired or in personal care homes. Their contribution to the town’s activity level was nil, except to fill the 11 (yes, eleven) “old folk’s homes” in town. According to the signs, about 50,000 people live in the area on farms or neighboring villages. I’m not sure if I believe it.

There was actually a fair amount to do. There were sports - which I loathed though, except for swimming and watching the occasional hockey game. There were also extra-curricular activities at school, community groups, art, movies, a few theatre groups, several church youth groups, and music. A lot of drinking and drugs are there too, as in any small and relatively isolated community. I managed to steer clear of the latter.

The local library was starting a Computer Club, and my parents were savvy enough to note that computers were “the way of the future”. My father had taken some introductory programming courses (early languages such as COBOL and APL) at school, and my mother had taught math and art in a high school before I was born.

School bored me, in general. One of my earliest memories is of a spelling contest on the blackboard in Grade 1. The word to spell was “said”. I was the only one who got it right, out of about 20 kids. What was wrong with these people? I remember wondering at the time.

I was typically the youngest in my grade already, and I had always wanted to skip ahead a few grades and get it over with. At least I should have entered the Enrichment program, but I didn’t know how to get into it. It seemed to be an exclusive club for the extra smart and the wealthy establishment.

We were not wealthy. We didn’t even have a car. This was OK in such a small community; I could bike to school in summer, and walk there in winter[3] in about half an hour.

My parents asked me if I was interested in the new Computer Club. I was. I went to the library once a week anyway, as I was a real bookworm with a love for Sci-fi and Fantasy novels. (I still am today.)

A computer-savvy United Church Minister, along with a few high school students, was organizing the Computer Club. I showed up to one of the first meetings, where I was warmly greeted. Everyone was at least three years older than me, but it didn’t matter. We all had an interest in computers in common. That meeting, the focus was on computer graphics.

The Club started out with a Commodore VIC-20, a Coco 3 and a Tandy TRS-80, all of which were really neat, and reasonably state-of-the art computers at the time. They were locked with their monitors in big plywood cabinets. The librarian sorted and labeled the keys to the computer cabinets according to how much memory the computers had! I chuckled at this bizarre method, as though I was in on some inside joke.

We learned how to draw a simple racecar on the VIC 20, and then how to make it drive across the screen. I was enthralled. I could write a program on a computer, and it did stuff! I was sure that, in time, I could make computers do anything I desired.

After the lesson and setting of membership fees, election of treasurers, secretaries, etc. (the club now had a total of about 10 members), the meeting ended. My “ride” had to walk over to pick me up, so I got to sit and listen to the senior members and the Minister who were getting into the advanced topics before going home. I only caught the basics of their conversation at the time, but it’s stuck with me. I understand it now.

“You know, with the membership fees, we could buy a decent monitor for that TRS-80. I’ve got some great color games I downloaded from a BBS[4]!”

“Hey, that gives me an idea. Why don’t set up our own BBS? I think the fees would cover a phone line. We could host it here, or one of us could run it at home.”

The Minister shook his head. “No way. BBS’s are a major headache, they eat up a lot of time, and worse, you always have hackers breaking in and either intentionally or accidentally crashing the thing.”

“But we could simulate a crash. We could write a program to parse the user’s keystrokes, and if he was trying to do hacker-type things, pretend the board crashed, have it spit out some random gibberish, and boot him off. No harm done, and we wouldn’t be seen as a challenge. It would seem too easy, so he’d go away.”

This was from the most senior of the group (apart from the Minister), a high school student I’ll call DBruce. The group nodded and hummed at this creative suggestion.

DBruce did some really cool things with the TRS-80, he had one at home. Most memorably was his game “Forest of Doom”. You were a little dot on an 8x8 grid that represented a forest. Different letters in the grid meant different things – Trees, Monsters, Inns, Rivers, Mountains. When you fought and defeated a monster, you got some gold. Even better, though, there were an infinite number of these grids so you could ‘explore’ for hours until your character died or retired very rich. I think the game generated the grids randomly; so a common tactic after you had had the stuffing beaten out of you was to walk back and forth across the boundary until a grid with something you needed (like an Inn) appeared. I never did get a copy of the game.

I kept going to the Club on Tuesdays, and hanging out at the library on Saturday afternoons to learn these new computers. I rotated though the different models, going to the upstairs Librarian’s desk (where all the grown-up books were kept!) and asking for the 2K, 4K, or 8K keys. I was always the only one there. My little racecar soon jumped over ramps, and soon afterwards I had programmed the different computers to draw dazzling 3D color graphics.

About the same time, the TV show Whiz Kids came on TV. I watched it, Airwolf, the Edison Twins, Mr. Microchip, and Knight Rider every week. All of these shows had some element of computers or technology doing amazing things.

Whiz Kids in particular was huge amounts of fun. It was about a teenager named Ritchie who had a giant computer in his basement. He hacked into systems all over the world and got into trouble, and he and his friends (even the token female teenager) were always running somewhere or saving somebody. The FBI and the CIA constantly sought out his help, and once he got permission from his parents, he went on grand adventures.

In one memorable episode, to stop a kidnapper, they hacked into the freeway traffic status signs and made them say “Hippopotamus Crossing.” That really appealed to my developing sense of mischief. Could that be possible in real life, I wondered?

***

How did you connect computers together? Over the phone? Was it something they just did, or did you use the phone at all? Perhaps some other medium? I absolutely needed to find out.

I spend an entire Saturday sitting at the VIC 20 at the library trying to connect to something, anything. I tried things like:

Obviously getting nowhere, I left the whole 'hacking' thing alone for several years.

I saved up enough for my own VIC 20 computer with money made from my paper route. My parents matched my savings so I could buy the accompanying tape drive for storing programs. The condition was: I had to spend half my time on it learning how to program it, not just playing games. That wasn’t a concern in my case, but I understood why they insisted. The Atari 2600 and Colecovision video game units (early versions of Nintendo) were all the rage, and quite a few kids my age were doing nothing but vegetating in front of them. I bought my VIC 20 at the local Canadian Tire store, which sold car parts, household cleaners, and Commodore computers and peripherals, in that order.

Soon afterwards, a dedicated computer store opened up, with a promotional draw, with a prize of a Commodore 64. I entered it and won. Somewhere there is a really painful photo of the store manager with a pudgy 13-year old holding a Commodore 64 box nearly as large as himself. It appeared in the local paper.

I wasn’t sure what to make of the ‘C64’, as it was abbreviated. I liked my VIC 20, but the C64 was just more of the same, so I thought. I was using an old black and white TV for the monitor, so I was missing out on all the color. I retired the VIC 20 and switched full time to the C64. Again I saved and saved, this time for a used color monitor. It was worth it!

After a few months, I got the color monitor. My younger brother was watching me use the computer one day after I hooked it up. “Hey, you figured out how to make it do color.”

“It’s always done color,” I retorted. “It was just the TV. The colors were always there, it just couldn’t show them.”

“No, I think you were just stupid before.” Typical siblings. I was 13, he was 11.

I got a mild lecture from my parents, on how not to be disrespectful towards people who weren’t as smart or inclined towards computers. It was sort of surreal though. I didn’t feel smart. Was being smart the same as being bored?

The Minister’s church ran a summer camp, and he personally organized the computer component. I was invited that summer. I had never been to anything like it: Canoeing, sports, campfires, guys and girls pairing off and sneaking into the woods, Bible studies and computer programming, all in one day. One of the donated computers had a speech synthesizer.

Another computer had a 1541 disk drive, a device that used floppy disks instead of tapes. Floppy disks could hold much more data than a tape, and were a lot faster as well. Somebody had brought a huge box of games on floppy disk, and they were pretty popular as a result.

***

In Grade 7, my locker was a few feet away from a closed door. I knew that whatever was in there had to be pretty small, as I had been on the classrooms on either side. I wondered what was in there.

The room was quite small as I had guessed, and it housed six desks, the teacher’s desk, and a table with a Commodore 64 and a 1541 disk drive! Wow! I had seen a 1541 at computer camp the past summer, but these disk drives cost several hundred dollars, and way out of my price range. I soon met the teacher in charge of the small room, Mr. B. The room was used for “remedial studies”, where Mr. B. helped out students who needed more one-on-one attention.

Best of all, a small group of students met there every lunch hour to play and swap C64 games on floppy disks. The crowd was a bit different every day, but I became a regular, and got to know nearly everyone in school with a Commodore 64. We met up every school day, except when Mr. B was away. I soon had a few games on floppy disk, but could only play them at friend’s houses.

When Mr. B was away, we tried breaking into the room with a paper clip. We just had to have our daily fix of games. The paper clip worked – once. The next time we tried it, the paper clip got stuck in the lock. Oops. We ran, and steered clear of the room for a while, but he never said anything.

My neighborhood convenience store had a pretty good selection of magazines and comic books. One day I spotted Ahoy Magazine – devoted entirely to the Commodore 64. Wow again! It reviewed all the latest games, had programming hints, tricks, tips, and game programs printed that you could type in yourself. I spent many evenings listening to the Ghostbusters soundtrack, typing in games and utilities from the magazines, absorbing as much as I could along the way. Soon I was writing my own submissions for the magazine. The first appeared in print two days before my 14^th birthday (The October 1987 issue).

Everyone’s pirated game collection grew and grew, and by Grade 9 I had a pretty sizeable collection of my own. Hacker II was just one of hundreds of games, and I now had a used 1541 drive so I could play them. Some people outside our circle of friends always had the best and newest games though; I had to find out where they came from.

One of the occasional attendees at the lunch hour game swap that I became good friend with was Mr. The Kidd. He took his name from the scene in Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure where they go back in time and meet Billy the Kid. Bill and Ted assume “The Kid” is his last name, so they respectfully call him…Mr. The Kid. The extra ‘d’ was a personal touch.

***

High school was even duller than junior school. It had its saving graces, though.

The first was the sheer amount of extra-curricular activities. I got into the Drama club, Reach for the Top (predictably, this group had a lot of overlap with the former members of the junior school’s C64 games group), and clarinet and drums in the marching band. I also got involved with the high school age Youth Group at the Baptist Church.

The second was the Vocational Electronics course. Our high school was a Vocational high school, preparing the students for careers in everything from haircutting to food services to auto mechanics and electronics. This was a well thought out and practical idea, but it had its darker side. The haircutting class ran a boutique right in the school. They would cut your hair for dirt-cheap. I never risked it. The food services class also ran the cafeteria. I never risked that, either.

The Electronics teacher, Mr. N., was ready to retire, and he ran a pretty unstructured class. It was my best preparation for university – it’s up to you to do the work. Mr. N. refused to baby-sit, but he was always there to answer questions or lend a hand with projects.

It was two hours every afternoon. The first hour with Mr. N was a formal class – teaching us Ohm’s Law and such; often going off into tangents (which we happily encouraged) about his time flying helicopters in the North, or how “in the good old days” he used to ram student’s heads through the walls when they pissed him off. Or he’d just blow stuff up.

The electronics workshop was great. It had a miniature computer-controlled drilling machine, a Commodore 64, and several computers that had been there since the 1970’s. There was even a Heathkit Hero 1 Robot, and a Jacob’s Ladder[5].

I had moved my bedroom into our newly renovated basement, (away from my brother!) My dad had mounted a door on its side into a recess in the wall as a desk. That sounds weird, but it meant I had a huge computer desk with room for the computer, monitor, books, and disks, with no table legs to bump into. It really worked. It was easy to fit several people in front of the makeshift desk to play multiplayer games, which was happening more and more often. It was strange playing multiplayer games on the computer, though; you had no way to “hide” your moves from your opponent like in a traditional board game. It lacked something.

A group of us also started playing the infamous board game Dungeons and Dragons every Saturday morning. Here I got to know 911 and Oracomm.

Somewhere in the midst of all this activity, Mr. The Kidd introduced me to Urban Spaceman, who in turn introduced me to Pteryx.

2. Organization

Pteryx and I hit it off instantly. His wacky humor and enthusiasm, combined with a strong mischievous streak, really clicked with me.

Due to a scheduling oddity, we ended up in the same high school Chemistry class even though we were a grade apart. The material was interesting, so we were motivated to keep on top of it, and paradoxically, we therefore had more time to goof off. The teacher, Mr. M, was tolerant of our antics as long as we kept our marks high and didn’t disrupt anyone else.

We also were both in the high school’s Drama club. I ran the sound and lights and had some bit parts; Pteryx had more onstage time and also helped out with the sound, especially the sound effects. He had a MIDI[6] keyboard and a separate MIDI-controlled sound effects generator, which was used for doorbells, rain, thunder, and whatever else we fancied.

Pteryx also had a Commodore 64, and a modem. Modems allowed you to connect computers together over phone lines, over any distance – the magic device I had been looking for. He downloaded games from friends in the closest city, which I thought was very cool. I managed to get one too, so we began calling each other with the modems to experiment with trading files, chatting, and just to teach ourselves this new technology.

***

One winter evening after a late Drama practice, we were all milling around the school’s pay phone, chatting while people waited for their rides. I hung around to see if I could catch a ride with someone or their parents and thus avoid the cold walk home.

Dawn, one of the drama club members who lived out of town, walked up to the payphone and dialed a long series of digits. She told the remote listener that she was just about to leave, would be home in 45 minutes or so. She said “uh-huh” a few times then hung up.

I stared at her, well, more specifically, the phone, with interest. “Hey, you didn’t use a quarter!” I observed. Hmm, free phone calls?

“I don’t have it here. I have the number memorized. Gotta start the long drive home. Bye!!!” She waved and left.

A thousand possibilities flew through my mind. Pteryx noticed the look on my face and laughed. “Maybe she’s really a super hacker, like in the movie Wargames.”

“YOU HAVEN’T SEEN WARGAMES?!?!?” he exclaimed. “I have to fix that. Anyway, there’s this scene, you see, our hero uses a piece of metal to get a free phone call. Hmmmmmm.”

A couple of days later, Pteryx and I stayed late after Drama, until everyone else had left. We unscrewed the payphone’s mouthpiece cover, and used a paperclip to short out the center contact to the little metal shelf that holds the phone book. A horrible skritch sound came from the speaker.

Pteryx dialed the local exchange and four random digits. I released the phone from the paperclip. We put our ears to the speaker. It was ringing.

“Hello, sorry, wrong number,” Pteryx snickered. We were nearly doubled over, trying to restrain our laughter and excitement.

Pteryx laughed out loud. “Hahaha, oops, he can’t hear us, we need to put the mouthpiece back on. Shit. Hahaha.” He continued to hold the phone while we chuckled.

Later we learned that you could jam the paper clip right through the center hole in the mouthpiece. It wasn’t very good for the phone, but it worked. This trick was fun and useful. It also made for a great bit of showmanship. Not everyone could relate to computers and such, but free phone calls were cool.

Soon afterwards, I was walking by the phone near the front door of the high school after classes had ended. The amount of snow falling outside was brutal; it was practically a blizzard. I saw Handcuffs (I swear that was her online handle later on), a casual acquaintance from Youth Group, looking really upset.

“I’m going to be two hours late getting home. My bus isn’t even here yet. I need to call my parents and ask them what to do. Can you lend me a quarter?”

I grinned. “I’ve got something better.” I pulled a paperclip out from the change pocket in my jeans, and in a fluid, well-practiced motion by now, jammed the paperclip into the mouthpiece, grounded it, and dialed her number. It started to ring and I handed her the phone.

She stared. “How the hell did you do that? Can you show me? Hello, Mom? Yeah, the weather’s shitty here too. The buses are late. Okay. Sure. Okay, I’ll head over to Grandma’s instead. Okay. Okay. Bye!” Most out-of-towners had arranged with a relative to crash with in case of bad weather keeping them in town.

***

A local computer store – I think it was the one I had won my C64 from some years earlier – opened an electronic Bulletin Board System (BBS) called Delphi. BBS’s allow you to call up a system with a computer modem, and exchange information, messages, even games, with other users. This was the first one ever in our town. Pteryx and I pounced on it with our modems.

Not surprisingly, I knew most of the people on it. Some I didn’t, others I figured out who they were and when I did, I was surprised. I had no idea they were into computers at all. There I met Sim – who I didn’t know as he was around 35 years old. I don’t think we ever met in person. He had all kinds of neat tricks and info to really master the C64. This guy knew all about the internals of the computer.

Best of all, Sim also had a huge list of BBS’s across North America. This got us going with reaching out to the outside world.

One of the members of Delphi took on a really nasty persona when online. I sort of knew him in person, but his conduct online was very strange. His spelling was atrocious, as though he was typing with oven mitts on. What was understandable was an assortment of rude insults directed at me. I brushed it off but it started to get really crazy. It was my first flame war. I don’t know how the System Operator (aka “Sysop”), the owner of the BBS, tolerated it.

I eventually exacted some minor revenge by secretly creating a user account on the BBS that was identical to my opponent’s. I posted all kinds of wacky apologies and buffoonery before posing as a computer virus running automatically, and then signed off the account.

The Sysop found out, and booted me off for three months. I didn’t miss it - much. Delphi closed a few weeks later, leaving us all stranded with our Canadian Tire 1200 bits-per-second modems and nothing to call with them. Except each other.

***

Before Delphi went down, my brother also got into computers, mostly IBM PCs and compatibles, but he was still intrigued by my C64 as I had a modem. For a time we settled our differences through playing Archon, a game that combined elements of chess and combat.

“Here, let me show you.” I called Delphi up with my modem. I was using the handle Perseus at the time.

Hardly anyone uses his or her real name on BBS. A handle or code-name, like on CB radio, made you basically anonymous and added a bit of mystery to the whole experience.

“See, first it asks for my name and password. I type in Perseus, then my password.”

“Listen, it’s just echoing back dots, so people like you can’t see the real password.”

The familiar sibling pattern emerged, resulting in considerable shouting and even some parental involvement. Neither of us got in any real trouble, but I was pretty upset about the whole event. It was practically a repeat of the color TV episode.

Pteryx and I were pretty good friends by this point. We talked about more than just computers – girls, school, music, family, whatever. I told him about the argument with my brother, which turned out to be a very good thing.

***

Soon we were off school for the Christmas break. Pteryx had just made an interesting discovery. The more I thought about it, the more I realized it was true.

He had observed that purple Christmas lights were extremely rare, and therefore, he reasoned, quite valuable in and of themselves. Nearly all other colors appeared on people’s houses, but only a few purple ones were to be seen.

In a foreshadowing of things to come, Pteryx organized a small blitz across the town to grab as many purple lights as possible, which I reluctantly participated in. I never found out what he did with them all.

***

On January 1, 1991 at about 12:01 am, due to a miscalculation, I was with a bunch of friends in the 7-11 store picking up some snacks for our New Year’s Eve party. I spotted a book on the Top 40 rack:

“The Cuckoo’s Egg - Tracking a Spy through the Maze of Computer Espionage.”

It intrigued me, so I bought it. The reason I remember the date so vividly wasn’t so much for the book itself, but the fact that the Progressive Conservative Government had just introduced the Goods and Services Tax (GST) in Canada. It had come into effect about thirty seconds earlier.

This was a real annoyance, and at a twenty-four hour store like 7-11, they had to just abruptly start charging GST at midnight. The GST is a 7% tax on everything that can be bought in Canada, except groceries. I wondered if it was the first GST purchase in all of Western Canada.

I’d finished The Cuckoo’s Egg before school resumed a few days later, and lent it to Pteryx. He also devoured it, and it was all we talked about for weeks in Chemistry class.

The Cuckoo’s Egg was about Hunter - a German hacker, based in Hanover, Germany. Hunter broke into US military systems and was paid off by the KGB. It was written by Cliff Stoll, a former astronomer turned system administrator. Stoll managed one of the systems at the University of Berkeley that Hunter used as a gateway, and was able to watch the hacker’s every move. Most of the hacker’s activity was on Tymnet, a vast computer network spanning the US.

***

The high school payphone had an “Out of Order” sign on it when we returned from Christmas break. The principal made an announcement over the P.A. system warning against “vandalizing” the pay phone.

A new phone eventually replaced it. This new phone had a new style of mouthpiece, with no holes near the middle.

3. Start Your Hacking!

We wanted to go and see this incredible world of computer networks, phone switches, and global systems for ourselves. We had no idea where to begin, though.

How the heck did you get into Tymnet with a Commodore 64 and a Canadian Tire modem?

Pteryx and I had been calling long-distance BBS’s with our modems for a while. He had even found the Anarchist’s Cookbook, which describes how to build bombs among other things, in his online travels. Mr. M let us mix up some of the lesser explosives as an “extra project” and set them off in the Chemistry Lab after class.

Pteryx lived on a farm a bit south of town, and his family had a party line. Use of modems on a party line was strongly discouraged, possibly illegal. The reason was that a modem completely tied up the line – for a dozen houses. If someone at one of the other houses needed an ambulance, police, doctor, etc, and picked up their phone, all they would hear was the wreeeeeeeeeeeep of the modem and have no way to ask the person to hang up.

“Yes, this is Mr. McKenzie. I’m on a party line. I would like to make a long-distance call, please.”

Pteryx would give the BBS number, and as soon as he heard the familiar wreeeeeeeeeeeep of the remote modem, he would quickly activate his own prepared modem, and hang up the cordless phone. Viola! It was a carefully timed procedure, striking a delicate balance between confusing the remote modem and raising the operator’s suspicions.

I would never been able to pull it off, but Pteryx was a talented actor, and therefore, a talented social engineer. Social engineering was the name given to tricking someone out of his or her password, or into giving you something for free.

So to whom were the calls charged to? Initially, we used our high school’s modem dial-out line. If somebody questioned the entries on the bill and called the numbers, our logic went, a modem would answer and they would think nothing of it after that.

Then we found numbers that didn’t exist. Not busy or disconnected lines, but number that you just dialed…and then they sat there. No rings, no busy signals, just mysterious black holes.

Pteryx found all kind of wonderful phone numbers in our local exchange. Numbers that had a recorded voice saying “Eleven…Eleven...Eleven…” or “Ten…Ten…Ten…” Some answered with random beeps that were not a modem or a fax machine. (We tried calling them with both.)

I don’t know how he found them, whether he sat all day calling numbers (a process we eventually automated) or if he had a list from a third party. I doubted he got any of this info from his mother, who worked at the Telephone System. I never asked where he got them.

Sometimes he would call the numbers with the recorded numbers and argue with them. “Twelve! Fourteen! Three! I said Three! Listen to me already!” To this day, Pteryx assures me he’s not a nutcase.

***

It was pretty obvious from the Cuckoo’s Egg that Tymnet was the place to be. How to get there, though? We didn’t know how.

Eventually, a number of leads pointed us to Datapac, the Canadian equivalent of Tymnet:

* The high school had an account on something called HSNET that connected schools across Canada. You called a local Datapac number, and then entered a series of secret codes (which the HSNET software did for you), which connected you to the remote system. Its location was unknown, and there were no long distance charges.

* Local “wired” farmers used an online system called Grassroots that provided everything from weather forecasts to current grain prices. It worked the same way – a local call to Datapac, connect to a provincially shared system. The local TV channel used Grassroots to check and display the weather forecast. (It was funny to see a Commodore 64 providing the graphics for the newscast.)

* CompuServe and QuantumLink (a C64 online service) came with booklets of numbers to phone from any city or town – even ours – to get into their system. Surely they didn’t have a node in all of these places? It must be some kind of global network: Datapac.

My Youth Group leader was on QuantumLink, they handed out connection kits every year much like they do today[7]. He gave me a stack of the booklets. They listed every Datapac and Tymnet phone number in North America. This was a goldmine of information.

* Much later, we realized that the Interac/Plus network machines at grocery stores in Canada connect over Datapac. It says so in large letters on the back of the magnetic card reader!

Therefore, penetrating Datapac became the first goal. The phone number was trivial to find. It was in the QuantumLink Booklets, even in the phone book under “Datapac”!

We dialed Datapac, and it connected. Nothing happened. It just sat there. We needed something to activate it though, some kind of password. We began the hunt for it.

***

Chemistry class discussions had moved to organizing the hacking/cracking/phreaking effort. We had heard of similar groups we wanted to emulate: UPI (United Phreakers Inc), Triad, Revenge, Fairlight, and dozens more. We knew a lot of people, and realized there was a broad range of skills around, but it was all so chaotic. An organized group was needed to pull it together. We toyed with names, and logos, and eventually decided on:

“Ascension International Cracking”

We even made membership cards. People were continually changing their handles, either to keep with the times or cover their online tracks. Maybe they were just looking for their online “identity.”

The high school electronics lab became a headquarters of sorts for AIC. We programmed the Hero 1 robot to say “AIC Rules!” when we arrived.

The electronics program attracted two polarized groups of people. There were the future techs and engineers who wanted to get into electronics or electrical engineering, or audio equipment repair, even telecommunications. Then there were the sorts who were after an easy credit. The sort to wear thick leather jackets and Slayer T-shirts year round, all day long. Every high school has them[8].

One of the latter was nicknamed Slimer. He dabbled in some of our hacking activities and used Slimer as a handle, but I don’t think he realized the reasons for his given handle (think personal hygiene). We both liked thrash metal music, so we got along all right, but his drug habit was a bit extreme - even for his crowd.

We were bored one day. So, we started hooking things up to the Jacob’s Ladder in the lab. Things like forks, spoons, blackboards, solder, capacitors, etc.

Slimer waited until I was adjusting the angle of the fork at the top of the Ladder, and suddenly became all wild-eyed and flipped the transformer on. I got an incredibly nasty shock, but survived with no burns or other lasting effects. Slimer and I never spoke again. He became increasingly more freaked out over the years, ultimately ending up in a detox center in a nearby city.

Another guy in the class was watching me frantically type one day while I wrote up directions to crack the codes on a recent game release. I stopped and nodded, asking what he wanted.

“I’ve been watching this stuff you’re doing, and the people you talk to.”

“Are you like this ringleader of a giant hacker gang or something?” He adjusted his leather jacket.

Warily, I explained that no, while we had a name and all that, it was just a few friends trading games. Really.

“Guys like you need protection, man. Somebody to run with the evidence and burn it in case the cops come.” We both looked at my box of floppy disks. “I’ll do that. If I see cops running in here, I’ll hit the kill switch. Your codes will be destroyed. You can count on me.” He pointed at himself and nodded.

The relaxed atmosphere in the course made it a hangout for people from the other vocational courses to come during their breaks. The place was always busy with people coming and going. I only knew who was actually enrolled in the course at exam time. I even stopped in outside of class time myself now and then, usually when I escaped my morning computer course

***

“I have the Datapac password!” Pteryx exclaimed over the phone one Saturday morning.

“What? How? Tell me!” It was the time of day I usually defined as “too early”. I woke up abruptly, though, and reached for a pen and my handy notepad.

“Nahhhh…that would be too easy!” he taunted. “But I’ll give you a hint.”

I was pretty sure that he’d tell me eventually, but I suddenly wanted to – needed to – know the password, now!

“Here’s your hint. It’s two characters, and your brother would easily figure it out. Gotta go, bye!” -Click-

I stared at the blank notepad. What was that supposed to mean? I quickly fired up my terminal program and dialed Datapac, then stated at the equally blank screen.

My mind returned to the real world. Today, I remembered, I was supposed to do some yard work at a local Motel to raise money for the Youth Group’s trip to Edmonton. I was supposed to show up in about an hour. It was a quick 5-minute bike ride away.

The light went on. I had it. I returned to the computer, and typed in the password.

In fact, the two dots weren’t really a password, just an acknowledgement of the connection, so that Datapac knew that something “live” was on the other end. That just gets you into the ‘neighborhood’ so to speak; the cool stuff was still a NUI (Network User Identifier), and some passwords away.

***

“Yes. I missed work on Saturday, thanks to you.” I made a face, and then grinned back. “So? How do we go from there, to anything interesting? All I keep getting is…”

We quickly picked up HSNET’s access code and our school’s NUI. Pteryx was at school, using the modem, and reprogrammed the phone number to be that of my home number instead of Datapac’s number. The school computer dialed my computer.

I was at home at my computer, pretending to be Datapac. This fooled the HSNET software into giving me the codes it used to connect. It gave me the NUI, but not the password. I didn’t know, yet, how Datapac responded to a valid NUI. We were one step closer.

***

The computer courses at our high school were excruciatingly boring. Other students were writing BASIC programs to print their names on the screen. Pteryx, our good friend Kang, Oracomm, and I were developing our own BBS software from scratch, and causing random mayhem.

We constantly corrected the teacher, rerouted screens to computers on the far side of the classroom, or even programmed all the computers to show Mickey Mouse giving the user the middle finger when they were switched on. The whole school was soon using AIC BASIC to do their assignments too.

I wrote most of my assignments in the C++ or Assembler languages. These were incomprehensible to the teacher but gave the correct answers. We did this to protest the fact that we couldn’t challenge the credit and move on. It was a prerequisite for some upper-year courses, which we needed if we wanted to go to University.

This had its saving graces. The daily assignments took me about 30 seconds to write, so I would excuse myself to the washroom and go visit my girlfriend who had no classes that hour, or wander to the Electronics Lab, or across the hall to the Business Education Computer Lab, which is where the dial-out modem and link into HSNET was kept.

Mr. Spaced was a pretty good guy to have for a teacher for that course. He was very easygoing, if a bit ‘spaced out’, hence our nickname for him. He would occasionally freeze in place for several minutes while looking at the whiteboard and working out how to best explain a programming concept. Half the class snuck out during these episodes.

Our high school also participated in the International Computer Problem Solving Contests, coordinated by Mr. Spaced. We entered three years in a row as Ascension.

The contests were a good challenge. You had two hours to write five programs to solve five different problems. The problems typically were some kind of sorting task, or a logic or mathematical problem.

The trips were typically a few days to a nearby city. It was a great opportunity to socialize and generally party, along with a chance to miss some school. Mr. Spaced always took us to the seediest pool hall he could find.

Every year we came in second in the province, only to be beaten by a mysterious entity known as Ping. Who or what was it?

We noted the NUIs of all the systems we used in the contests, and tried breaking back into them after returning home.

***

The game swapping still continued, as we began our hacking, though not as feverishly. Why bother swapping disks, when the ultimate game was on the other end of the modem? Still, some games were worth having, and were in high enough demand that we wanted to stick an AIC logo on them and distribute them.

One such game was Pool of Radiance, a computerized version of Dungeons and Dragons. It took up eight disks, had first-person perspective, and a long, complicated plot. One of the greatest games ever.

Typical copy protection in the C64 era was to deliberately place errors on the floppy disks right at the factory. The first part of the game was in fact a program that made the disk drive skip the damaged sections, and then get to get to the real game. You couldn’t copy these disks easily, as the copy program would gag on the errors. Special copiers like Fast Hack’ Em filled the niche for copying these games.

Another approach was to have the program ask for a code word from the manual or a code wheel, which you would only have if you bought the game or spent a lot of money at the library photocopier. Pool of Radiance used this technique, with two code wheels which aligned Elf and Dwarf letters to give you English words like dragon, wyvern, zombie, etc.

Rather than try to rip apart the original code wheel and photocopy it, we wanted to do something more elegant. We had played games that we knew were copy protected if you bought them, but these versions had no passwords at all. Somebody had rewritten the game to skip the passwords.

Pteryx suggested a simplified version of this. Why not zoom onto the disk itself with a special disk-editing program, find the words (which was easy, as they were regular English), and change them all to the same thing?

“I’ve done it before, it’s easy,” he assured me. “I did it to a game called Hacker II once, to change the opening story as a joke.”

Then it clicked. Flamingo->Bird->Archeopteryx->Pteryx. Greek for “wing”, or something.

I told him about my early encounter with Hacker II and its hacked message. We both laughed and laughed; he had never realized anyone had ever seen “that copy.”

***

The phone system around Pteryx’s family farm had been upgraded, and not only did everyone now have a private line, Pteryx got his own personal phone line. He quickly set up the Blasphemous Rumours BBS on his computer, named after a song by Depeche Mode. It was our very own BBS, which gave us complete control of the contents.

Blasphemous Rumours was running on his Commodore 128 (the next generation after the Commodore 64) and some second-hand 1541 disk drives, all wired together to give an unprecedented two megabytes of storage![9] Yet another 1541 drive ran the BBS software itself and stored people’s messages. Blasphemous Rumours stored some of our best games, demos, and in a top-secret hidden area, as much as we could find, read, or write about hacking.

***

When Pteryx and another friend named Valheru finally obtained the high school HSNET account password, I though they had hacked the HSNET software, or used a line analyzer, or some other high-tech tool. I nearly died laughing when they gave me the password. Valheru had guessed it in about 3 tries. We made him an AIC member after that. Here is the password; I give it as an example of a really bad one:

Now, guess our Business teacher’s son’s name! This teacher also ran the Business Education computer lab. The funny thing is, we knew “leahcim” well and even traded the occasional game with him. I never told him about the password.

That opened the floodgates. We were into HSNET and called up the master list of users, and went to work. This was the (humorous) code that got us into the rest of the system:

In all we got into about 40 accounts on the HSNET system. Many had not been used in over a year; we assigned new passwords to these and gave one to each AIC member. This became our online messaging system. We could use its internal BBS feature to communicate with each other as a primitive form of e-mail, which we thought was amazing.

We ran into another user on HSNET who kept really strange hours. Typically nobody was on after school hours except us. Pteryx was convinced he/she was another hacker, and sent him/her coded messages and poems to determine if it was the case or not. We never found out for sure who it was.

Now that we knew what form the NUI’s took, we began exploring in earnest. We also found our way onto the Datapac Information System, and that was the ultimate source of information. It described in hold-your-hand detail how to make the jump from Datapac into Tymnet and several other international systems. Tymnet had its caché after reading the Cuckoo’s Egg, so we focused on it. Soon we were in.

***

We met Wolf in the Electronics course. His father was the head of the local Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) detachment. For the past few summers we had gone water-skiing behind Wolf’s father’s boat every couple of days. Wolf would drive, I would “spot”, and 911 would ski. Oracomm and Valheru would join us occasionally.

Around February 1991, Valheru, 911, and I wanted to try something similar, in anticipation of the far-off summer: Skiing while being pulled behind a snowmobile.

The arrangement was probably pretty safe. 911 drove the snowmobile as it was his, I sat on it behind him, facing backwards to spot, and Valheru did the skiing. We used the same hand signals as water skiing. We chose a nice flat spot to test this new activity: The new Catholic Church parking lot at the south edge of town. (There are a lot of churches in our hometown.)

It worked quite well, and just as I was about to take a turn, the RCMP showed up, positioning their car between the snowmobile trailer and us. Busted! The officer waited patiently as we approached.

We all knew the drill. Police in small communities must be very bored. As my 16^th birthday had approached, my parents had saved and bought a 1980 Dodge Aspen so I could prepare to get my driver’s license. It was a large and intimidating vehicle. I was pulled over about 50 times during my high school tenure, for nothing at all. Seatbelt check. Was anyone drinking in the car? Any illicit substances? Each time they took my name and phone number, nothing ever came of it.

So, we pulled up, turned off the snowmobile’s motor, and presented ourselves. The officer nodded at us.

“You realize that operating a motorized recreation vehicle is illegal within town boundaries? This could be impounded.” He motioned to the snowmobile.

“Yes sir. I though we were out of the town boundaries, though. Where is the boundary, for next time?” 911 asked.

“A bit farther south, by the cemetery. But I wouldn’t be caught dead there. Ha, ha.”

“That’s not all. You,” - he pointed to me - “were riding a recreational vehicle in an unsafe manner. I think. And you, “ – he pointed to Valheru, who had taken off his helmet but was still wearing his skis and holding the tow rope – “There’s nothing specifically illegal about what you’re doing, yet. Probably a general stupidity clause will apply, though.”

He proceeded to take our names, parent’s names, addresses, and phone numbers. He even took our dates of birth. Valheru was so nervous, he forgot his.

“Excuse me for just a second.” He reached for his radio. “Car Three here. Following up on the noise complaint, talking to some teens about skidoo safety.”

“Too late to bother, they’d already loaded it up.” We looked at the snowmobile, still sitting in the parking lot. “Just a warning this time.”

He told us to stay out of trouble and get going before someone called his bluff.

***

In March of 1991 our Youth Group rented a van and went on our planned trip to Edmonton. It was a sightseeing trip and one of the places we went to was the Telephone Historical Centre Museum and Science Centre. Handcuffs, Geronimo, and I were extremely interested in this. It had working demonstrations of early phone switches, and experiments that helped visitors learn the fundamental principles of how the phone system works. Very cool indeed. If only they knew.

We also went to the West Edmonton Mall. This is probably Canada’s largest mall; it has several hotels, a wave pool, even roller coasters and other rides right inside the mall.

In the wave pool, one particularly large wave sent me crashing into a fellow swimmer, female. I apologized profusely, and much to my surprise, she started chatting with me. It turned out she was also just visiting Edmonton, and she only lived in a city a few hours from my own hometown. Wow! We swapped phone numbers, and soon after returning to our respective homes we were into the long-distance dating thing.

She had no direct access or interest in computers, but one of her best friends did. I assigned her a cracked HSNET userid, and sent her friend detailed directions on how to make the free call into Datapac then access the account[10]. We exchanged the occasional letter, both through HSNET and ‘snail mail’. It eventually fizzled due to the difficulty of getting together in person, but we stayed friends and went to each other’s high school graduations.

***

With his own phone line, Pteryx could run his own BBS, or call other BBS’s all he liked without interfering with his parents’ line. He could also talk to me on his parents’ line while he hacked simultaneously. I still had to ask my parents’ permission if I wanted to tie up the phone line for several hours. It also meant I had to hang up the modem if I wanted to call someone to ask them to look at something I had found.

One afternoon in the summer of 1991, I called Pteryx up. “Hey, have a look at your BBS. Something’s up.”

Pteryx talked to me on his cordless as he walked. This was at least his second cordless phone. The first one had met an untimely end.

Pretending that this inanimate object with my voice was some sort of voodoo device, he would taunt the phone, or feed it to his turkeys. Once he dropped it in a bag of potato chips. Another time he was talking to me on the cordless phone, beside his pool. He went to jump onto an inner tube…and missed. I heard a splash, a scream, and then the line went dead. End of phone.

The phone was safe this afternoon. He looked at his BBS screen. “Yeah, so somebody’s connected. Wait a minute…it’s you. How are you talking to me at the same time then…?” Then it clicked. “No way!”

He came over that weekend and we fired up A Higher Power BBS on my computer using my phone line. This served as the AIC on-line headquarters. It stored most of the message boards and text files, ranging from music and movie reviews to hacking (in the hidden section). Blasphemous Rumours was now devoted to game distribution as it had more storage space. Pteryx gave me his second-hand Commodore 128 to use for the BBS and bought himself a new one.

***

Pteryx had stayed at my place in town for the weekend while we set up the BBS, and I was driving him back out to his farm in the Aspen.

I had had my license for a few months now, and was quite confident flying along the gravel section roads at 100 km/h. These section roads were raised about 10 feet above the ditches on either side to facilitate water run-off. And they had fresh gravel applied every summer.

The car swayed and swerved, and ultimately went sideways into the ditch at about 60 km/h. We skidded to a bone-jarring stop. The car pitched as we stopped in a huge cloud of gravel dust, halfway down the ditch with the front end at the bottom. At least I hadn’t rolled it. As the dust settled and we partially recovered, someone quipped:

We crawled out of the car to survey the damage. There was none we could see, just some scrapes and a lot of dust. Then we heard a car door slam.

We couldn’t believe it. It was Mr. Serious, our Physics teacher. We were mortified. He was a no-nonsense teacher, but really knew his stuff. Or so we thought. He lived in town, at the far end. We never found out what he was doing five miles south of town on an empty section road.

Having assured him we were all right, he offered to help us get the car out of the ditch. He proceeded to pull a little yellow rope from his trunk, and tried to pull my dad’s car out of the ditch with his own. This was against the angle of the car, and with a car half the mass of the almighty Aspen. After the rope broke, we convinced him to drive us the rest of the way to Pteryx’s farm.

Pteryx’s parents weren’t home that day, but he was well on his way to getting his license too. His scheme of the moment was to use his parents’ half-ton truck to pull the car out.

We went into the barn and found the truck. The keys were in it. We opened the barn door, and Pteryx drove while I spotted to make sure that the bumper didn’t catch on the barn door. The bumper wasn’t the problem.

Pteryx had failed to notice the truck driver’s door was still partially open. As the truck came out, it ripped the door of the barn off.

Dejected, we walked to the next farm over and asked for help. This time, they employed a front-end loader and heavy chain which was much more effective.

My parents never found out, Pteryx’s parents made him repair the barn door and wondered for many years afterwards what he thought he was doing that afternoon, as well as why the truck door never shut properly, though they strongly suspected that there was some unspoken truth.

4. The Great Scan

Pteryx and I poked and prodded around Datapac and Tymnet, and found a few dozen NUIs and Datapac access numbers, but after a week or two we were going crazy typing in all the numbers. Hand scanning, as it’s called, was not the way to explore Tymnet.

1310600001
NO CONNECTION

1310600002
NO CONNECTION

1310600003
DATAPAC: CALL CONNECTED TO 1310600003

WELCOME TO XYZ INTERNATIONAL PLEASE LOGIN

We would find a system, and poke and prod at it for a while, guessing passwords, trying to determine what it was, or what type of system it was. Then, it was back to the hand scanning until we found something else.

13106000514
NO CONNECTION

13106000515
NO CONNECTION

13106000516
NO CONNECTION

13106000517
NO CONNECTION

“Look, this boring, repetitive typing, I’m so sick of it. Isn’t it something the computer could do on its own?” Pteryx mused.

“Yeah, maybe, but how do you program a modem?” I replied. “I have no idea how you do that, from one of our own programs. Besides, you need to be watching to wait and expect the response.”

“Should be possible. Activate the modem somehow, and send commands to it. Get into Tymnet, and run a loop of all the possibilities. Have your program check the response, it it’s not ‘NO CONNECTION’, keep it.”

I thought about it and researched the techniques for several days. It turned out to be pretty easy. The program is given in Appendix A. It’s 20 lines of badly organized BASIC code.

Pteryx and I split Tymnet in two, and started the systems running, on average 20 hours a day over about four weeks. The BBS’s were taken down during this time. Other AIC members, notably Oracomm and 911, scanned other networks like Datapac and Telenet, and looked for gateways into other systems.

I also had a grand scheme to do the same to just our town – to see what modems were lurking in our own backyard.

This process is called WarDialing - named in honor of the movie Wargames (which I still hadn’t seen).

Occasionally we found something we recognized, which was very cool. Some notables

o Dialout Servers in Aurora, Illinois and Olympia, Washington.

This was fun. I could dial the local Datapac number, leap to this NUI, and navigate a very easy to use menu system. One of the menu options was Dial Out. I looked in my QuantumLink booklets for the Tymnet dialup line in Aurora or Olympia, and entered it. It worked. I entered the famous “..” code and tada! I was back in the Tymnet network, and my connection would trace to Aurora, Illinois or Olympia, Washington, not my hometown. I should have used this a lot more. The problem was that going through two ‘layers’ really slowed down the connection.