A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z [^a-zA-Z]
Appendix A --- Appendix B --- Appendix C
***************** This appendix contains several legends and fables that illuminate the meaning of various entries in the lexicon.
=======================
"The word hack doesn't really have 69 different meanings", according
to MIT hacker Phil Agre. "In fact, hack has only one meaning, an
extremely subtle and profound one which defies articulation. Which
connotation is implied by a given use of the word depends in similarly
profound ways on the context. Similar remarks apply to a couple of
other hacker words, most notably random."
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.
An important secondary meaning of hack is `a creative practical
joke'. This kind of hack is easier to explain to non-hackers than the
programming kind. Of course, some hacks have both natures; see the
lexicon entries for pseudo and kgbvax. But here are some examples
of pure practical jokes that illustrate the hacking spirit:
In 1961, students from Caltech (California Institute of
Technology, in Pasadena) hacked the Rose Bowl football game. One
student posed as a reporter and `interviewed' the director of the
University of Washington card stunts (such stunts involve people
in the stands who hold up colored cards to make pictures). The
reporter learned exactly how the stunts were operated, and also
that the director would be out to dinner later.
While the director was eating, the students (who called
themselves the `Fiendish Fourteen') picked a lock and stole a
blank direction sheet for the card stunts. They then had a
printer run off 2300 copies of the blank. The next day they
picked the lock again and stole the master plans for the stunts
-- large sheets of graph paper colored in with the stunt
pictures. Using these as a guide, they made new instructions for
three of the stunts on the duplicated blanks. Finally, they
broke in once more, replacing the stolen master plans and
substituting the stack of diddled instruction sheets for the
original set.
The result was that three of the pictures were totally different.
Instead of `WASHINGTON', the word ``CALTECH' was flashed. Another
stunt showed the word `HUSKIES', the Washington nickname, but
spelled it backwards. And what was supposed to have been a picture of
a husky instead showed a beaver. (Both Caltech and MIT use the beaver
--- nature's engineer -- as a mascot.)
After the game, the Washington faculty athletic representative
said: "Some thought it ingenious; others were indignant." The
Washington student body president remarked: "No hard feelings,
but at the time it was unbelievable. We were amazed."
This is now considered a classic hack, particularly because revising
the direction sheets constituted a form of programming.
Here is another classic hack:
On November 20, 1982, MIT hacked the Harvard-Yale football game.
Just after Harvard's second touchdown against Yale, in the first
quarter, a small black ball popped up out of the ground at the
40-yard line, and grew bigger, and bigger, and bigger. The
letters `MIT' appeared all over the ball. As the players and
officials stood around gawking, the ball grew to six feet in
diameter and then burst with a bang and a cloud of white smoke.
The "Boston Globe" later reported: "If you want to know the
truth, MIT won The Game."
The prank had taken weeks of careful planning by members of MIT's
Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity. The device consisted of a
weather balloon, a hydraulic ram powered by Freon gas to lift it
out of the ground, and a vacuum-cleaner motor to inflate it.
They made eight separate expeditions to Harvard Stadium between 1
and 5 A.M., locating an unused 110-volt circuit in the stadium
and running buried wires from the stadium circuit to the 40-yard
line, where they buried the balloon device. When the time came
to activate the device, two fraternity members had merely to flip
a circuit breaker and push a plug into an outlet.
This stunt had all the earmarks of a perfect hack: surprise,
publicity, the ingenious use of technology, safety, and
harmlessness. The use of manual control allowed the prank to be
timed so as not to disrupt the game (it was set off between
plays, so the outcome of the game would not be unduly affected).
The perpetrators had even thoughtfully attached a note to the
balloon explaining that the device was not dangerous and
contained no explosives.
Harvard president Derek Bok commented: "They have an awful lot of
clever people down there at MIT, and they did it again."
President Paul E. Gray of MIT said: "There is absolutely no truth
to the rumor that I had anything to do with it, but I wish there
were."
The hacks above are verifiable history; they can be proved to have
happened. Many other classic-hack stories from MIT and elsewhere,
though retold as history, have the characteristics of what Jan
Brunvand has called `urban folklore' (see FOAF). Perhaps the best
known of these is the legend of the infamous trolley-car hack, an
alleged incident in which engineering students are said to have welded
a trolley car to its tracks with thermite. Numerous versions of this
have been recorded from the 1940s to the present, most set at MIT but
at least one very detailed version set at CMU.
Brian Leibowitz has researched MIT hacks both real and mythical
extensively; the interested reader is referred to his delightful
pictorial compendium "The Journal of the Institute for Hacks,
Tomfoolery, and Pranks" (MIT Museum, 1990; ISBN 0-917027-03-5).
Finally, here is a story about one of the classic computer hacks.
Back in the mid-1970s, several of the system support staff at
Motorola discovered a relatively simple way to crack system
security on the Xerox CP-V timesharing system. Through a simple
programming strategy, it was possible for a user program to trick
the system into running a portion of the program in `master mode'
(supervisor state), in which memory protection does not apply.
The program could then poke a large value into its `privilege
level' byte (normally write-protected) and could then proceed to
bypass all levels of security within the file-management system,
patch the system monitor, and do numerous other interesting
things. In short, the barn door was wide open.
Motorola quite properly reported this problem to Xerox via an
official `level 1 SIDR' (a bug report with an intended urgency of
`needs to be fixed yesterday'). Because the text of each SIDR
was entered into a database that could be viewed by quite a
number of people, Motorola followed the approved procedure: they
simply reported the problem as `Security SIDR', and attached all
of the necessary documentation, ways-to-reproduce, etc.
The CP-V people at Xerox sat on their thumbs; they either didn't
realize the severity of the problem, or didn't assign the
necessary operating-system-staff resources to develop and
distribute an official patch.
Months passed. The Motorola guys pestered their Xerox
field-support rep, to no avail. Finally they decided to take
direct action, to demonstrate to Xerox management just how easily
the system could be cracked and just how thoroughly the security
safeguards could be subverted.
They dug around in the operating-system listings and devised a
thoroughly devilish set of patches. These patches were then
incorporated into a pair of programs called `Robin Hood' and
`Friar Tuck'. Robin Hood and Friar Tuck were designed to run as
`ghost jobs' (daemons, in UNIX terminology); they would use the
existing loophole to subvert system security, install the
necessary patches, and then keep an eye on one another's statuses
in order to keep the system operator (in effect, the superuser)
from aborting them.
One fine day, the system operator on the main CP-V software
development system in El Segundo was surprised by a number of
unusual phenomena. These included the following:
* Tape drives would rewind and dismount their tapes in the
middle of a job.
* Disk drives would seek back and forth so rapidly that they
would attempt to walk across the floor (see walking_drives
).
* The card-punch output device would occasionally start up of
itself and punch a lace_card. These would usually jam in
the punch.
* The console would print snide and insulting messages from
Robin Hood to Friar Tuck, or vice versa.
* The Xerox card reader had two output stackers; it could be
instructed to stack into A, stack into B, or stack into A
(unless a card was unreadable, in which case the bad card
was placed into stacker B). One of the patches installed by
the ghosts added some code to the card-reader
driver... after reading a card, it would flip over to the
opposite stacker. As a result, card decks would divide
themselves in half when they were read, leaving the operator
to recollate them manually.
Naturally, the operator called in the operating-system
developers. They found the bandit ghost jobs running, and X'ed
them... and were once again surprised. When Robin Hood was X'ed,
the following sequence of events took place:
!X id1
id1: Friar Tuck... I am under attack! Pray save me!
id1: Off (aborted)
id2: Fear not, friend Robin! I shall rout the Sheriff
of Nottingham's men!
id1: Thank you, my good fellow!
Each ghost-job would detect the fact that the other had been
killed, and would start a new copy of the recently slain program
within a few milliseconds. The only way to kill both ghosts was
to kill them simultaneously (very difficult) or to deliberately
crash the system.
Finally, the system programmers did the latter -- only to find
that the bandits appeared once again when the system rebooted!
It turned out that these two programs had patched the boot-time
OS image (the kernel file, in UNIX terms) and had added
themselves to the list of programs that were to be started at
boot time.
The Robin Hood and Friar Tuck ghosts were finally eradicated when
the system staff rebooted the system from a clean boot-tape and
reinstalled the monitor. Not long thereafter, Xerox released a
patch for this problem.
It is alleged that Xerox filed a complaint with Motorola's
management about the merry-prankster actions of the two employees
in question. It is not recorded that any serious disciplinary
action was taken against either of them.
A Tale of Hackish Ingenuity:
=============================================
Here is a true story about a glass tty: One day an MIT hacker was in a
motorcycle accident and broke his leg. He had to stay in the hospital
quite a while, and got restless because he couldn't hack. Two of
his friends therefore took a terminal and a modem for it to the
hospital, so that he could use the computer by telephone from his
hospital bed.
Now this happened some years before the spread of home computers, and
computer terminals were not a familiar sight to the average person.
When the two friends got to the hospital, a guard stopped them and
asked what they were carrying. They explained that they wanted to
take a computer terminal to their friend who was a patient.
The guard got out his list of things that patients were permitted to
have in their rooms: TV, radio, electric razor, typewriter, tape
player, ... no computer terminals. Computer terminals weren't on the
list, so the guard wouldn't let it in. Rules are rules, you know.
(This guard was clearly a droid.)
Fair enough, said the two friends, and they left again. They were
frustrated, of course, because they knew that the terminal was as
harmless as a TV or anything else on the list... which gave them an
idea.
The next day they returned, and the same thing happened: a guard
stopped them and asked what they were carrying. They said: "This is a
TV typewriter!" The guard was skeptical, so they plugged it in and
demonstrated it. "See? You just type on the keyboard and what you
type shows up on the TV screen." Now the guard didn't stop to think
about how utterly useless a typewriter would be that didn't produce
any paper copies of what you typed; but this was clearly a TV
typewriter, no doubt about it. So he checked his list: "A TV is all
right, a typewriter is all right ... okay, take it on in!"
[Historical note: Many years ago, "Popular Electronics" published
solder-it-yourself plans for a TV typewriter. Despite the essential
uselessness of the device, it was an enormously popular project.
Steve Ciarcia, the man behind "Byte" magazine's "Circuit Cellar"
feature, resurrected this ghost in one of his books of the early
1980s. He ascribed its popularity (no doubt correctly) to the feeling
of power the builder could achieve by being able to decide himself
what would be shown on the TV. -- ESR]
[Antihistorical note: On September 23rd, 1992, the L.A. Times ran the
following bit of filler:
Solomon Waters of Altadena, a 6-year-old first-grader, came home
from his first day of school and excitedly told his mother how he
had written on "a machine that looks like a computer -- but
without the TV screen." She asked him if it could have been a
"typewriter." "Yeah! Yeah!" he said. "That's what it was
called."
I have since investigated this matter and determined that many of
today's teenagers have never seen a slide rule, either.... -- ESR]
======================= Some years ago, I (GLS) was snooping around in the cabinets that housed the MIT AI Lab's PDP-10, and noticed a little switch glued to the frame of one cabinet. It was obviously a homebrew job, added by one of the lab's hardware hackers (no one knows who). You don't touch an unknown switch on a computer without knowing what it does, because you might crash the computer. The switch was labeled in a most unhelpful way. It had two positions, and scrawled in pencil on the metal switch body were the words `magic' and `more magic'. The switch was in the `more magic' position. I called another hacker over to look at it. He had never seen the switch before either. Closer examination revealed that the switch had only one wire running to it! The other end of the wire did disappear into the maze of wires inside the computer, but it's a basic fact of electricity that a switch can't do anything unless there are two wires connected to it. This switch had a wire connected on one side and no wire on its other side. It was clear that this switch was someone's idea of a silly joke. Convinced by our reasoning that the switch was inoperative, we flipped it. The computer instantly crashed. Imagine our utter astonishment. We wrote it off as coincidence, but nevertheless restored the switch to the `more magic' position before reviving the computer. A year later, I told this story to yet another hacker, David Moon as I recall. He clearly doubted my sanity, or suspected me of a supernatural belief in the power of this switch, or perhaps thought I was fooling him with a bogus saga. To prove it to him, I showed him the very switch, still glued to the cabinet frame with only one wire connected to it, still in the `more magic' position. We scrutinized the switch and its lone connection, and found that the other end of the wire, though connected to the computer wiring, was connected to a ground pin. That clearly made the switch doubly useless: not only was it electrically nonoperative, but it was connected to a place that couldn't affect anything anyway. So we flipped the switch. The computer promptly crashed. This time we ran for Richard Greenblatt, a long-time MIT hacker, who was close at hand. He had never noticed the switch before, either. He inspected it, concluded it was useless, got some diagonal cutters and diked it out. We then revived the computer and it has run fine ever since. We still don't know how the switch crashed the machine. There is a theory that some circuit near the ground pin was marginal, and flipping the switch changed the electrical capacitance enough to upset the circuit as millionth-of-a-second pulses went through it. But we'll never know for sure; all we can really say is that the switch was magic. I still have that switch in my basement. Maybe I'm silly, but I usually keep it set on `more magic'. 1994: Another explanation of this story has since been offered. Note that the switch body was metal. Suppose that the non-connected side of the switch was connected to the switch body (usually the body is connected to a separate earth lug, but there are exceptions). The body is connected to the computer case, which is, presumably, grounded. Now the circuit ground within the machine isn't necessarily at the same potential as the case ground, so flipping the switch connected the circuit ground to the case ground, causing a voltage drop/jump which reset the machine. This was probably discovered by someone who found out the hard way that there was a potential difference between the two, and who then wired in the switch as a joke.
==========
These are some of the funniest examples of a genre of jokes told at
the MIT AI Lab about various noted hackers. The original koans were
composed by Danny Hillis. In reading these, it is at least useful to
know that Minsky, Sussman, and Drescher are AI researchers of note,
that Tom Knight was one of the Lisp machine's principal designers, and
that David Moon wrote much of Lisp Machine Lisp.
* * *
A novice was trying to fix a broken Lisp machine by turning the
power off and on.
Knight, seeing what the student was doing, spoke sternly: "You
cannot fix a machine by just power-cycling it with no understanding of
what is going wrong."
Knight turned the machine off and on.
The machine worked.
* * *
One day a student came to Moon and said: "I understand how to make
a better garbage collector. We must keep a reference count of the
pointers to each cons."
Moon patiently told the student the following story:
"One day a student came to Moon and said: `I understand how to
make a better garbage collector...
[Ed. note: Pure reference-count garbage collectors have problems with
circular structures that point to themselves.]
* * *
In the days when Sussman was a novice, Minsky once came to him as he
sat hacking at the PDP-6.
"What are you doing?", asked Minsky.
"I am training a randomly wired neural net to play Tic-Tac-Toe"
Sussman replied.
"Why is the net wired randomly?", asked Minsky.
"I do not want it to have any preconceptions of how to play",
Sussman said.
Minsky then shut his eyes.
"Why do you close your eyes?", Sussman asked his teacher.
"So that the room will be empty."
At that moment, Sussman was enlightened.
* * *
A disciple of another sect once came to Drescher as he was eating
his morning meal.
"I would like to give you this personality test", said the
outsider, "because I want you to be happy."
Drescher took the paper that was offered him and put it into the
toaster, saying: "I wish the toaster to be happy, too."
=============== This story says a lot about the ITS ethos. On the ITS system there was a program that allowed you to see what was being printed on someone else's terminal. It spied on the other guy's output by examining the insides of the monitor system. The output spy program was called OS. Throughout the rest of the computer science (and at IBM too) OS means `operating system', but among old-time ITS hackers it almost always meant `output spy'. OS could work because ITS purposely had very little in the way of `protection' that prevented one user from trespassing on another's areas. Fair is fair, however. There was another program that would automatically notify you if anyone started to spy on your output. It worked in exactly the same way, by looking at the insides of the operating system to see if anyone else was looking at the insides that had to do with your output. This `counterspy' program was called JEDGAR (a six-letterism pronounced as two syllables: /jed'gr/), in honor of the former head of the FBI. But there's more. JEDGAR would ask the user for `license to kill'. If the user said yes, then JEDGAR would actually gun the job of the luser who was spying. Unfortunately, people found that this made life too violent, especially when tourists learned about it. One of the systems hackers solved the problem by replacing JEDGAR with another program that only pretended to do its job. It took a long time to do this, because every copy of JEDGAR had to be patched. To this day no one knows how many people never figured out that JEDGAR had been defanged. Interestingly, there is still a security module named JEDGAR alive as of late 1994 -- in the Unisys MCP for large systems. It is unknown to us whether the name is tribute or independent invention.
=====================================
This was posted to Usenet by its author, Ed Nather (utastro!nather),
on May 21, 1983.
A recent article devoted to the *macho* side of programming
made the bald and unvarnished statement:
Real Programmers write in FORTRAN.
Maybe they do now,
in this decadent era of
Lite beer, hand calculators, and "user-friendly" software
but back in the Good Old Days,
when the term "software" sounded funny
and Real Computers were made out of drums and vacuum tubes,
Real Programmers wrote in machine code.
Not FORTRAN. Not RATFOR. Not, even, assembly language.
Machine Code.
Raw, unadorned, inscrutable hexadecimal numbers.
Directly.
Lest a whole new generation of programmers
grow up in ignorance of this glorious past,
I feel duty-bound to describe,
as best I can through the generation gap,
how a Real Programmer wrote code.
I'll call him Mel,
because that was his name.
I first met Mel when I went to work for Royal McBee Computer Corp.,
a now-defunct subsidiary of the typewriter company.
The firm manufactured the LGP-30,
a small, cheap (by the standards of the day)
drum-memory computer,
and had just started to manufacture
the RPC-4000, a much-improved,
bigger, better, faster -- drum-memory computer.
Cores cost too much,
and weren't here to stay, anyway.
(That's why you haven't heard of the company,
or the computer.)
I had been hired to write a FORTRAN compiler
for this new marvel and Mel was my guide to its wonders.
Mel didn't approve of compilers.
"If a program can't rewrite its own code",
he asked, "what good is it?"
Mel had written,
in hexadecimal,
the most popular computer program the company owned.
It ran on the LGP-30
and played blackjack with potential customers
at computer shows.
Its effect was always dramatic.
The LGP-30 booth was packed at every show,
and the IBM salesmen stood around
talking to each other.
Whether or not this actually sold computers
was a question we never discussed.
Mel's job was to re-write
the blackjack program for the RPC-4000.
(Port? What does that mean?)
The new computer had a one-plus-one
addressing scheme,
in which each machine instruction,
in addition to the operation code
and the address of the needed operand,
had a second address that indicated where, on the revolving drum,
the next instruction was located.
In modern parlance,
every single instruction was followed by a GO TO!
Put *that* in Pascal's pipe and smoke it.
Mel loved the RPC-4000
because he could optimize his code:
that is, locate instructions on the drum
so that just as one finished its job,
the next would be just arriving at the "read head"
and available for immediate execution.
There was a program to do that job,
an "optimizing assembler",
but Mel refused to use it.
"You never know where it's going to put things",
he explained, "so you'd have to use separate constants".
It was a long time before I understood that remark.
Since Mel knew the numerical value
of every operation code,
and assigned his own drum addresses,
every instruction he wrote could also be considered
a numerical constant.
He could pick up an earlier "add" instruction, say,
and multiply by it,
if it had the right numeric value.
His code was not easy for someone else to modify.
I compared Mel's hand-optimized programs
with the same code massaged by the optimizing assembler program,
and Mel's always ran faster.
That was because the "top-down" method of program design
hadn't been invented yet,
and Mel wouldn't have used it anyway.
He wrote the innermost parts of his program loops first,
so they would get first choice
of the optimum address locations on the drum.
The optimizing assembler wasn't smart enough to do it that way.
Mel never wrote time-delay loops, either,
even when the balky Flexowriter
required a delay between output characters to work right.
He just located instructions on the drum
so each successive one was just *past* the read head
when it was needed;
the drum had to execute another complete revolution
to find the next instruction.
He coined an unforgettable term for this procedure.
Although "optimum" is an absolute term,
like "unique", it became common verbal practice
to make it relative:
"not quite optimum" or "less optimum"
or "not very optimum".
Mel called the maximum time-delay locations
the "most pessimum".
After he finished the blackjack program
and got it to run
("Even the initializer is optimized",
he said proudly),
he got a Change Request from the sales department.
The program used an elegant (optimized)
random number generator
to shuffle the "cards" and deal from the "deck",
and some of the salesmen felt it was too fair,
since sometimes the customers lost.
They wanted Mel to modify the program
so, at the setting of a sense switch on the console,
they could change the odds and let the customer win.
Mel balked.
He felt this was patently dishonest,
which it was,
and that it impinged on his personal integrity as a programmer,
which it did,
so he refused to do it.
The Head Salesman talked to Mel,
as did the Big Boss and, at the boss's urging,
a few Fellow Programmers.
Mel finally gave in and wrote the code,
but he got the test backwards,
and, when the sense switch was turned on,
the program would cheat, winning every time.
Mel was delighted with this,
claiming his subconscious was uncontrollably ethical,
and adamantly refused to fix it.
After Mel had left the company for greener pa$ture$,
the Big Boss asked me to look at the code
and see if I could find the test and reverse it.
Somewhat reluctantly, I agreed to look.
Tracking Mel's code was a real adventure.
I have often felt that programming is an art form,
whose real value can only be appreciated
by another versed in the same arcane art;
there are lovely gems and brilliant coups
hidden from human view and admiration, sometimes forever,
by the very nature of the process.
You can learn a lot about an individual
just by reading through his code,
even in hexadecimal.
Mel was, I think, an unsung genius.
Perhaps my greatest shock came
when I found an innocent loop that had no test in it.
No test. *None*.
Common sense said it had to be a closed loop,
where the program would circle, forever, endlessly.
Program control passed right through it, however,
and safely out the other side.
It took me two weeks to figure it out.
The RPC-4000 computer had a really modern facility
called an index register.
It allowed the programmer to write a program loop
that used an indexed instruction inside;
each time through,
the number in the index register
was added to the address of that instruction,
so it would refer
to the next datum in a series.
He had only to increment the index register
each time through.
Mel never used it.
Instead, he would pull the instruction into a machine register,
add one to its address,
and store it back.
He would then execute the modified instruction
right from the register.
The loop was written so this additional execution time
was taken into account ---
just as this instruction finished,
the next one was right under the drum's read head,
ready to go.
But the loop had no test in it.
The vital clue came when I noticed
the index register bit,
the bit that lay between the address
and the operation code in the instruction word,
was turned on ---
yet Mel never used the index register,
leaving it zero all the time.
When the light went on it nearly blinded me.
He had located the data he was working on
near the top of memory ---
the largest locations the instructions could address ---
so, after the last datum was handled,
incrementing the instruction address
would make it overflow.
The carry would add one to the
operation code, changing it to the next one in the instruction set:
a jump instruction.
Sure enough, the next program instruction was
in address location zero,
and the program went happily on its way.
I haven't kept in touch with Mel,
so I don't know if he ever gave in to the flood of
change that has washed over programming techniques
since those long-gone days.
I like to think he didn't.
In any event,
I was impressed enough that I quit looking for the
offending test,
telling the Big Boss I couldn't find it.
He didn't seem surprised.
When I left the company,
the blackjack program would still cheat
if you turned on the right sense switch,
and I think that's how it should be.
I didn't feel comfortable
hacking up the code of a Real Programmer.
This is one of hackerdom's great heroic epics, free verse or no. In a
few spare images it captures more about the esthetics and psychology
of hacking than all the scholarly volumes on the subject put together.
For an opposing point of view, see the entry for Real_Programmer.
[1992 postscript -- the author writes: "The original submission to the
net was not in free verse, nor any approximation to it -- it was
straight prose style, in non-justified paragraphs. In bouncing around
the net it apparently got modified into the `free verse' form now
popular. In other words, it got hacked on the net. That seems
appropriate, somehow."]
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z [^a-zA-Z]
Appendix A --- Appendix B --- Appendix C