This is Hacker Public Radio episode 3,939 for Thursday the 7th of September 2023.
Today's show is entitled, How I Got Into Tech and Hacking.
It is part of the series How I Got Into Tech.
It is hosted by Trickster and is about 21 minutes long.
It carries a clean flag.
The summary is getting interested in tech can start in both the odd and familiar places.
This is Trickster's story.
Hey everyone, this is Trickster.
If the name rings a bell, you might know me as the co-founder of mobilegames.com.
I am also a demo scene coder for many, many years.
I have a few first place productions under my belt.
In these days, I am the showrunner of a yearly vintage computing festival.
As a hack divist, I was also involved in the birth of the abandoned wear movement in 1997.
I am also one of the curators of a Dawes game archival effort that has been going on
for a slightly over 25 years.
While I don't use the term to describe myself, I do consider myself a hacker.
I thought since Hacker Public Radio is running a little low on shows, it might be time
to record an emergency episode following the most common topic that people pick, how
I got into tech.
I got into tech via intellectual curiosity and also the need to control my environment a
little bit.
I was an unabashed nerd as a kid and unfortunately throughout middle school, I was bullied
and in many cases beaten weekly.
So these two impulses, needing to control my environment because of that, and just simply
being curious, naturally led to hacking.
So I am going to go ahead and describe my timeline in those terms because how I got into
tech and how I got into hacking to me are synonymous.
So let's go all the way back to 1977.
Total trickster is six years old and his father is working for Teletype Corporation, which
used to make machines that would sit on either end of a phone line and someone would
type on one end and it would output be type written on the other end.
Obviously these machines are gone, having been supplemented by everything from facts to
the internet.
But at the time in 1977, it was necessary to analyze serial lines and so my father brought
home a serial line analyzer and it's my very first memory of sitting in front of anything
with a display and a keyboard.
You would connect serial to both ends and set the board rate and what have you and then
you would be able to inspect the traffic going back and forth, but you could also inject
traffic.
So you would type on the keyboard and it would show up on this tiny one line of vacuum
fluorescent display and I suppose that's where it all began really.
So forward two more years to 1977 and now I am in second grade and looking at an Apple
2, but at the time I'm too interested in arcade games and console gaming with Atari 2600
to notice really that the Apple 2 was not just an educational instrument, it was actually
a computer running software.
But that changed a year later in 1980 when a neighbor's mother who used to work for
AT&T, brought home an Osborn which is a portable or really legible computer that runs
CPM and has two five and a quarter inch floppy drives and one of the discets that she
brought home and I'm not even sure she knew she brought it home was colossal cave adventure.
My friend and I would, I don't know how but we figured out how to start it up and we
spent hours trying to solve colossal cave adventure just exploring everything and typing
all the verbs we could think of, naughty and nice and that was pretty much it that's so
the seed for hey this is an instrument this is a machine that does what I tell it and I've
never really shaken that off.
Let's go forward three more years and end up in 1983.
I'm at a friend's house they have an IBM PCXT and that friend actually the friend of
their father worked for AT&T and as such had free long distance back in the 80s and some of
the 90s long distance cost extra money for those too young to remember you would pay something
like 10 or 15 cents a minute if you called overseas it was dollars per minute thankfully we
don't have that problem anymore but when you had free phone calls and a computer and a
modem you could imagine that hilarity would ensue we would connect a computer but we wouldn't
do it to download files because we weren't quite aware of that yet we would join these online
games where lots of real people could all participate in the same game think like a trivia
game or something like that and we joined them not because we wanted to play the games but because
we wanted to just simply hang out in the game lobbies and talk to people and it was astonishing
that there were people from all across the continental united states all typing to each other
was fascinating also in 1983 I was fortunate enough to go to a middle school that had really good
funding they had a lab of apple two pluses and I discovered apple writer and apple writer let me
type up my messy papers instead of handwriting them and you know constantly racing and so on
I would get half a letter grade more improvement than my classmate simply because I would hand
in typewritten things not typewritten of course they would be printed on the dot matrix printer but
you get the idea and of course I love the idea that the computer could help me fix my mistakes
before I exposed them to others I really wanted to computer at that point but unfortunately we
could not afford one but my father was very forward thinking and instead of purchasing a computer
he bought a computer magazine subscription it hours was family computing so every month a computer
magazine would arrive and I would just consume it covered a cover and it wasn't as good as having a
computer but it definitely prepared me because this magazine like all 80s computer magazines had
at all it had coverage of the 8-bit micro's the newly emerging 16-bit systems it had basic
programs you could type in and it even had those basic programs with slight modifications for
other systems so the base program was apple soft basic but then here's the section to change
for the PC and it would be like 10 lines you would change and here's the section for Commodore and so on
and reading that kind of taught me a little bit of computer programming without actually having
the computer in 1984 my middle school was teaching languages to 7th graders and I was taught basic
and I was also taught logo for those who don't know logo is a graphical programming language where
you enter simple commands like put the pen down on the paper move forward 10 pixels turn right 90
degrees move forward another 10 pixels and so on you could draw simple pictures with it it was
designed as a teaching language but that is where the light bulb went on with programming for me
not necessarily basic I don't know why but in logo you could define procedures these procedures could
take arguments and you could name the procedures whatever you wanted so this light bulb of oh
if I'm doing a lot of repetitive actions and the only thing that changes about them is this one
thing which is of course a variable then I can kind of put it all in you know a macro it
wasn't a macro but you know what I mean it's you could bundle it all up in a little package and give
it its own name and all you had to do was change the argument and then all the code would run
with that different argument light bulb completely went on I really loved programming at that point
I was selling in the two programming classes that I was in and myself and a few other students were
similarly gifted and the school was forward thinking enough that they created a special seventh grade
class just for gifted computer students this was amazing think of it like a like a Montessori
class almost it was not directed now unfortunately that means of course we ended up playing and
copying a lot of games in there but they arranged to have presentations from local computer people come in
I grew up in the Chicago land area and Gottlieb was there Gottlieb was an arcade game manufacturer
they created Cuebert they created the laser disk game mock three and someone from Gottlieb
dragged those arcade games in for one of our classes and gave us an overview and a demonstration of
the arcade games and how they were created satisfying and yet expanding my intellectual curiosity
finally in Christmas of 1984 we finally did receive a system I father worked for AT&T at the time
and he got a corporate discount on their clone their PC clone at the time the AT&T 6300
and finally we had a computer and the first thing I did I went bonkers entering in all of the magazine
type events from the family computing magazine subscription we had previously and typing them in
just indirectly teaches you programming teaches you better programming teaches you structured programming
moving on a little bit more into high school that's pretty much where intellectual curiosity went
rampant I was also interested in music and I was trying to get better music out of the computer we owned
but an IBM PC doesn't have a sound ship so you figured out how to work within your limitations
I started out writing basic programs that would play music I then figured out chords by playing
arpeggios fast it's a single output PC speaker can only play one note at a time but
you know if you can quickly rapidly you know rotate through different notes it sounds a little bit like a
chord later I saved up and purchased music construction set for the PC which sounded very much like
you were trying to murder a buzzer but it did try to approximate for voices and that was fantastic
and later I got bank street music writer which came with a piece of hardware that output six real
voices and that further fueled my my passion for trying to compose and play back music on the PC
obviously being a teenager during this time I was copying more and more games
but I was a little different than my friends I wasn't copying games based on how fun they were
I was copying games based on how well they were programmed I tended to grab the simulators the
flight simulators or maybe a racing game or something that had particularly fast graphics that kind of thing
certainly arcade games arcade ports not all of them were terrible for the PC
unfortunately for me in high school I was not particularly good at math maybe I was but I wasn't a
particularly good student and as such I did not qualify for the AP programming classes where they were teaching
all sorts of fun stuff like advanced algorithms and they were using this new language I'd never heard of
Pascal I ended up ditching one of my classes to audit the programming class it was probably social
studies or history something that of course fascinates me now but didn't in high school no idea why
funny how life works out but I really wanted to learn turbo Pascal because it ran so much faster than
basic once it was compiled and a lot of my friends were in there including Brian Hertz who I later
co-founded mobile games with when I wasn't trying to figure out how to hack my classes at school I was
back in home trying to figure out how to hack the hardware our computer did not have a hard drive so
trying to deal with a single floppy and then later two floppy system required a little bit of
hacking especially if you wanted to play games that required two flopbies or a hard drive or so on one trick
I learned was whenever a program exits it has to reload command dot com this is a PC running
doc but there were situations where I couldn't have the doc disk in the drive so I learned how to
create a ram drive copy command dot com to it and then set the comm spec environment variable
to point to the ram drive and that saved quite a bit of disk swapping also little things like
figuring out that burning up another 36 kilobytes of ram was worth loading a small disk cache
just to get the forest read ahead caching so some disk cache is you know you tell them to read one
sector and then they'll go ahead and read all the sectors on that track anyway just in case you need the
next one the next sector and a very small cache could go ahead and do that and that made slow games
load from floppy disk gosh three times faster probably my journey in tech continued throughout high
school pyriting games joining pirate groups working for software stores and becoming a
a career because I could grab the games from the software stores copy them throw them up onto a
BBS and return the game the next day let's jump forward to New Year's Eve 1990 I've already told
you that I was kind of trying to force non musical computers to do better music and I delighted
and well programmed games versus like adventures and stuff I loved pyriting games so it's no
wonder that when I discovered the demo scene I really took to it I had been aware of the demo scene
indirectly by watching crack trows and other animated messages that show up before you play a game
showing you know who cracked it shoutouts to their friends bragging that kind of stuff but I grabbed my
first real pure demo the space pigs mega demo off of a BBS on New Year's Eve 1990 and I watched it
and just everything clicked it was like there's a group of people out there who hack the computer
for fun make it do stuff that the designers never intended and that was it I just that's all I wanted
to do and ever since that time period I have been involved in the demo scene often on in one way or
another let's continue on throughout the 90s my hacking journey continues my first Unix was
Harris UX on a Harris mini computer at DePaul University then later I was working for a Unix
company I worked for Mark Williams company this is before Linux existed Mark Williams company created a
home brew clone of system five our four called coherent and it was actually it wasn't even
system five or four it was before that it was really like a clone of system seven so it was kind of limited
but it was a Unix that you could run on a 26 or higher and it cost 99 dollars and came with a huge
gigantic manual and working for them first this technical sales and then later in the technical
support department of course I learned all sorts of fun hacking my very first email address that
that delivered email directly to my house was hacked up via UUCP in fact you can search and try to
find my original email address which is get ready for this MWC bang Utricks bang MWCBBS bang
TRX home bang trickster at UUNet.UU.Net that was a really mil and it got all the way to my house
later I left Mark Williams company and no longer ran coherent on my home system although there was
another good reason for that but that's a story for another day so I ended up running slackware
on my 386 40 megahertz system in 1994 connecting to the internet via slip serial line IP this is
before PPP existed discovering this crazy new thing called the worldwide web hacking knowledge
continued by finding out that you could by discovering that you could view the source of any
web page you were looking at so that's how I taught myself HTML also around this time I was doing
some demo scene coding I preferred Pascal having learned it from that AP course I was crashing
but the thing that made it usable for demo coding and for anything performance related is that
at some point turbo Pascal I think it was six and later added the ability to have inline a
simpler and that was fantastic you could just simply inline a simpler to replace a series of statements
that were very slower or that the compiler could not optimize then something curious happened
in the late 90s I had children I was married in 94 and we had children in 97 and 99 and
as a default activity hacking mostly stopped and I'm not mad this is nobody's fault it's just life
and I thought at the time that well this is the next phase of my life I have children now
I have a family I need to pay attention to them and I need to provide for them
what ended up happening is that all that prior hacking experience I just described all those skills
ended up translating into good job skills and job performance I became skilled at troubleshooting
poorly documented systems and removing bottlenecks I worked for a cybersecurity forum for
five years troubleshooting crazy stuff like quadrupling knatted firewalls and I was called the
smartest kid in the room for most of the 2000s these days I am not called the smartest kid in the room
and most of the time I'm not and that's actually good because that means everyone is smarter than me
which means I must be in a really great work environment hacking does continue but only
sparsely and really on my terms for example I was always annoyed that the original PC could have
been programmed better so eventually my demo scene activity focused on it I've had a crew
so to speak since let's say 2013 and my crew and I won the old school compost at revision 2015
and evoke 2022 and we received scene dot org awards and meteoric awards for those productions
those awards are kind of like the Oscars for the demo scene just for lack of better term
so I still hack it's just changed in scope you know here's another scope change as previously mentioned
I help run a vintage computer festival every year a vintage computer festival Midwest and we
have to put on a show that serves over 2,000 people with only six volunteers and hardly any
money or equipment we also don't charge for the show so we kind of have to make do with donations
and donated equipment and spur the moment grabbing somebody for manpower and things like that
trying to put on a vintage computer festival that serves over 2,000 people with only six
guys has to be hacking in some form it's it's just got to be you know hacking has served me
really well for half a century I guess I'm happy to be that old but I guess I'm also happy that
hacking has enriched my life for that long you know hacking isn't limited to just personal enjoyment
of tech it's helped me in my career and it's also helped me socially when you meet another hacker
you've both immediately got this shared vocabulary and interests and you can use that to speak
in a sort of shorthand to communicate quicker and more effectively when I go to a demo party you know
I like to say that I can crack a shade bob joke and someone somewhere will get it and that's a
really great feeling that has been my journey thus far I hope it continues and I hope that if you
are a budding young hacker and you are trying to hack your life your situation your tools your
utilities your relationships for better I hope you have the intellectual curiosity to discover
what works for you and carry it through thanks for listening you have been listening to
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