Hackers finding their way to ITS

[larsbrinkhoff]

@SimHacker posted this:

Zork is how and why I got on the ARPANET as a nerdy kid. And I wasn't even a Russian Spy!

Connecting to the ARPANET and getting an account on DM was an adventure in itself, almost like the beginning of the game itself.

At the time there were no passwords or anything but security through obscurity on the ARPANET TIPs. And the MIT-AI Lab was kind enough to hand out free after-work-hours "TURIST Accounts" to anyone who asked nicely with the right magic words.

Some dude named Bruce who had a BBS (Bruce's NorthStar Horizon in Northern Virginia) told me how to do it step by step:

1) After 8PM EST, dial up the NBS TIP at (301) 948 3850 at 300 baud, typed "E" to get the banner, then "@L 134" to connect to AI. (NCP host ids were only 8 bits, before TCP/IP's vast 32 bit address space!)

2) Make up an account name (I chose A2DEH).

3) Try to log in with that name, like ":LOGIN A2DEH".

4) If it asks for a password, somebody already has that account. In that case, think of another name and try again. (RMS's password was famously "RMS", after they forced everyone to use a password over his objections).

5) If it doesn't recognize your user name, it asks "Do you want to apply for an account?" Answer YES. When it asks "Why do you want to use the MIT-AI Lab's PDP-10?" answer "Learning LISP." (Which, as it turns out, is a long incremental process pursued over a lifetime, since there are so many implementations of LISP on the inside with names like MDL and JavaScript on the outside.)

6) When the account is approved, now all ITS systems know about you (ITS had network file and account sharing long before NFS and YP), and although you still can't log into DM directly, you could log into AI to learn LISP (and EMACS).

7) The MIT-AI Lab staff would kindly and patiently go out of their way to help you learn LISP and EMACS. (Many thanks to KMP for writing TEACH-LISP and answering my clueless tasteless questions like "how to you set the value of a variable?").

8) To play Zork, dial up the TIP after 8PM and connect to DM with "@L 70".

9) Log in as "URANUS" with password "RINGS".

10) So as not to look suspicious (3 kids from all over the country logged in as URANUS, URANU0, URANU1 at the same time all playing Zork or watching each other play), change your user name to your own with ":CHUNAME A2DEH".

11) Only two people could play ZORK at once, so hang out chatting with other people waiting to play ZORK, or spying (in a socially acceptable manner) on whoever's playing ZORK via ":OS PDL" (for "Output Spy Paul David Lebling"), or snooping around trying to find the Zork source code, which was well hidden.

12) There was no file security, so you could snoop around Marvin Minsky's home directory and hurt your brain trying to understand what appears to be line noise, but is actually the Universal Turing Machine he implemented in TECO.

13) When somebody from USER-ACCOUNTS sends you a "nice private message" telling your they know what you're up to with ZORK, and that you should really learn LISP like you said you would because it's such a great language, instead of demanding you commit "seppuku" and "dumping you off the net and be done with it", you simply start learning LISP instead of acting like an entitled dick by whining about how the people who gave you a free account that you bragged about in BYTE magazine are a bunch of communists and threatening to get some Proxmire type to start inquiring into its operations by seeing if your "Pentagon friends can upset them. Or perhaps some reporter friends. Or both., Or even the House Armed Services Committee."

[larsbrinkhoff]

@GuySteele wrote this:

I was a teen-age hacker.

When I was about twelve or so, a lab secretary at MIT who knew I was `interested in science' (it might be more accurate to say `a latent nerd' -- more on that later) arranged for one of the computer hackers there to give me an informal tour. I remember stumbling around racks full of circuit boards and wires, a screeching cabinet that printed a full page every six seconds, and rows of blinking lights; the computer room was crammed full of equipment with no obvious organization. One set of gray cabinets had some trophies and plaques sitting on it: this was the PDP-6 computer that, running a program called MacHack, won prizes playing against human players in chess tournaments. The PDP-6 also had two speakers and a stereo amplifier sitting on top of it. The hacker typed a couple of commands on a keyboard, and the PDP-6 burst into a Bach Brandenburg concerto (no. 6, as I recall).

One part of that tour stands out most clearly in my mind. I was told to sit down in front of a large, round, glass screen and was given a box that had some buttons and a stick on the top. My hacker guide typed another command on the keyboard and, suddenly, green and purple spaceships appeared on the screen! The purple one started shooting little red dots at the green one, which was soon obliterated in a multicolored shower of sparkles. The green ship was mine, and the hacker had expertly shot it down. Years later I learned that this had been a color version of Space War, one of the very first video games.

Remember that this was years before `Apple' and `TRS-80' had become household words. Back then computers were still rather mysterious, hidden away in giant corporations and university laboratories.

Playing Space War was fun, but I learned nothing of programming then. I had the true fascination of computers revealed to me in November, 1968, when a chum slipped me the news that our school (Boston Latin) had an IBM computer locked up in the basement. I was dubious. I had earlier narrowly avoided buying from a senior a ticket to the fourth-floor swimming pool (Boston Latin has only three stories, and no swimming pool at all), and assumed this was another scam. So of course I laughed in his face.

When he persisted, I checked it out. Sure enough, in a locked basement room was an IBM 1130 computer. If you want all the specs: 4096 words of memory, 16 bits per word, a 15-character-per-second Selectric (`golf ball') printer, and a card reader (model 1442) that could read 300 cards per minute. Yes, this was back in the days of punched cards. Personal computers were completely unheard of then.

Nominally the computer was for the training of juniors and seniors, but I cajoled a math teacher into lending me a computer manual and spent all of Thanksgiving vacation reading it.

I was hooked.

No doubt about it. I was born to be a hacker. Fortunately, I didn't let my studies suffer (as many young hackers do), but every spare moment I thought about the computer. It was spellbinding. I wanted to know all about it: what it could and couldn't do, how its programs worked, what its circuits looked like. During study halls, lunch, and after school, I could be found in the computer room, punching programs onto cards and running them through the computer.

I was not the only one. Very soon there was a small community of IBM 1130 hackers. We helped to maintain the computer and we tutored our less fanatical fellow students in the ways of computing. What could possibly compensate us for these chores? Free rein in the computer room.

Soon after that, I developed into one of the unauthorized but tolerated `random people' hanging around the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. A random hacker is to a computer laboratory much as a groupie is to a rock band: not really doing useful work, but emotionally involved and contributing to the ambience, if nothing else. After a while, I was haunting the computer rooms at off-hours, talking to people but more often looking for chances to run programs. Sometimes `randoms' such as I were quite helpful, operating the computers for no pay and giving advice to college students who were having trouble. Sometimes, however, we were quite a nuisance. Once I was ejected from the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory by none other than Richard Greenblatt, the very famous hacker who had written the MacHack program with which the PDP-6 had won its chess trophies. He threw me out because I was monopolizing the one terminal that produced letter-quality copy. (I was using the computer as a word processor to write customized form letters to various computer manufacturers, asking them to send me computer manuals.) I deserved to be tossed out and gave him no argument. But when you're hooked, you're hooked, and I was undaunted; within a week or two I was back again.

Eventually I got a part-time job as a programmer at MIT's Project MAC computer laboratory. There I became a full-fledged member of the hacker community, and ultimately an MIT graduate student.

[larsbrinkhoff]

Myself:

I started with home computers - VIC20, Atari ST - as a kid. I read all computer related books in the library, and one of them was Guy Steele's Hacker's Dictionary. This book is chock full of information and anecdotes about ITS and PDP-10 computers. I recently got a used copy and reread it, and it brought back some memories. This book must have been at the back of my mind as a budding programmer.

In the mid 1990s, I got access to Usenet groups. At that time, the subject of PDP-10s and ITS would come up every now and then in technical discussions. People remembered them fondly, and it always sounded like exciting technology. This probably added to the mythology spinning in my mind.

Around 2000, there was a spur of ITS activity because there was a cleaned up set of files going around the FTP sites, and people were trying to make a PDP-10 emulator to get it running. I downloaded the files and looked around. I wanted to examine the programs, but they were almost indecipherable. After getting some help, I learned about the file formats and wrote a disassembler running on Linux.

Shortly after this, I was hired by the XKL company to add PDP-10 support to GCC. I worked on that for about two years.

In 2016, I had the idea to convert the instructions for installing ITS on an emulator into an automated script. This initially small script snowballed into what we now have on GitHub.

[oilcan-productions]

Thank you for doing this. I just recently discovered this after stumbling across a discussion on Zork and other Infocom Source Code after finally getting around to reading Ready Player One which reminded me of so many things from my early computer days in the late 70s and early 80s. I remember a multi 100 dollar phone bill my mom was giving me a hard time for because I was online on an MIT BBS from Vienna Austria all night.