The role of amateurs in computer science

Transcription

1 The role of amateurs in computer science Tom van den Broek Bas Lijnse June 19, Introduction The role of amateurs in computer science... An appealing title for a paper about computer science history. But what do we mean when we talk about amateurs? Do we mean hackers, professionals which do hobby projects on the side or simply anyone who does something with computers on a not for profit basis? In this paper we will define amateur as: A person who initiated or worked/works on a computer related project that is not intended to be profitable. So a high school student hacking an outlook exploit is as much an amateur as a PhD researcher working on K- pilot in his spare time or a system administrator who designs robot hardware for fun. So now that we have the definition of amateurs, what has been their role in computer science? Ever since the existence of computers people have been fascinated by the possibilities of the machines and have been experimenting with them for fun. This experimenting has often resulted in serious projects and even high quality products that were produced solely by amateurs. In this paper we will take a look at three categories of amateurs that have contributed essentially to the the computer community. These groups are: Early hardware hackers The open source community The underground cracker community Even though not all amateurs can be categorized in these groups, we think that the ones that have had any influence in the area of computer science can be. The last important thing to mention in this introduction is that this paper is based on material we found on the Internet and is far from complete. Nonetheless we did our best to give a good impression of the influence that various amateurs have had on computer science. 1

2 2 Early hardware hackers 2.1 Altair 8800 In January 1975, Popular Electronics magazine s cover featured a picture of the Altair 8800 computer. This was the beginning of a revolution in computer use. From that that month there was a affordable computer for home use. Before computers where very expensive and only available at companies and institutions. The Altair 8800 was produced and sold by a small mail order company for electronic equipment(calculators, etc) named MIT S. The owner, Ed Roberts, was on the verge of bankrupt. With 1/4 million dollar debt to his bank he was looking for additional sources of income. Being an electronics/computer enthusiast himself he saw the potential to built a real computer for home use around the new Intel 8080 CPU. As a last attempt to safe his business decided to sell a computer in kit form based upon the Intel He contacted Popular Electronics for which he had written articles before to do a story on his new computer. The computer was named Altair by his young daughter after a star in the popular series Star Trek, because it sounded High-tech. He struck a deal Intel to sell the CPUs for $75 instead of the $360 they official costed. This $360 as an in-house joke at Intel a reference to IBM s 360 Mainframe computers which cost millions of dollars. The expectations where that he would self around 200 of his computer is the first year. However nobody expected the huge demand of a inexpensive($397) computer for home use. The first day the phone start ringing and they sold about 200 Altair s before the day day ended. People send in checks without seeing the system. The first Altair s where just barely computers by todays send of the word. They consist of the CPU an 256 Bytes of Ram. The input proceeded byte after byte via 16 switches on the front that each represented a bit. The output consisted of a couple of LED s. There was no external storage, no keyboard or monitor. Also there was know possibility to store your programs on media or to use a higher programming language. Of course this soon changed. All kind of expansion kits where developed(home brew an commercial) which consisted of tape storage, floppy drives, keyboards and monitor output. An Altair with all the extensions would cost around $4000 which was the same price a PDP-8 microcomputer with the same features would cost. These extension wouldn t have been possible if there wasn t a interpreter for a programming language. A couple of month after the release of the Altair Roberts received a letter from a company which said they had already created a version of Basic. He immediately tried to phone it, but he reached a home number in Seattle where they didn t knew about anything. 2

3 Paul Allen and Bill Gates had written and sent the letter using letterhead they had created for their high school computer company - Traf-o-Data. The Altair was the first home computer and was started a revolution, but wasn t very user friendly. It was hard to assemble. At least quite extensive electronic skill were needed to assemble the kit and even then it not always operated reliable. Also it was a boring an error prone to program it. 2.2 Home brew computer club The legendary Home brew Computer Club was the first of its kind, and provided an early impetus for the development of the microcomputer industry in Silicon Valley. Its first meeting in March 1975 was held in one of its members garage in Menlo Park in Santa Clara County. The Home brew members were engineers and computer enthusiasts who discussed about the Altair and other technical topics. The club attracted many hobbyists and was attended by nearly 750 people one year after its foundation. The Home brew computer Club had its own philosophy. People meet, because they were interested in computers and liked tinkering with them, but not for commercial reasons - at least in its early times. Its members exchanged information about all aspects of micro-computing technology and talked about devices they had designed. The Homebrew Computer Club is the place where the roots of many Silicon Valley microcomputer companies are located. It has spawned a revolution in microprocessing. Belonging to the group of people the started the Homebrew computer club where famous names as Steve Jobs and Steven Wozniak from Apple. Also Adam Osborn and Bob March from Osborne computers (The first portable computers) and Lee Felsenstein (designer of the Osborne one) belonged to initiators. Soon after the foundation of the first Homebrew computer club all around America computer clubs where formed modeled after the original design. Even in Europa instances existed. An example of this is the HCC from the Netherlands which still exists. The Homebrew computer club has mend a lot for the creation of a climate in which the experimentation with computer hardware and software encouraged. Lot s of persons at the home brew computer club owned their own computer. Altair or home built systems by own design. For example Steven Wozniak wanted to built his own a computer. This became the Apple 1. 3

4 3 Apple 1 Steve Wozniak, who worked for Hewlett-Packard at the time, wanted to build his own computer. He couldn t afford the Intel 8080 CPU (this CPU was very popular then, as it was used in the Altair 8800 & IMSAI 8080, but was pretty expensive). He would have used the Motorola 6800 but it was also much too expensive. Finally he decided to build his computer around the MOS 6502 (which was reasonably compatible with the Motorola 6800). The Apple was designed largely during the Home brew computer club meetings. This resulted computer was easier to use than the Altair: unlike this one, the Apple 1 had a keyboard connector and could display characters on a TV (the Altair used LEDs for display). The display rate was very slow, only 60 Hz. Steve Jobs, who programmed the game Breakout for Atari (with a little help from the Woz ), was interested in this computer. Together they created the Apple Computer Company and tried to sell their computer. Paul Terrell, the owner of a computer shop, was interested in this computer, but fully assembled (the Apple 1 was sold naked, no monitor, no power supply, no keyboard, no tape drive, etc.) and with a cassette interface, which Wozniak designed. He sold it with the Basic he wrote soon after. They sold about two hundred of these units. This machine was so popular that Jack Tramiel of Commodore offered to buy Apple. Apple was, at the time, a major purchaser of MOS 6502 processors and Commodore owned MOS Technologies. Wozniak wanted $15,000 more than Tramiel offered, needless to say, the deal fell through. The reason they only sold 200 apple 1 s was because the all built them on the bedroom of Wozniak and by the time the had made the first 200 Wozniak had lot s of new idea s. First he built a couple of prototypes of optimized apple 1 s of which the last one consisted of half the number of chips as the original model. By then the proceeded with a new computer the apple II. This would become the computer that defined for a big part computers as we know them today. The Apple II also was design with the help of the input with from the home brew computer club, but the story of the Apple II is really beyond the scope of this paper. 4 Open source movement A group of amateurs that should definitely be in this paper are the opensource hackers. Even though open-source, and in a stricter sense free software was defined only twenty years ago by Richard Stallman, it s history goes farther back. 4

5 4.1 UNIX The nowadays well known operating system UNIX and all of it s clones and descendants have their roots in a hobby project of Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson in In that year Bell Telephony Labs (BTL) withdrew from the MULTICS project on which Ritchie and Thompson had been working. The MULTICS project was a joint project of BTL, GE and MIT to develop an operating system for a large computer which could support up to a thousand users. During the MULTICS project they had created a game called space wars which ran on the MULTICS supercomputer. Because they wanted to keep playing that game, but had no longer have access to the machine they decided to rewrite the game to run on a much smaller machine: The DEC-PDP7. This machine had no operating system and no disk, but got all of its input via paper tape. Because of the lack of an operating system, all routines that ware necessary for the game had to be build from scratch. During 1969 had also designed the basis of an operating system for a supercomputer on paper to create one to replace the advantages they had when they were using the unfinished MULTICS system. After a while they started adding functions from their designs to their PDP-7 code until they had a working operating system: UNIX. In 1971 BTL ordered a DEC PDP-11 for the development of a text processing system. Thompson and Ritchie started porting UNIX to this machine to use it as a development environment and continued to develop it into a more and more complete system. Because UNIX was not seen as a product but merely as a tool, Bell Labs did not have commercial interest in it at that time. The UNIX system complete with it s source-code was freely distributed to universities and research facilities around 1976 where people made their own enhancements. The most important adaptions were made at Berkeley University by a group lead by Bill Joy. This adapted version of UNIX became known as BSD and is the ancestor of todays open-source unices OpenBSD, NetBSD and FreeBSD. Later Bell Labs began seeing the value of UNIX and adopted it as one of it s products and commercial UNIX versions were developed. 4.2 GNU So now we know that the first versions of UNIX were the result of a personal project of two computer scientists, we should take a look at a system that actively claims not to be UNIX. The GNU operating system, which is an acronym for GNU is Not Unix is the result of a project that was started in 1984 by Richard Stallman. When Stallman started working at MIT in 1971 all the software that the group in which he was working used was free software. The users of the software were mainly programmers themselves and altered software whenever they needed 5

6 an improvement. In the beginning of the 1980 s almost all software had become proprietary, which means that the creator of the software forbids you to alter or redistribute your software. As an effect of this, users were no longer able to cooperate with each other in improving their software because they had no longer access to the software s source-code and were bound by licence agreements. Stallman did not like that he was no longer permitted to use his software as he wanted but only in the exact way that was prescribed by the licence of the software s creator. He became convinced that the evolution of software should never be restricted by license-agreements. All users of software should have the right to improve their software (thus have access to it s source-code) and redistribute it however they want. This belief made Stallman iniate the GNU project in The first thing that every computer needs is an operating system. If there is no free operating system, a computer can not even be used without proprietary software and free software can be restrained by the operating system it is running on. The goal of the GNU project is therefore to create a completely free operating system. The system had to become compatible with UNIX because it s design had proven to be good and compatibility would make it easier for users to switch to the GNU operating system. When Stallman started the GNU project, he resigned from MIT to prevent them from claiming the rights on his GNU operating system and make it proprietary. However, professor Winston, the head of the MIT AI Lab, allowed Stallman to keep using their computers. The first components that Stallman wrote were an editor (Emacs) and a C compiler (gcc). All other components were created later by volunteers from all over the world working together communicating via the Internet. By the early 1990 s a complete system was ready when the last part, a free kernel, was contributed by a computer science student from Finland: Linus Torvalds. 4.3 Linux The Linux kernel and the GNU/Linux operating, commonly referred to as Linux, have their origins in a small project of one computer science student. In 1990 Linus Torvalds became interested in operating systems and signed up for a course on operating systems. During the summer before the course he already purchased the accompanying book Operating systems: Design and implementation by Andrew Tanenbaum. Torvalds became aware of UNIX and was intrigued by it s simple yet powerful design. To illustrate the principles of operating system design Tanenbaum had written a trimmed version of UNIX for the Intel processor called MINIX. By 1991 Linus Torvalds had saved enough money to buy his own personal computer and was determined to run UNIX on it. Contrary to enterprise UNIX systems, Tanenbaum s MINIX was an affordable system so Linus purchased 6

7 MINIX and installed it on his new computer. Because MINIX was designed for educational purposes it had been oversimplified on purpose on several important points to illustrate it s design. One of the things that MINIX wasn t very good at was terminal emulation which Torvalds needed to access the mainframes at the university. Because he wanted to learn how his worked he decided to create a terminal emulation program on the bare machine without using an operating system. This way he had to access all hardware himself and would be learn how his computer really worked. While developing the terminal emulator, Linus kept using MINIX as a development environment. When the terminal emulator was finished Torvalds kept enhancing it by first adding filesystem support for his MINIX filesystem so he could store information he accessed via his terminal emulator. More and more the terminal emulator transformed into an operating system kernel. Linus used to the MINIX mailinglist to keep fellow operating system enthusiasts informed about his work and discuss operating system design. As the project advanced other people became interested in his system and started helping him by patching it and adding functionality. Because Linus had decided that he would make his system compatible with the POSIX standard for UNIX systems, he was able to port GNU tools to run under on his system and by that creating a more and more useful operating system. By 1994 Linux had advanced from a simple terminal emulator to a complete operating system supporting multiprocessing, multi users, filesystems and even networking. This had all been accomplished because Linus had decided to make Linux free software that everyone was allowed to help improve. In that year Linux version 1.0 was released at a special conference at the university of Helsinki. Nowadays Linux, or better GNU/Linux has evolved to a widely used operating system with a large userbase and support from many large companies. 5 Hacker/cracker community The last group of computer amateurs that should be in this paper are the hackers and crackers. Obviously these computer users are not professionals who get paid for their actions or the code they write. Still, this group has had, and still has a large influence on the computer industry. 5.1 BBS communities Bulletin Board systems (BBS) started formed the core of cyberspace in the early eighties. It was the medium on which the informal discussion and exchange of information and programs took place. From this time the concept of hacker in it s current meaning originates. Before this a hacker was 7

8 nothing more than someone who liked tinkering hardware(not necessarily computer related), but since this period it became the specific term for persons who tried to make hard or software do things it wasn t supposed to do by design. From the early 80 till the half of the 90 BBS s was the place where hackers and the malicious counterparts crackers gathered. 5.2 Magazines Some of the information available on the BBS s was also compiled into informative newsletters that were distributed via mailinglist. These newsletters grew out to become electronic magazines with articles and tutorials about programming, exploiting software, invading networks and other underground knowledge. The most well known of these magazines are 2600 and phrack. An example of the influence of these magazines is an article in phrack issue 49 by a hacker named Aleph One. This article: Smashing the Stack for fun and profit explains in detail how a stack works in C and how to exploit it s weaknesses and is still considered to be the tutorial for people who are interested in the principle of buffer overflowing Magazine still exists and is even available in print nowadays. 5.3 Virus writers An other group with a large influence on the IT industry are virus writer. Due to the emergence of destructive viruses the user computer experience has changed forever. Also The IT industry responded on this threat by developing all kind off security software. for example: virusscanners. Today this a multi-billion industry. So it s quit fair to say they had a lot of influence. 5.4 CERT Computer Emergence Response team or CERT was founded in 1988 as response on the growing risk of critical systems being hacked. In the couple of years before it foundation there had been some quite severe computer frauds which involved hacking. This made the government aware that their own computer controlled systems(infrastructure, military) could be the next target. 5.5 Security companies Security companies are the logical complement of CERT. The provide security related services on a commercial basis. A lot of security companies are founded or employ former hackers. A famous example of this is Kevin Mitnick who on his own was responsible for making computer security aware as an issue to the larger public. 8

9 6 Conclusion During the years many amateurs have contributed to the evolution of computer science. Early computers where build by electronics hobbyists, operating systems have been built by volunteers all over the world, wide used protocols started as a hack in someones hobby application. Yet we have only given examples of amateurs and systems of amateurs that have been influential. Naturally, this paper is far from complete. Even now that we have read a lot of information about amateurs in computer science we are still unable to tell what has exactly been the influence of amateurs, but we can say that at least some of them have changed computer history. 9