Hacker heritage
Techno Talk
Mark Nelson
Could a model railway club have kickstarted today’s maker movement by inventing computer
hacking 60 years ago? Some people reckon it did, as you will read in this article. If that sounds
like an outlandish claim then prepare to be amazed, because truth is often stranger than fiction.
I
s there a natural affinitybetween
hobby electronics and model railways?
Probably – this magazine has featured
several projects that combine them. And
if you visit https://merg.org.uk you’ll discover MERG (Model Electronic Railway
Group), which is an international, UKbased society promoting interest in the
application of electronics and computers
to all aspects of railway modelling. Their
acclaimed textbook Electronics for Model
Railways is available for free download
at: https://merg.org.uk/content/ebook
US origins
Interest in melding electronics with
model railway operation goes a long
way back – arguably to 1946, when students at MIT (Massachusetts Institute of
Technology in the US) began work on a
vast HO-scale layout that specialised in
the automated operation of model trains.
As the article at https://bit.ly/pe-oct21tmrc explains in greater detail, the Tech
Model Railroad Club (TMRC) became a
wellspring of hacker culture and begat
the first hacking group in North America.
By the mid-1950s, the club had installed
a semi-automatic control system based
on telephone relays that could run a
train over the entire set of tracks, in both
directions without manual intervention: throwing switches and powering
tracks ahead of the train. A decade later, the telephone manufacturer Western
Electric donated to the club a crossbar
telephone exchange switch under its college gift scheme. As well as controlling
train operations, the expanded setup
now featured a digital clock display and
an internal telephone system with external dialling-out lines, all built from
telephone stepping switches and relays.
Onwards and upwards
While many club members were content
with building rolling stock and scheduling timetables, the truly ‘techie’ experts
felt driven towards more challenging
projects. These students shared a passion to find out how things worked and
then to master them. Many who had
been ‘exploring’ the phone switching
network were now being drawn into
10
computer programming, inventing novel techniques, ingenious shortcuts and a
language of their own. One of the words
they coined was ‘hacker’ and according
to The History of Hacking (https://bit.ly/
pe-oct21-hack), this term ‘hacking’ originated at MIT in the 1960s.
Marvin Minsky, the director of the MIT
Artificial Intelligence Lab, was sympathetic to the hackers’ desire to experiment,
and was so impressed by their accomplishments that he allowed them to have
access to the machines in his lab. Erik
Brunvand, author of A Little Bit of Hacker
History (https://bit.ly/pe-oct21-mit), describes the 1960s as the ‘golden age of
the computer hacker’. In his words, ‘the
machines were large, slow, cumbersome
to use, and it took an extraordinary effort to make them do even the simplest
computation. The legendary feats of the
early hackers are made even more amazing when you consider the primitive
nature of the machines they were using
and the tools they had at their disposal.’
Good guys gone bad?
Few things in life are constant, and inevitably hacker activity evolved over time.
A turning point took place in 1975 with
the formation of the Homebrew Computer
Club in Menlo Park, California. This
group of computer hobbyists included folk like Apple Computer founders
Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, and they
played an influential role in the development of the microcomputer revolution
and helped stimulate the rise of Silicon
Valley. In those days, computer hackers were seen as computer experts who
used their knowledge to achieve a goal
or overcome an obstacle, within a computerised system by non-standard means.
Gradually, however, the term took on
a negative connotation and computer
hackers are now more commonly perceived as unauthorised users who break
into computer systems to steal, ransom,
change or destroy information, often by
installing dangerous malware without
the knowledge or consent of their users.
Of course, enlightened folk recognise
that not all hacking is malevolent and it’s
only the so-called ‘black-hat’ hackers who
operate with malicious intent. ‘White-hat’
hackers are the good guys who identify
system vulnerabilities in order to fix
them. Occupying the middle ground
are ‘grey-hat’ hackers (typically political activists) who justify their actions
on ethical grounds.
Does true hacker culture still exist?
Arguably yes, but under a different name.
In the 1980s, hackers wanted machines
that they could modify and program themselves. Since then, users’ horizons have
evolved and expanded, but the underlying desire to create high-tech machines
at affordable prices using homebrew
techniques is a constant theme. Only the
name has been given a makeover and we
now call it ‘maker culture’.
It’s hard to better the definition offered
by Wikipedia, namely that maker culture
is a contemporary subculture representing a technology-based extension of do
it yourself (DIY) activity that intersects
with hardware-oriented parts of hacker
culture and revels in the creation of new
devices as well as tinkering with existing ones. Typical interests enjoyed by
the maker culture include engineeringoriented pursuits such as electronics,
robotics, 3-D printing and the use of
computer numeric control tools.
Maker culture is now well supported
by magazines and websites. Its image is
positive, with many activities run on a
collaborative, not-for-profit basis. There
are public expositions called ‘maker
faires’ (or something similar name),
while all manner of maker spaces such
as ‘fablabs’ (fabrication laboratories; ie,
small-scale workshops) are making digital manufacturing facilities accessible to
business start-ups, groups and private
individuals. Programmable microcontrollers and single-board computers
such as the Arduino and Raspberry Pi,
combined with plentiful open-source
software are lowering the entry cost of
hardware development. Online funding platforms such as Kickstarter and
Patreon are examples of financial support to the maker community. 60 years
on, it’s a great time to revive and maintain the true hacker spirit!
Practical Electronics | October | 2021
