Amateur radio, hackers, amateurs and models of railways

Investigating the roots of the free software movement

In 2003, Scott McNeely, CEO of Sun Microsystems, called GNU / Linux “a great medium for amateurs,” but not for industry. The relative success of Linux on Sun’s territory, and the subsequent decline of Sun, proved that McNeely’s assessment was wrong, but Linux certainly has its roots and inspiration among hackers and fans.



Hobbies - “interest or activity, outside of regular activities, and, above all, for pleasure.” A tedious job - “a started project or product, built not only to perform some constructive task, but with some wild pleasure derived from simple involvement.” Early Linux kernel developers called themselves hackers and for the most part did their real work at home, suspending things for a hobby. Contribution to the core gave them intellectual abilities and rewards that otherwise would not be available.

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Linus Torvalds did not quit his job at Transmeta in order to devote himself to full-fledged work on the Linux kernel since 2003, but it can be argued that by that time the Linux kernel had more employees than any comparable project. The fact that kernel development was more of a hobby than a job, with a return that was emotional rather than financial, can be considered a virtue, not an obstacle to its potential success.

Access to computers must be complete and unlimited.

Linux developers in the early 90s grew up in the era of the ZX80 and BBC micro, Acorn and Apricot, for which the code was often obvious, and computing was an educational process. Jeremy Allison, the developer of Samba, argues for free software: “I want anyone in the world to have the same opportunities that I had when I was growing up,” he says. "The beginning of the eighties was a period of intense creativity in the computer industry in the UK."



"I had a Sinclair QL , which was a 32-bit machine, even though it had an 8-bit bus." The source code of the operating system, QDOS, turned on perfectly legitimate. "The assembler sources, commented source, you could buy and watch They were sewn into ROM, but you could modify them - there was a company that disassembled them for me quite legally - and then IBM PC and Microsoft came and destroyed all this creative potential, just leveled off ground tank tracks. Thus, det and growing up these days, they don’t know any of those things. They don’t know the basics of how things are arranged. They have black boxes that rattle because they are broken and they can’t look inside. You can’t learn from this. "



For those who spent their childhood or adolescence, digging into home computers of the late seventies and early eighties, playing with software, were gaining experience, and something that could be shared. One could say that Linux grew out of this ideal as much as it grew out of the free software movement or the Usenet culture of the early 90s, where, “if you wrote something cool, you sent it to Usenet” and the only condition which came with the software, was that, "if the program broke, you support both parts."



Also, for the early development of Linux, it was important that it was fun, or how Linus Torvalds expressed it in his statement of August 25, 1991 in comp.os.minix - announced the arrival of the OS, which he intended to call Freax, “just a hobby, will not be as big and professional as GNU. ”



A gradual departure from the perception of software as a tool, understanding and reworking, allowing users to better understand the machines for which they paid, often outdated, true or not, to the famous Open Letter to Lovers, written by Bill Gates, “Main Partner, Microsoft”, February 3 1976, in which Gates stated: “Since most amateurs should know, most of you steal your software. You have to pay for the hardware, but software is something that can be shared. Who cares if they paid the people who worked on it? “



Gates’s complaint was directed against owners of home computers who developed a culture of sharing software that they used to program their computers and unhappily asked: “Who can afford to do professional work for anything? What amateur can spend 3 person-years on programming, finding all the errors, documenting their product and distributing it for free? “A question that free software developers have answered many times.

Always give in to Practical Requirement!

Sometime in 2002, Andrew Rodland flipped through the Linux kernel code and ran into a random comment in the 'panic_blink' function, which described the purpose of the function, as „tells the user who can run X and not see the console, that we have a panic. This is to distinguish from 'real' hang. Theoretically, you can send a panic message like Morse code, but it remains as a homework for the reader. ”



Rodland, “not having the habit of retreating before a problem (if it’s just not really difficult),” created a patch that changed the kernel to report a panic with Morse code.



In January 2009, Thomas Shepe updated Rodland's code for inclusion in the Linux 2.6.29-rc1 kernel. “When turned on,” he wrote in the comments, “this code screams the kernel in panic about using Morse code, signals the LEDs on a possibly connected keyboard and / or beeper. You can enable / disable your Morse code output devices of your choice using the kernel boot option “panicMorse”. A modification of Morse code can be rejected as frivolous or playful, (and what is wrong with that?), But SOS sent by a crashing kernel also has practical application, as a debugging tool for developers of kernel and hardware.



Nowadays satellites, GPS and spacecraft, Morse code no longer has the meaning that it once had, as a means of calling for help or communicating with someone on the other side of the planet. But even in this millennium, experience in Morse code is still in demand for obtaining a radio amateur license. And an amazing number of early Linux contributors and other free software projects were hams. The most famous are Alan Cox, who wrote the Morse code tutorial GW4PTS for Linux in 1993, Ted Tso, whose call sign is VE7RJT, Bruce Perens (K6BP), and Bdale Garby, who broadcasts as KB0G. Indeed, Perence led a successful campaign to remove the requirements for the knowledge of Morse code, as a condition for obtaining an amateur radio license, a law that he described as the Most Foolish Technology Law in the World.

All information should be free.

Amateurs were really practical lovers. This hobby dates back to the first decades of the 20th century. According to the radio amateur under the pseudonym iceowl ( here ), “radio amateurs of the 1920s and 30s were at the forefront of technology. The transmitters and receivers they built in their homes were ultramodern. ” As hobbyists in many fields, amateurs often organized professionals to implement some of the most ambitious aspects of their hobbies.



Part of the attractiveness of conversations with fellow radio amateurs in abandoned corners of the world through a machine that you built yourself from radio tubes, wires and glue has evaporated in recent years, replaced by instant pleasure provided by mobile phones, netbooks and VoIP. But the hobby continues in pursuit of more esoteric goals, such as Moonbounce , communicating "with other stations by the reflection of the radio signal from the moon", or DXing , "a geopolitical game played by psychos with wires, radio transceivers and generators", which aims is to “establish contact, verifiable with one of the many of the 335 geographic and political units that the American Radio Relay League recognizes as separate countries”. Iceowl concludes that „for many crazy radio operators, the magic detector radio is where the infection begins. DXing is a disease in full swing. ” In fact, just like the beginning of personal PCs, in the 1920s and 30s at the beginning of public broadcasting, it was generally possible to eavesdrop on fervent conversations about the best methods for building detector receivers on the upper decks of doubledeckers, and the number of magazines available on the topic.



In the early years of home computers, a reliable way to connect to the Internet was through KAQ9 NOS , originally written by Phil Karn in 1985 for CP / M, and later ported to DOS for use with amateur packet radio. KAQ9 was Karna. “KA9Q NOS was only the second well-known implementation of Internet protocols for lower-end computers“ after MIT PC / IP, and “attracted many contributors and became very widely used during the late 1980s and amateur radio communications and in various educational projects. In a sense, “Karn wrote,“ it was the Linux of his day. ” KAQ9 was the recommended Demon Internet software as early as 1995.



Although better known as ex-Debian leader and HP Open Source and chief Linux technologist, Bdeyl Gabi was a contributor to KA9Q NOS, and says his most famous contribution was “a stupid little mail program I wrote for the network program KA9Q NOS, under BM, although I assume that I am more proud of my role as an integrator and the author of the documentation for the package until April 1989. ”



According to Perenzo, Amateur radio can greatly contribute to education in that area that cannot be found on the Internet: you can learn about analog electronics, and about building analog and digital wireless communications. You can build your own equipment from the materials at hand, while most computer scientists simply collect cards together. You can communicate all over the world without the Internet - only the air between you and the person with whom you are talking. You can even call the World or the Shuttle, or control one of the many satellites that hams built and launched as 'hitchhikers' along with commercial space cargo. ”

Distrust of power - promoting decentralization

Another amateur radio operator who was prominent in the computer world was Steve Wozniak, co-founder of Apple, with Steve Jobs. Wozniak's early interest in technology stems from his interest in amateur radio, but he later became involved in a more esoteric pastime of “phone phreaking” through his friendship with John Draper, who received two prison sentences for hacking telephone networks, but later redeemed himself when writing Easy Writer, the word processor for Apple II, allegedly while in prison.



Bruce Sterling says in his book “Hacker Crackdown” that “the true roots of the modern hacker underground are most likely to grow” from a group of the 1960s and 70s, known as the Youth International Party , or Yippies, who were the first to defend telephone phreaking . The most notable of the Yippies was Abbey Hoffman, about whom Stirling speaks, that he was "a gifted publicist who regarded electronic media both as a playground and as a weapon."



Sterling says that “during the Vietnam War, there was a federal surcharge levied on telephony services. Hoffman and his company had the opportunity, and were engaged in the systematic theft of telephony services, arguing that by doing so they participated in civil disobedience: to refuse taxes for the illegal and immoral war. ” To this end, Hoffman and his co-editor, euphemistically known as Al Bell, published a newsletter called Youth International Party Line, “dedicated to collecting and distributing Yippie hacking methods, especially phones”, using devices to trick switchboards to provide free access to calls, imitating their own signals from the telephone system, are activities known as “phone phreaking”.



Hoffman was a prankster with a political purpose, but telephone phreaking was a surprisingly widespread activity. Before founding the more orthodox empire of Apple Computers, Wozniak and Jobs' first business venture had to design and sell a boxed phreaking device known as the Blue Box , which tricked Bell telephone systems to provide their users with free long-distance calls.

Hackers must be convicted of their hacks, and not by false criteria, such as education, age, race or position.

The more moralistic hacker culture ideal, as represented by the free software movement, grew from another amateur playing field, the Tech Model Railroad Club (TMRC) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the late 1950s.



Stephen Levy tells the story in "Hackers: Heroes of Computer Revolution". “Some participants liked the idea of ​​spending time making and painting replicas of certain trains with historical and emotional value, or creating a realistic landscape for the site. It was a knife-and-brush group, and they subscribed to railway journals and registered a club to travel on old railway lines. Another faction gathered in the Signals and Power Subcommittee, a subcommittee of the club, and they cared most about what was happening under the site. It was a system that worked like the collaboration between Rub Goldberg and Werner von Braun, and was constantly improved, updated, improved, and sometimes broke (gronked - in the club slang). The S & P people were fascinated by the system’s operation, its growing complexity, the way any change made would affect other parts, and how the relations between the parts could be reduced to optimal interaction. ”



The S & P participants became known as The Midnight Requisition Committee, also TMRC, so-called because “when the TMRC needed a set of diodes, or some additional relays, to add some new feature to the System, several people from S & P waited for darkness and looked for a way to the places where these things are stored. None of the hackers who were, as a rule, scrupulously honest in other matters, did not seem to consider it a theft. ”



The tradition of MIT computer hackers began when TMRC discovered the TX-0 computer in Building 26, and decided that the best time to gain access was at night, “when no one in his mind goes to the hourly session with a piece of paper left every Friday near the air conditioner in the RLE lab ... TMRC hackers, who most likely considered themselves TX-0 hackers, changed their lifestyle to adapt to the computer, ”and this is the moment when the real fun began. Their midnight raids on the TX-0 brought them into the new world of mysterious and wonderful hacks, which carried them away from the disgusting model of the railway and the clinging mess of wires under the table covers.



The core of the TMRC hacker group was ultimately absorbed by the AI ​​Group at MIT - under the competent guidance of Prof. Marvin Minsky and John McCarthy, the inventor of Lisp. AI Group, initially as part of the MIT project - MAC (Multiple Access Computing) - for the development of collective access and machine recognition, eventually gained independence and became the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, or AI Lab.

You can create art and beauty on the computer.

One of the AI ​​Lab hackers, Bob Saunders, later described Levy himself and others as an “elite group. Other people were busy researching, spending their days in four-story buildings, making smelly couples or in a physics lab, throwing particles into things or anything else they do. We simply did not pay attention to what other people were doing, because we were not interested. They studied what they studied, and we studied what we studied. And the fact that most of this was not in the officially approved curriculum was, generally speaking, insignificant. ”



Work became a hobby, and a hobby was work. Art, politics and social morals of the hackers revolved around the life of the machine. Richard Greenblatt, who, in the context of his role at the MIT invented for himself, sometimes described himself as a 'hacker of a hacker', flunked his course because he got the best education and too much fanatic from machines to go to lectures or pass exams, working during the night and sleeping during the day, while relying on lectures.



It is said that Greenblatt did not spend too much time on personal hygiene and he completely dressed randomly, but he also excellently wrote the first computer chess program, and created Maclisp, the Lisp dialect for the MAC project on the PDP-6. He co-authored the revolutionary operating system ITS (Incompatible Time sharing System), which became the vehicle for developing hacker software, and was largely responsible, together with Tom Knight, for inventing MIT's Lisp Machine, which was the first commercial single-user workstation.



Railway modeling may not be cool, but TMRC hackers, who became AI Lab's main members, developed the first workstations, the first computer games, the first music software and were the first to show hacks — and the culture they developed inspired the creation of a free movement. software.

Computers can change your life for the better.

Models of railways, amateur radio and computer hacks were the entrance of a person who was keen on his hobby in the mysterious world of programming. Alan Cox "worked on such things as a multiplayer game (AberMUD) that accidentally attracted me to the kernel" before he became one of the most famous experts on the Linux kernel. In his free time, he "uses his hacker skills to fix the locomotives of the tiny N-scale model railway for fun." He also wrote a kernel module for the packet radio protocol, AX.25, which is vital for amateur radio users. And he is not alone in his interest in railroad models. Neil Young, the grunge godfather, has seven US patents in digital control and monitoring systems for railway models (which he designed to give his son, who has cerebral palsy, better access to a hobby), and once had 20 - interest in Lionel Trains.



He once said about modeling railways - “This is meditation for me. This is such a relief - to avoid creating music, and the impact of music, to implement all this in algorithms and principles of work. ”



All this is to prove that lovers, those who pursue unpaid interests just to get the best out of their hobbies, can bring passion, commitment, aesthetic balance and imagination to a project that often does not fit into the world of work, where initiative and opportunity are often sacrificed for the necessity of knowing one’s place and following a schedule.



Yet strangely, most of the most famous hackers who worked at home to create Linux and other free software projects are now hired for relatively high wages by billions of corporations to do what they would have done anyway - working on their hobbies ...