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1. The Tech Model Railroad Club (TMRC) is a club at MIT that built sophisticated railroad and trains models. The members were among the first hackers. Key figures of the club were Peter Samson, Alan Kotok, Jack Dennis, and Bob Saunders. The club was composed of two groups, those who were interested in the modeling and landscaping, and those who comprised the Signals and Power Subcommittee and created the circuits that made the trains run. The latter would be among the ones who popularized the term hacker among many other slang terms, and who eventually moved on to computers and programming. They were initially drawn to the IBM 704, the multimillion-dollar mainframe that was operated at Building 26, but access and time to the mainframe was restricted to more important people. The group really began being involved with computers when Jack Dennis, a former member, introduced them to the TX-0, a three-million-dollar computer on long-term-loan from Lincoln Laboratory. They would usually steout the place where the TX-0 was housed until late in the night in hopes that someone who had signed up for computer time did not show up.2. The Hacker Ethic was a set of concepts, beliefs, and morals that came out of a symbiotic relationship between the hackers and the machines. It was not something that was written up as a manifesto, but a commonly, silently, agreed upon creed that simply came to be. The Ethic basically consisted of allowing all information to be free in order to learn about how the world worked; using the already available knowledge to create more knowledge. Anything that prevented them from getting to this knowledge was resented. The best system was an open one that could be debugged and improved upon by anyone. For them, bureaucracy was the bane of open systems and the IBM culture at the time was its epitome. The worth of a hacker should only be judged by looking at his hacking, not on other criteria such as education, age, race, or position, and anything a hacker created on a computer ld be considered artistic and beautiful just like anything else. The most beautiful computer code was one that was aesthetic, innovative and did not waste memory space. The practice of optimizing program code was known as "bumming." Another belief was that computers can enhance your life, even if you are not a hacker. At the time computers were not well understood and hackers had to convince others, including their professors, of this belief.3. Spacewar!: Many of the hackers were also fascinated by the telephone companies and their exchange systems and would often go on tours the companies offered to learn as much about them as possible. Alan Kotok, who had acquired some prestige with his skills with the TX-0 and also worked for Western Electric (the manufacturing arm of the Bell System), would read as much as he could about the technical details of the telephone system and then explore or fingerprint the network. In September 1961, DEC donated to MIT's RLE lab the second PDP-1 that it had produced. The machiewas a dream to hackers. Six of them, including Kotok, Samson, Saunders, and Wagner, spent a total of two hundred and fifty man-hours one weekend to rewrite the TX-0 compiler for the PDP-1 because they did not like the first choice. They were only paid five hundred dollars for their feat, but the finished product that had come of the Hacker Ethic, was its own reward. Steve "Slug" Russell was another PDP-1 hacker that came up with a 2D game called Spacewar! in which two space ships, controlled by toggle switches on the PDP-1, would fly around the screen and shoot torpedoes at each other. His program was further improved by the other hackers. Samson, for example, changed the random dots that represented the stars to look like the real constellations and he made the screen scroll as the ships moved in space. Dan Edwards, another programmer, added a sun and the effect of gravitational pull. Kotok and Saunders even created the first computer joystick out of TMRC parts to aid with the playing. The game and the comerwere readily and freely available to anyone. Eventually two programs were started to make computers usable by more than one person at a time, a concept that was called time-sharing. One was started by Jack Dennis for the PDP-1, and one was started by Professor Fernando J. Corbató for the IBM 7090. MIT would eventually be paid three million dollars a year by ARPA to develop time-sharing through Project MAC headed by Robert Fano with the involvement of Corbató, Dennis, and Minsky who would focus on Artificial Intelligence. Project MAC was housed on the ninth floor of Tech Square, and it would become a home to many hackers.4. Greenblatt and Gosper: Ricky Greenblatt was a born hacker, although when asked whether a hacker is born or made, he said, "If hackers are born, then they're going to get made, and if they're made into it, they were born." He was an intelligent child, and used to play chess and make electrical devices at an early age. When he first got into MIT he was intent on making the Dean's List, but byhis sophomore year he flunked out, because he was spending too much time hacking relay circuits at the TMRC and programming for the PDP-1. He even programmed a FORTRAN compiler for the PDP-1. Bill Gosper was a math genius. He took a programming course with John McCarthy, and Minsky's course on artificial intelligence. The hackers enjoyed Chinese food, and they would order anything that seemed interesting to their exploratory minds. Most did not have much of a social life outside of hacking, and some such as Greenblatt were notorious for their lack of personal hygiene. Gosper managed to graduate, but he had to work to pay back the tuition money that the Navy had paid him. Gosper did not like the Navy culture which did not allow programmers near the computers, and he hated the UNIVAC computer that they used since he considered it erroneous in its very design. He managed to work for a private company and later for Project MAC. Greenblatt decided to write a better chess program because he found Kotok's version te lacking in strategy. The program was good enough to defeat the renowned academic Hubert Dreyfus who had proclaimed that no chess program would be good enough to beat a ten-year-old (and, correctly, that the MIT Artificial Intelligence Programme was doomed to failure due to profound theoretical fallacies). Although the hackers proved the skeptic wrong, their Hacker Ethic concluded that convincing the outside world of the merits of computers was not as interesting as hacking them.At age 12, Mitnick used social engineering to bypass the punchcard system used in the Los Angeles bus system. After a friendly bus driver told him where he could buy his own ticket punch, he could ride any bus in the greater LA area using unused transfer slips he found in the trash. Social engineering became his primary method of obtaining information, including user-names and passwords and modem phone numbers.[3]Mitnick first gained unauthorized access to a computer network in 1979, at 16, when a friend gave him the phone number for the Ark, the computer system Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) used for developing their RSTS/E operating system software. He broke into DEC's computer network and copied their software, a crime he was charged with and convicted of in 1988. He was sentenced to 12 months in prison followed by three years of supervised release. Near the end of his supervised release, Mitnick hacked into Pacific Bell voice mail computers. After a warrant was issued for his arrest, Mitnick fled, becoming a fugitive for two and a half years.According to the U.S. Department of Justice, Mitnick gained unauthorized access to dozens of computer networks while he was a fugitive. He used cloned cellular phones to hide his location and, among other things, copied valuable proprietary software from some of the country's largest cellular telephone and computer companies. Mitnick also intercepted and stole computer passwords, altered computer networks, and broke into and read private e-mail. Mitnick was apprehended on February 15, 1995 in Raleigh, North Carolina.[4] He was found with cloned cellular phones, more than 100 clone cellular phone codes, and multiple pieces of false identification.[5] Bravo - FBI - The211Reno and Kevin89183 , to be continued... Comming soon