In Pittsburgh: Hacking the Night Away

By Robert T. Grieves

The hour approaches midnight on the campus of Carnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburgh, but in Wean Hall, C.M.U.'s computer center, it might as well be high noon. On the fifth floor, two dozen undergraduates pound computer terminal keyboards, complete class assignments or work on research projects. In a glass-walled room two floors below, 20 students are seated at terminals. Down the hall from them, in a large room known as the SPICE rack (for a project called the Scientific Personal Interactive Computing Environment), several young men and women tap away on Wean Hall's most sophisticated machines.

Welcome to the world of the computer hacker. As midnight wears on to 3 a.m. and then 6 a.m., the hum of conversation dies and Wean Hall becomes very quiet. But the lights burn on, the soft-drink machine on the third floor continues to dispense 16-oz. bottles, and nocturnal computerniks still sprawl before green screens, clack-clacking their instructions into the memory of a DEC-20 system.

Rob MacLachlan, 20, wears faded jeans, a plaid shirt and a blue headband to keep his flowing blond hair at bay. He is barefoot. On this night he is running through the SPICE program on a $70,000 Symbolics LM2 computer. The project's goal: to provide a network (a group of interconnected computers) with almost unlimited memory and computation power. He also uses the terminal to play games--Star Wars, Splines and Worm--devised by students and faculty members at C.M.U. and other schools.

"I'm a hacker; it would be silly for me to deny it," MacLachlan says. "My grade-point average is higher or lower depending on how many computer courses I take in a semester. I'm really not that interested in other subjects." MacLachlan's longest stretch in front of a terminal so far this year: 32 hours.

As a hacker, MacLachlan is a member of an intense, reclusive subculture of the computer age that has cropped up at the nation's top universities. The term hacker derives from "hack," meaning a subtle, sometimes elegant fix for a flaw in a computer program. Hackers spend hours typing commands on terminal keyboards to learn as much as possible about the strengths and weaknesses of a particular program or network. They tinker for the sheer fun of it, delving deeper and deeper into the mysteries of software.

Indeed, a good deal of pop psychology has been written about the tendency of hackers to sublimate personal or academic problems in the immediate thrill of answering a question posed on a terminal screen. In Psychology Today, Stanford Professor Philip Zimbardo summed up the hacker's dilemma: "Fascination with the computer becomes an addiction, and as with most addictions, the 'substance' that gets abused is human relationships."

The hacker stereotype is a pudgy male with a fish-belly-white complexion who swills soft drinks, lives on candy bars and spends most of his waking hours in front of a terminal, playing games or trying to penetrate Defense Department networks. (So far as is known, no one has succeeded in breaching a classified Pentagon system.) Dress ranges from the clean-cut, Ken-and-Barbie look to the torn jeans and tie-dyed couture of the Woodstock generation. Beards and glasses are popular hacker accessories.

Jim Large, 21, and Skef Wholey, 19, are SPICE rack regulars along with MacLachlan. Like most hard-core hackers, they do not think much about graduation or life after college: all that seems incidental to the computer experience. They generally study, work and talk in the SPICE rack, and when they go out for food, their choice of eatery is understood and unvarying: Jimmy Tsang's Chinese restaurant in Shadyside. Any suggestion that hacking is the least bit odd makes them bridle. Says Large: "Hacking just means doing something with enthusiasm. I know more about farming than the average person knows about computers, but I don't view farmers as strange people wrapped up in their own culture."

Like all enthusiasts, hackers have developed their own argot, handed down from the first computer zealots of the early 1970s. To "gronk out," for example, means to go to sleep; to "frobnicate" or "frob" means to fiddle with the controls of a computer. Hackerese changes along with computer technology; even the term hacker is under revisionist pressure. At Carnegie-Mellon, some hackers contend that "wizard" is a more appropriate moniker for those adept at programming.

Like rock stars, hackers have their groupies. Angela Gugliotta is not a hacker, but she prefers the company of hackers. Says she: "When I started meeting hackers I said to myself, 'Gee, here are people who are interested in something.' I was unhappy here until I started hanging around hackers." Hangers-on are tolerated if they know their place; poseurs who spout hacker phrases but know nothing about computers are regarded with contempt. Says Wholey: "You learn to avoid those people. They have nothing to say."

Since the early 1970s the largest communities of hackers have been found at three of the nation's leading computer centers: M.I.T., Stanford and Carnegie-Mellon. Carnegie-Mellon is perhaps the pre-eminent computer school in the nation. It has more terminals available to students, a more structured computer curriculum, and a number of illustrious experts, such as Herbert Simon, Allen Newell and Raj Reddy, on its faculty. Says Carnegie-Mellon Research Scientist Ronald Cole: "C.M.U. is definitely the most intense computer environment in the U.S."

Hackers at C.M.U. like to test their tenacity by exploring ways of scaling the electronic barriers that protect computer systems or by engaging in protracted computer combat. In their wars, they try to block each other's access to programs or destroy those of their rivals. Recently a hacker created a program known informally as Lose Big; it looks like a game but actually is a trap that destroys the files of whoever runs the program. "Nerds," which is what hackers call computer dilettantes, are the chief victims of Lose Big. "You see a guy at the terminal," says Veteran Hacker Rudy Nedved, 23, "and suddenly he gets this 'Oops, what happened?' look on his face." Such techniques are sometimes used later in life to write popular computer games--or pull off staggeringly large computer frauds. (Computer Whiz Stanley Mark Rifkin, who was a hacker at California State University Northridge, used his software expertise to steal $10.2 million from California's Security Pacific National Bank.)

Two years ago Vince Fuller, a clean-cut C.M.U. junior known then as a computer prankster, used his terminal to sneak into Columbia University's computer system via an electronic link between the two schools. He could have damaged Columbia's main computer by exploiting a "bug," or error, in the operating system, but instead he quickly notified authorities of the problem. Two months ago a more diabolical hacker broke into C.M.U.'s DEC-20 system and misused an authorization code to destroy student, faculty and researcher files. It took university programmers 23 hours to restore the lost files from storage discs.

"Flaming" is another favorite hacker activity. To flame means to speak rapidly or obsessively on a variety of subjects both significant and trivial. Hackers flame by typing opinions, gossip and mad rantings into a computer file reserved as a community bulletin board. Those wanting to know what is on the mind of computerniks all over campus can call up the board on their terminals and read the latest flame. One recent public notice contained a rosy farewell message from the head of C.M.U.'s Computer Science Department, who explained that he was leaving the university for a job at a private computer company started by a former faculty member. The farewell address was fake; but because C.M.U.'s electronic bulletin board can be read by other universities on the same network, the perplexed department head began receiving queries from colleagues as far away as Europe.

The hacker culture generates its own rewards; success, such as rapid career advancement, is not that important. At 26, Jim McQuade is growing into hacker middle age. He has attended C.M.U. intermittently since 1974, with time off to do freelance computing for two firms. At one point he even considered becoming a drama major. Now a first-semester senior, McQuade uses his terminal for completing papers and assignments, for doing work as a Robotics Institute researcher, and for hacking programs on the side. Says he: "I'm not in any hurry to graduate."

Neither are the bone-weary hackers who trudge out of Wean Hall at dawn's first light. They repair to dorm rooms and Victorian houses in quiet neighborhoods to spend the day in owl-like slumber, skipping both meals and classes. As dusk descends, they will meander back to the computer rooms, returning to the fluorescent comfort of typed instruction and programmed response, ready to hack again.

-- By Robert T. Grieves This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.