Memories of a Door Hack
In a previous post, I told you of a door hack one of my colleagues did, and what social concepts it illustrated. Mind you, when I was younger, I also did my own door hacks. My former clubmates from the Club Informatique of Lycée Louis-le-Grand may remember one that I did long ago, back in High-School. In retrospect, I realize this anecdote too may illustrate a number of interesting social concepts.
(Paragraphs in small caps are for computer geeks only.)
My high-school, the much reknowned Lycée Louis-le-Grand, had a Club Informatique -- a computer club, that had before my time acquired very expensive hardware (at the time), two Apple //e's and then three PC-XT's. The computers were in a room, hidden in one of the dormitories for students of undergraduate-level classes préparatoires (aux grandes écoles). My brother had told me how he and his friends had spent many a day playing Ultima IV or The Bard's Tale on the Apple //e's -- and the screen of one //e sported the sequels of it: marks were left where white eraser liquid had been put and later removed too harshly; the white marks indicated the starting position where monsters initially appeared in combat in Ultima IV; when invisible monsters were encountered, the party would put them to sleep before they could move, and could then take the fight to their known initial position before the monsters could wake.
By the time I discovered the computer room, Apple 2's were already passé, and the main attraction was the Atari 520STF (brought by a student from the dorm, IIRC) with its sexy 32-bit 68000 processor, that was used for games or for typesetting texts with Calamus. Joris van der Hoeven (now of TeXmacs fame) and Alain Knaff (now back to Luxembourg) also tried to write computer algebra software for their pocket-sized PC-compatible Atari Portfolio's, the physical dimensions of which was within the limitations allowed during examinations of the Concours des Grandes Écoles.
Unused were the PC-XTs, for which nary an interesting piece software was available at the club. No fun game, no documented programming language. I took on to learning them in assembly with MASM, editing files with PC-Tools 4. The 8086 was certainly more powerful than my 6502, but it made everything horribly complex, and the result was hardly faster. The Apple ][ was a piece of art from the 1970's; the PC was a piece of shit from the 1980's. The Atari was so much better. And even sexier were other machines: Amigas, Macs, Acorns -- but they were unavailable. But still, the PC was the machine to learn to program: the existence of a thriving clone PC market meant that PCs had ever growing memory, ever enhanced graphics, ever bigger hard disks, ever falling prices, and ever wider availability, where other machines were doomed to whither and disappear. Atari's, Amiga's, Acorn's and Mac's could be much better platforms, sleekly designed to be both affordable and powerful, powerful and elegant, wicked fast, or just beautiful, but they had no future, because they couldn't evolve fast enough; and they couldn't evolve fast enough because they were small isolated players in a small market. PCs, being office-oriented, could be sold to a much wider basis of solvent buyers, than better designed machines targeted primarily towards gamers and learners. And among office-oriented machines, PCs evolved faster to the high-demand market because IBM had unintendedly neglected to keep the design proprietary enough using the usual protectionist intellectual property; the key software, the operating system, was licensed from Microsoft, who would gladly sell it to clone-makers. (Though interestingly, at that time, DR-DOS 5 and then 6 by Digital Research were great enhancements over MS-DOS by Microsoft, yet ultimately failed.)
Then came Tetris, and the first actual PC games; then also came copies of Turbo Pascal 4 and 5, the integrated IDE of which included instant help, documentation, tutorial and examples, so that you could learn all you needed from it. Turbo Pascal 3, without documentation and help, couldn't be learnt from a random copy; neither could any of those many programming languages that were available (FORTH, FORTRAN, C, BASIC, whatever): for all of them, you needed paper documentation, and that was unaffordable to copy. And even when you could get a bad sixth hand photocopy of a reference manual, you couldn't learn the intention with which those zillions of functions could be used. Turbo Pascal cames with plenty of examples you could run and step through. Thus I, and many people, could and did learn how to program with Turbo Pascal. Of course, I already knew Assembly and BASIC, but Pascal took programming from the 1950's and 1960's to the 1970's, a huge step forward for commoners in the late 1980's. Turbo Pascal, with its handy and comprehensive interactive help, revolutioned the way software was written on mainstream (=cheap) computers.
With the advent of interesting software for the PC and a new generation of pupils, more people began to come to the club. At some time, someone must have complained that the few computers were too crowded to the administration, for the administration began to be felt.
As a response to the lack of available computing hardware, some well-intentioned administrator, now officially in charge of the Club but wholly incompetent in either technical or pedagogical matters, saw it fit to institute quotas, and a machine to enforce them.
The administrator, now deceased CPE Le Grouyer, based his decisions on fake democratic consultations: he summoned representatives of the club members (in practice, those members came who were most concerned by what the administration could decide), and asked their opinions, not without making clear the implicit threat that if they would disagree on his core beliefs, they would be considered as unreasonable and irresponsible, and replaced by other representatives that would agree, or dismissed altogether so that decisions would be taken without consultation. He instituted a quota system, with each member being having official access to the computers at given hours of the week only.
The quotas was greeted positively as a workable though unflexible solution to the resource contention problem whereby too many people would try to simultaneously use the three PC-XTs (there was no contention on the two obsolete Apple //e's; I was maybe the only one with a software collection for this system). A system of property rights would solve the contention issue, and rights were soon understood as transferable to a friend, exchangeable between owners, homesteadable when wavered (with a priority to official tenants). This was much better than the previous system (still in full validity when the new rules didn't apply) whereby a mix of importance (priority to programmers over players, and to more interesting software over more trivial software), homesteading (don't interrupt something that's begun, especially if interruption would waste it by lack of game saving), and welfare (give a fair share to those who haven't used the machine yet, and over whom you have no compelling priority). Actually, a property system had been considered, but in absence of any institution, of any accounting of time spent, or even of any inventory of existing members, it wasn't possible; intervention by official high-school administrators was rightly felt as something much more costly than coping with the occasional contention problem was. And soon enough, the cost was felt.
Once in a while, the administrator would come in and chase non-scheduled members (or worse, non-members). The administrator realized his quota system was not respected as intended by him. He badly wanted to control the access to the computer room. Therefore, on the next year, he had the club spend most of the alloted budget, not on a much needed new machine that would have reduced resource contention, but on an expensive electronic keycode device that would control the door of the computer room. He didn't see computer hacking as the goal of the club, and allowing more hacking as the priority; he saw teaching discipline as the goal of the institution, and enforcing discipline as the priority. A sports teacher encouraged him by finding a bargain second hand door control device.
The electronic lock was a nuisance. Whenever someone was in, you could knock at the door, and he'd open and let you use an available computer if there was any, or chat with other hackers if they were present. But if the scheduled club member didn't come or there were none, then you were out of luck and couldn't come in, and the computer resource was plainly wasted. The only good thing was that the administrator, confident in his device, would come less often and thus chase hackers less often. But as for contention control, it was no improvement to the rules that were already used, and was thus felt as a pure waste, that could have been used to buy a new computer or improve existing ones.
Some hackers had tried to discover how the device worked; they had open it, seen the electronic circuit, and were discussing how to hack the panel to add a magic code. Other hackers traced the way it controlled the physical door lock, through a simple electromagnet, that I measured to be open using 9V DC. That's when I decided to hack the door. I took copper wire from the club cabinet full of old stuff, bought a 9V battery and a tablet of chocolate. I put the battery inside the lock; I connected one battery pole to the electromagnet with some copper wire; and I connected a copper wire to the other pole of the battery, and another one to the other pole of the magnet. The wires then ran inside the metal bar that served as lock for the auxiliary doorpost, down to the ground, where they were wrapped using the aluminium wrapping from the chocolate. You could then use a ruler of any object to contact the aluminium wrappings, and the door would unlock. The design was later improved to use the metal bar as an electric conductor instead of a second wire.
That trick worked great for several months, but there were some issues. The administrator realized that some pupils were still coming at times when they shouldn't, so he tried to change codes, and issued more severe directives to not let any unauthorized person. That was only a minor issue. What was more problematic was that the lady who cleaned the room once in a while who unvolontarily put the wrappings in permanent contact, leaving the door open. That required next club member to come to remove contact. However, this ultimately confused the panel, probably because a member tried to enter his code while the wires were in contact; the panel would then try to assert current on its output line instead of its being in its usual high-impedance mode -- and then the panel was connected to a 9V battery. Oops. The panel had to be repaired. With all the dysfunctions of his device, the administrator made an inquiry and after some months, he finally discovered the battery trick. My parents were warned, I was summoned, blamed and excluded from the club to the end of the year. However, while the electronic device was being repaired, a key was provided to some club members the administrator trusted, and they promptly copied the key, which put an end to the whole expensive trouble, as all hackers, including excluded I, could now use the computers at will, avoiding the hours during which the administrator could inspect the room (if he did come, the present pupil would say some previous person opened the door).
It is interesting how common law and property rights naturally appeared among students, where the role of the Administration was that of a nuisance that monopolized and misused official means of property enforcement. By its monopoly, the Administration had long prevented the appearance of property rights, by preventing any institutionalized relationship between squatters of the computer room. When these rights emerged as a natural but unintended outgrowth of the institution of club membership, the Administration that sought to destroy them through expensive means, and yet the students stuck to such rights despite the Administration.