Origins
The substrate before anyone called it security: the first ARPANET log entry on 29 October 1969, the network that grew out of it, and the phone phreaks who learned that a system responding to tones would obey anyone who could produce them. Curiosity came first; the threat model arrived later.
Part of Cybersecurity
20 moments in this segment.
- — The BBN IMP team, 1969. The BBN engineering team that built the first ARPANET routers, including Robert Kahn, Frank Heart, Severo Ornstein and Will Crowther. These are the people who built the substrate on which the first worm ran two years later. Released under CC0 on Commons.
- — The 1969 BBN Interface Message Processor. A Bolt Beranek and Newman Interface Message Processor, the refrigerator-sized packet switch that formed each ARPANET node. Creeper (1971) moved between TENEX systems attached to exactly this hardware. File DateTimeOriginal is 2017, so this is a museum-era photograph of a period machine. The subject dates from 1969; the photograph itself is later.
- — The first ARPANET log entry, 29 October 1969. The handwritten IMP log from UCLA recording the first host-to-host login over the ARPANET, the network on which Creeper would later propagate. Charles S. Kline's entry notes that the system crashed after two characters of 'LOGIN'. This is the founding document of the network whose openness every later attack depended on.
- — A DEC PDP-10 / DECSYSTEM-10, the machine Creeper ran on. Creeper was written by Bob Thomas at BBN in 1971 for the TENEX operating system running on DEC PDP-10 hardware, printing 'I'M THE CREEPER: CATCH ME IF YOU CAN'. This is a preserved DECSYSTEM-10 at the Living Computer Museum in Seattle. There is no known free photograph or screenshot of Creeper itself. The subject dates from 1971; the photograph itself is later.
- — A Cap'n Crunch 2600 Hz whistle, Deutsches Technikmuseum. The actual cereal-box whistle displayed as a museum object in Berlin. Holding the real, cheap plastic object next to the phone system it defeated is the whole point of the phreaking story. The 2600 Hz exploit was publicised by Ron Rosenbaum's 1971 Esquire article 'Secrets of the Little Blue Box'. The subject dates from 1971; the photograph itself is later.
- — A blue box at the Computer History Museum. A blue box: a hand-built tone generator that reproduced the multi-frequency signalling AT&T used internally, giving its user free worldwide calls. Wozniak and Jobs built and sold these before Apple existed. Photographed at the Computer History Museum in 2004. The subject dates from 1972; the photograph itself is later.
- — Apple I, Macintosh and a Wozniak blue box together. A museum case placing a blue box beside the Apple I and the Macintosh. Wozniak has said repeatedly that without the blue box there would have been no Apple: the pair's first product was an illegal one. It is the clearest single image of the line from phreaking to personal computing. The subject dates from 1976; the photograph itself is later.
- — ARPANET logical map, March 1977, PDP-10 nodes highlighted. The Computer History Museum's reproduction of the ARPANET logical map for March 1977 with PDP-10 systems marked. It shows how small and how completely trusted the early network was: a few dozen named hosts with no authentication boundary between them. This is the topology Creeper and, later, the Morris Worm traversed.
- — An acoustic coupler modem. An acoustic coupler: the handset of an ordinary telephone is pushed into two rubber cups and data is carried as audible tone. This is how a home hobbyist got onto a remote system before dedicated data lines, and it is the device behind almost every 1980s war-dialling story. Slow, noisy and completely unauthenticated. The subject dates from 1978; the photograph itself is later.
- — A 1978 interview with John Draper. A contemporaneous interview in which Draper demonstrates a colour graphics computer costing 1,500 dollars, plays an early Lunar Lander game and discusses his work. It is a rare period recording of a phreaker at the moment personal computing arrived.
- — Protek 1200 acoustic coupler, 1984. The retail box for a 1984 UK acoustic coupler modem, from a private retro-computing collection. Period packaging is often more evocative than the device: it shows the moment home dial-up access became a consumer product. 1200 baud was fast for a bedroom in 1984. The subject dates from 1984; the photograph itself is later.
- — Information overload in Hackers: Wizards of the Electronic Age. A clip from the 1986 documentary Hackers: Wizards of the Electronic Age, in which computer users describe being overwhelmed by the volume of information available to them. It is period footage of the community that formed around early personal computing.
- — The Secret History of Hacking. A documentary on phreaking, computer hacking and social engineering from the 1970s to the 1990s, featuring John Draper, Steve Wozniak and Kevin Mitnick. It traces the line from blue boxes to the press panic over insecure computer systems.
- — A brief history of phone phreaking, at The Last HOPE. A conference talk from The Last HOPE on 19 July 2008 covering phone phreaking from 1960 to 1980, the golden age of the analogue long-distance network, and the origin of the blue box. It reconstructs the technical substrate that made phreaking possible.
- — John Draper tells the Captain Crunch story. Draper gives a conference talk on his own history, from the analog telephone network to the personal computer era. The session was recorded at the Vintage Computing Festival Berlin and archived by media.ccc.de.
- — Exploding the Phone on the toy whistle and the phone network. A narrated excerpt from Phil Lapsley's Exploding the Phone, telling how a phone phreak in the 1950s used luck and ingenuity to get inside the telephone system. It covers the pre-computer origin of the whole discipline.
- — John Draper on the Scene World podcast. A long interview with John Draper covering the blue box, his EasyWriter word processor and his views on security and privacy. It is a first-hand account from one of the central figures of the phreaking scene.
- — How telephone phreaking worked. A detailed walkthrough of in-band signalling on the analogue telephone network and how phreaks used tones to control it. Covers the technical substrate that hacker culture grew out of before computer networks were widespread.
- — Origins of the computer virus. A documentary on where self-replicating code came from, from the Darwin programming game and early theoretical work through Creeper on ARPANET. Covers the pre-history that the later virus era grew out of.
- — How phreaking really worked, from a telephone museum. A demonstration at a working telephone switching museum of the signalling that blue boxes exploited, using real equipment rather than diagrams. Shows in-band supervision and multi-frequency tones doing what phreaks used them for.
