So I was sitting on Staff Duty watching WarGames and being all nostalgic for the days when hacking was fun.  The days of Z80’s, phone couplers, 5” floppies, and nothing but a command line, in color if you were lucky. I remember having “fun” pushing the envelope with my XT clone and its 8mhz Turbo mode and doing things “just because I could.”  My first modem was in fact a little Hayes 2400 bps deal that was considered high speed and compact because it was a full 2400 bps and only a half card slot in length!  I had been using phone couplers at 150 or 300bps before that to connect to the online world of BBSes.  I know, that dates me really well (I was, in fact a few years younger than Matthew Broderick in the movie)!

The thing is, while I was waxing nostaligic, I was busy playing nethack on my Nokia n810.  This is my newest little gadget and its a wonderful device.  I won’t go into the technical specs because they are available to anyone reading this, nor will I go much into a “review” because plenty of those are available as well.  What I will tell you is that this thing is a full linux computer (Maemo/Debian) in a format I can slide in my pocket.  I was thinking to myself, while jacking into an unsecured wifi node to check e-mail, that I can do things with this little pocket device (and my cellphone for that matter) that Stephen Falken, the designer of the W.O.P.R’s OS, could never have dreamed of.  The n810 is only a little bigger and about as thick as an iPhone, yet I can SSH or Remote Login to my desktop (or my wife’s for that matter) wirelessly via my cellphone or wifi.  I can open a full Xterm, run KDE if I wish, browse the “Real Web” with Flash, all while running updates on a machine that is little more than the size of a Hot Pocket and half as thick.  Heck, it even has one of those tiny keyboards, or I could connect a Bluetooth one if I wanted.

If I had owned one of these back in my more mischevious days, the havoc I could have wracked sitting somewhere and hacking in via SSH to harass big brothers sitting on the thrones of thier mighty 80286 BBS.   Its actually a bit scary to think that there are, in fact, people probably doing this very thing with their iPhones, PDAs, and UMPCs right now.  However, its a new world after all and the days of finding backdoors into BBS software have long been surpassed by international syndicates hacking via the internet and script kiddies running DDoS against a “flamer” on some forum.

Its amazing how far we have come in just 25 years.  From huge mainframe datacenters dedicated to managing single thread processes and “playing chess” as it were, to card deck sized devices that have 1000 times more power, processing capability, and connectivity than those behemoths ever did.

Now I shall retire to my rocker, watch as my daughter grows up into her world, and regale her with tales of the HULL and our days of 4mhz glory. 

• WarGames - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WarGames
• nethack - www.nethack.org
• Nokia n810 - www.nseries.com
• Maemo - http://www.maemo.org
• W.O.P.R - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WOPR

you’re right.. it does date you. love the article anyway.