This resonates. A lot of real technical talent starts with curiosity and boundary-pushing as a teenager. Treating that impulse as purely criminal instead of something to mentor and redirect feels like a great way to waste the next generation of engineers and security researchers.
> Kagan also allowed the teens to connect to his employer’s DEC PDP-8 machine via teletype over phone lines so they could run programs written in TRAC (Text Reckoning And Compiling).<p>> Being able to work with computers interactively and in real time was generally unavailable to nonprofessional computer users at the time [1966].<p>What a game-changer and privilege. What hope did kids have to learn about computing at the time? Reading about it in books and magazines wouldn't seem to be sufficient. Did people outside the computer professionals in the special room get to use them? What about people in accounting, science, mathematics, ballistics, etc.?
This is an excerpt from the book “README
A Bookish History of Computing from Electronic Brains to Everything Machines” by W. Patrick McCray.<p>MIT Press: <a href="https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262553483/readme/" rel="nofollow">https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262553483/readme/</a><p>Amazon: <a href="https://www.amazon.com/README-Computing-Electronic-Everything-Machines/dp/0262553481/" rel="nofollow">https://www.amazon.com/README-Computing-Electronic-Everythin...</a>
> They borrowed an acoustic coupler—a forerunner of the computer modem—and connected it to a nearby pay phone<p>The acoustic coupler is mounted on a modem, and is just the cradle where you rest a handset. The device is not a forerunner of a modem, it <i>is</i> a modem.
Almost. A modem sometimes had a phone jack as well as a coupler, for those cases when the handset was hardwired into the phone and the phone was hardwired into the wall.<p>We tapped where we could and we were happy. Bonus points if the rotary phone had a lock on it and you dialed out by pulsing the hangup switch.
Trac64 implementation:<p><a href="https://git.luxferre.top/nntrac/" rel="nofollow">https://git.luxferre.top/nntrac/</a>
Web site is still up, resistors.org . It looks like John and Margy Levine (first generation Resistors) are running it now. I think Dave Fox (2nd generation I guess) took care of it before. The linked article looks pretty good. There were a bunch of paper archives kept around that are probably still interesting. I don't know who has them now or if they still exist.<p>I didn't know about Trac64 or that Trac even really had the concept of bits. It was all string operations, including string arithmetic in arbitrary precision, I thought. But I never used it much. It could be seen as a weird take on both Forth and Lisp.<p>#(ps,#(rs))