/Technology

Back in 1988, some guy named Robert Tappan Morris ended up crashing a pretty big chunk of the internet at the time, which was still really small and mostly academic. The thing is, this "Morris Worm" wasn't made to steal money or hijack anyone's data, the guy just wanted to measure the size of the web. But he messed up a detail in the code and the program started replicating itself non-stop, knocking down government and university computers. If you want to see how the press reacted back then, it's worth taking a look at the original article from [The New York Times: *U.S. Security Computer Network Is Hit by Virus](https://www.google.com/search?q=https://www.nytimes.com/1988/11/05/us/us-security-computer-network-is-hit-by-virus.html)*. This case shows pretty well how the minds of those who messed with technology worked back then. It was a mix of a somewhat naive curiosity and an insane desire to figure out how things worked on the inside, without all that criminal connotation the word got later on. ## The information freedom mindset of the 80s and 90s For anyone who lived through it or studies the period, it's clear that the driver behind everything was a creative kind of boredom. In 1986, a hacker known as The Mentor wrote a pretty famous text called the Hacker Manifesto right after getting arrested. He basically said his crime was curiosity, the fact that he wanted to learn and wouldn't accept that information was locked away under lock and key. At least in my experience reading about it, this idea that information should be free was almost like a religion to them. They wanted to understand the telephone system, the networks of large companies, and any giant computer that crossed their path. This search for learning happened in an environment that was completely different from today. There was no YouTube or online courses to teach you how to hack a system. If you wanted to learn, you had to figure it all out on your own or swap ideas in alternative channels. People relied heavily on BBS systems, which were basically other people's home computers that you dialed into directly to access forums and download text files. There were also independent magazines like Phrack or 2600, which circulated from hand to hand or in very simple digital files. Everything was incredibly slow. Modems made that classic noise that sounded like a choking fax machine, and speeds were painfully low. Downloading a simple manual of just a few pages took forever and still cost money because of phone line charges. That's why many started out in what was called Phreaking, which was the art of hacking phone systems to make free calls so they could stay connected. A classic of this underworld was Captain Crunch, who discovered that a plastic whistle that came as a toy in a cereal box emitted the exact same tone that phone companies used to route lines. Even the founders of Apple started out making devices that imitated those whistles. ## The shift to the modern era If we look at what people did back in the eighties and compare it to what happens today, the difference is night and day. Back then, hacker groups like the Cult of the Dead Cow or the guys from the Legion of Doom spent months trying to figure out how a mainframe worked just for the pleasure of getting in and seeing the access granted screen. Most of the time they just looked around, left a text file to prove they were there, and went on their way. There wasn't this thing of wanting to destroy the system or ask for a ransom. Nowadays, things have completely changed. Hacking has become a serious, corporate, and in many cases, highly criminal business. On one side, we have well-paid security professionals working in suits for large corporations, and on the other, we have entire syndicates, often funded by governments, focused on sabotaging infrastructure or stealing millions. The innocence of that era is completely gone. I think technology just got way too complex for that kind of romantic exploration to keep existing. Today everything is watched, systems are monitored in real-time, and any wrong move can get you locked up pretty fast. That feeling that the computer was a tool for personal liberation and that the internet was some kind of wild west where anyone with a modem and some persistence could be king, well, I guess that feeling is unfortunately a thing of the past.