As fall 1990 began, I led a sheltered life. IUSB was largely a small commuter campus full of people who didn't want to leave their parents' houses, or working-class people like my parents, trying to earn an MBA a class at a time at night. Aside from hanging out with my best friend Ray, I spent all of my time on a shitty Leading Edge Model D PC, logging into the VAXCluster at 2400 bps. I was learning unix, and learning pascal and C, but I wanted something big to happen. I'd read Phrack magazine back-issues and wish there was a ring of hackers at IUSB, or at least a couple of other people to talk to. I counted the days until I could move back to Bloomington.
Then Sid showed up. He was just Sean Sowder back then, but he exploded like a storm into FORUM that fall. Most FORUM newbies either sit back and listen for a long time, or start writing out-of-place, all-caps messages. But Sean took over, and acted like he owned FORUM. I could almost tell that he'd done some time on other BBSes, and I dug his story. He had a good rap, talking about hacking, punk rock, anarchy, mohawks, and living in his car and everything else. I wished I was in town so I could've broken into some vending machines with him or something. He took FORUM by storm, and changed to the Sid nickname, as a Sex Pistols tribute. He got bored of FORUM, but not before nabbing Mindy McKaig, a FORUM regular and the dean's daughter. They seemed like total opposites - she was a bleach-blonde sorority girl and he was a punk computer hacker, but they became inseperable after that.
Sowder met up with Joseph Hillenburg, a 14 year old kid who used his mom's account, ANLHILLE. I don't remember this clearly, but I think Joseph had a SHUTTON-like util program already, and Sowder simply wrote a program for it. That program was MENU, which let you read, mail, or print a bunch of text files. He used it to go through a bunch of movie reviews written and collected by Eric Miller, another util writer. After this, Sid and Joseph collaborated on the Ssowder utils. These were a util package that ran on top of SHUTTON's utils. Shortly after collaborating, Joseph and Sid parted ways. Sid wrote a program called BOMB to mailbomb people, and would't remove it. Joseph had compiled a game called GALTRADER and wouldn't remove it. They went their own ways. Joseph continued to maintain his own util program, but didn't put much energy into it; he later focused on unix and the Amiga.
Scott Hutton got a job with the UCS Support Center, and just before he started, a UCS staffer kindly explained to him that running a program that essentially killed the batch queue wouldn't be a very good idea for a UCS employee. He kindly obliged, not wanting to lose his new job before he even started working there, and shut down his utilities. Much of Sowder's code relied on aliases defined in Hutton's code, which made his util completely fall apart. Although this was in December, right before finals, Sid and his roommate Mike Meyer wrote the "Shutton Simulator", which was a package of just enough reverse-engineered commands to get things back up on their feet.
By the end of 1990, I was running out of things to do hack-wise, and pascal wasn't cutting it anymore. I knew I'd have to learn Modula-2 for the next semester, but I spent the whole Christmas break reading Steven Levy's Hackers and trying to devise a scheme to get $500 together for an Amiga 500. I didn't have a home computer, and had to drive 45 minutes to get to IUSB. I got so bored, I was trying to write a game in the BASIC-like language in my Casio graphic calculator. I absolutely needed to get back to Bloomington.
I visited in January, and finally met Sid (and Mindy.) It was at like 2 in the morning, in the Lib102A Macintosh lab. We sat in the back row and exchanged hacks for a while, like it was some sort of James Bond exchange of secrets or something - very surreal. Around this time, I was running the util sporadically, but not every time I logged in. Becky had found a VAX Macro (i.e. machine language) program that you could run instead of a bunch of DCL, and I used that instead.
In the beginning of March, Sid got into his first bout of trouble with UCS. I taught him how to forge mail, and he sent mail to one of his arch enemies, John Gibson, with the username of GOD. I don't know if this was somehow traced, or if it was simply guilt by association, but Sid was asked to come down for coffee and donuts with Sue Stager, the dean of computing ethics. He was nailed: they disabled his mail on the VAXes and his silver account, and made him email an apology to JGIBSON, CC'ed to Stager. The mail thing wasn't a tremendous blow, because Sid stole an entire stack of cards with class accounts on the silver VAX, which ran Ultrix. They had numerical userids, like SL123456. But that would let him use email for the time being. And the util would still run fine.
In March, I decided to spend a week in Bloomington, sleeping at my old roommate's place and hacking as much as possible. On one of my first nights there, I ran into a friend of a friend named Chris Hagen, who immediately knew me as Doctor X. Although he never did much programming, he became a source of great feedback for those of us who did, and a great tester. On this visit, I started working for Sid for the first time. The util was getting slower and slower on startup, and I intended to make some massive changes, including installing that piece of VAX Macro to speed up the assignment of global symbols.
I still remember the first time Sid gave me the password to his Amber account and let me tear stuff apart. I was in the old HPER cluster of terminals, with two VT240's pushed up next to each other so I could look at stuff in my JKONRATH account and modify it in the SSOWDER account at the same time. Now this was before the days of source control and mirrored deployment, or at least before I knew how to use it. I was patching the code while hundreds or even thousands of people were using it! The big trick was to quickly swap copies of stuff, or mess with some scheme of renaming one file for the other. I somehow screwed this up at one point, and about five seconds after I saved a file, the SSOWDER account was lit up with a barrage of bitnet messages like "Is something broken?" or "Are you working on the utils now?" I had to call Sid at his place in Willkie, and we hacked out the problem over the phone until I got everything ironed out. I made a lot of major changes that week, and there wasn't a single day that I got to bed before 8am, but by the end of the week, I'd cut a significant amount of time off of the login sequence. Plus, I had a lot of fun hanging out with Sid and his roommate Mike, and met a lot of new people I'd only seen as usernames before then.
Aside from working on refining old programs, I also started answering a lot of email. Tons of people would write with complaints, and we tried to divert as many of those messages as possible to me, since Sid's mail was technically dead. Ben Jackson, a hacker friend of Sid's from high school, also helped out during this period with some of the refinements. And in April, Sid unveiled an installer program. Instead of editing your LOGIN.COM and inserting the lines to run the util, you could now type @$DISK39:[SSOWDER]INSTALL and it would magically install the lines in your LOGIN.COM, ask you for a bunch of friends' names for WHO, the program that showed which of your friends were online, and some other preferences. After the install program, usership skyrocketed.
The next scandal was very murky, but I feel partially responsible. I have to start by explaining something else, though, so bear with me.
The utils had a feature called LAST that let you see the last time a util user logged on. As I mentioned before, SHUTTON tried this by checking every minute or two who was logged on and who wasn't, and making a giant log that differentiated this information so you knew when someone logged off. That was great, but it killed the CPU, running that many tight loops every minute or two. Sid used a much simpler approach. Every util user had a file sitting on a temporary disk. When they logged on, the util wrote a timestamp with the name of the machine in the file. Then, when someone did a LAST on that user, the timestamps were shown, and you could know when they logged onto each VAX. One day, I was putzing around when I realized that these files were world readable, and world writable. So I went in to my file, and under the timestamps for the ROSE, AMBER, GOLD, and JADE vaxes, I added an entry called BLACK. It looked cool, ominous, and top-secret.
I told a female friend to do a LAST on me, and she thought it was weird. She thought that Black was some kind of BBS, like the Mars BBS at msstate or the ISCA BBS at Iowa. So, she telnetted to Black, and tried to log in as guest, bbs, and soforth, with no luck. Then she tried JKONRATH, SSOWDER, with simple passwords, many times. None of it worked, so she gave up.
The Black VAX did exist. It belonged to the Glenn Black anthropology institute. It was a personal machine belonging to an anthropology faculty member who was also a high-up at UCS in some kind of odd dual-appointment. He also happened to be one of the most tight-assed data nazis at UCS. I logged on and found a shitty warning from this guy, telling me to cut it out, and I didn't even know what was going on. And moments later, I found out that none of Sid's VMS passwords worked anymore.
This caused a spiral of confusion within our small circle. Losing an account is possible at IU, but it's a lot like losing a job at the Post Office: you go through many levels of disciplinary warnings first. And when Sid finally bucked up and went to the Computing Support Center in the IMU to see if some unsuspecting worker could magically reset his password, their password-changing tools refused to work on his account. Nobody there knew about it being deleted. Sue Stager didn't know anything. My theory is that the data nazi guy had administrative access on the VAX cluster and nuked Sid's passwords without telling anyone else at UCS. But we didn't know, and in fact, Sid was never given an explanation for this.
News leaked, and the shit hit the fan. A "Save Sid" campaign started, and hundreds of users changed their process names to various pro-Sid sentiment. They ranged from the standard "Sid Lives!" and "Save SSowder" to the slighly more odd "SSOWDERdiedForU" and "FreeSid&Charlie". UCS played dumb, and no answers were given. The util would continue to run, but at the end of the school year, we had no idea what to do if something broke, and no clue how we'd keep making things better.
Last Updated 2/24/99
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