So, this is one of the only times I can think of when I actually hacked something, in the "off-label uses for computer things that the people in charge of those things would probably not have appreciated" sense.

After the year I spent at WPI, I took a year off from college and then tried to regroup and pick up at the University of Maine.

(This would have been an excellent thing to follow through with, instead of dropping out to go chase jobs for 15+ years and give education costs a chance to spiral totally out of control before actually getting around to completing my degree, but that's a different story.)

Anyway, when I was accepted at UMaine the first time, it was December or January, so I wasn't able to start attending for something like eight or nine months. But I had a student ID, and I was enrolled for a computer science class that fall, which meant I could get an account on the student mainframe months before my actual arrival on campus.

I should probably explain for the young. Back in those days (ca. 1993), universities didn't have the option of just getting everybody a Gmail account with the school's domain name on it and giving everybody the campus wifi password. None of that stuff existed. Instead, they had to have a giant computer somewhere on campus for students and faculty to timeshare; access was either by hardwired network terminals on campus or dialing into a modem bank attached to the system someplace.

At the University of Maine at that time, the big student machine was an IBM System/370 mainframe, vintage sometime in the early '80s (the S/370 series itself goes back to 1972), running the VM/CMS operating system and connecting to the Internet through another network called BITNET. This setup was a full generation, maybe two, older than the setup I'd gotten used to at WPI in '91-'92, although the difference between the two seems hilariously minor in hindsight compared to the difference between either one and the way things are done nowadays. I could get around that, though (and have a proper email address, not just "io[MY STUDENT ID NUMBER] at maine dot edu"), by enrolling for a 100-level computer science course and getting an account on the CS department's SPARC cluster, so that's what I did.

Anyway, that's not the hack. The hack comes from the fact that they only had dial-up that was local to Orono, and I wasn't able to move there from West Podunk until August. And, of course, there were no other ISPs anywhere in the area. I'd gotten accustomed to using the Internet, primitive as it then was, as a principal means of contact with most of the social scene I was part of while I was at WPI, so that was not ideal.

I spent a month or so stewing in that, until one day, at my local municipal library, when I noticed that they had a computer that had a sign next to it saying that it was for accessing URSUS. URSUS was (and still is) the electronic card catalog at the University of Maine's Raymond H. Fogler Library and its various affiliates around the University of Maine System. Curious, I went and tried it out. Turning the computer on yielded one of those customized boot-up scripts with the gaudy ANSI text and background colors MS-DOS hackers liked to make back in those days, like the loading screen for a game that came on bootable floppy—and while I was PLEASE WAITing, there came from behind the computer the sounds of a modem dialing a seven-digit number and connecting to something.

Hmm, I thought, and went to the circulation desk. "I notice the URSUS terminal over there dials a local number to connect," I said. "Do you happen to know what that number is?"

The librarian eyed me narrowly. "I'm not going to give you that information," he said flatly.

"Why?" I asked. "Is it classified?"

"No," the librarian replied, and then—and I swear I am not making this up—he went on, "but you look like one'a them, whaddaya call 'em, whackers." He shook his head, arms folded. "And I'm not going to be the one who gives you that kind of power."

He really said that. "That kind of power." The ability to access the Raymond H. Fogler Library's electronic card catalog after hours.

"Uh, OK then," I said, and went back to the URSUS terminal. I thought I might be able to interrupt the boot sequence and get a look at the script it was running, but I didn't even need to do that. Glued to the side of the monitor (these used to be big, boxy things that you could actually glue things to the side of, in much the same way that TV sets used to be so big that the phrase "set-top box" was not a ludicrous anachronism :) was a manila file folder...

... and in that file folder was a sheet of paper with instructions for connecting to URSUS manually if the script didn't work.

I took it downstairs to the children's room and made a copy.

That night I fired up the 1200 baud modem in my AT&T 3B1, which was, I kid you not, the only computer I had with a modem, cold-called the URSUS local access number, and waited to see what I would get.

What I got was the what-do-you-want screen—not even the login screen, mind you, it was unsecured and went straight to the user prompt—to a dial-up port on a Xylogics Annex comm server.

Some of you may know I used to work for Xylogics. That was a few years after I did this, but I already knew my way around Annexes, because they were what WPI used for its dial-up bank and some other stuff around campus. So I knew what to tell this one... and what to ask it. And what it told me was that it was connected to the entire Orono campus system, not just URSUS. Which meant I could get anywhere from that number. The System/370; the CS-department SPARCs; The World at Software Tool & Die in Boston, where I still had an account. Or any other system on BITNET or the Internet whose address I might happen to know, regardless of whether I had any business connecting to it.

Anywhere.

I have only felt that much like I was in a movie one other time in my life (one rainy night at UltraNet, many years later.

Luckily for UMaine, all I wanted to do was read my email and some newsgroups, and hang out on IRC. I did that all through that spring and summer, always when the library was closed to avoid clashing with anyone trying to use the actual URSUS terminal (this wasn't challenging, since, then as now, it seemed like the library was only open about 20 hours a week), and no one ever seems to have noticed.

So I guess the librarian was right about "that kind of power," though, in that odd way that interactions like that have, he can't possibly have known he was right about it. Or at least how he was right about it.

I can't remember if I mentioned this in my job interview at Xylogics a couple of years later. I'd like to think I did.

--G.
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Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
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