How I Hacked The OS Of My First Computer And How It Changed My Life

Listen up, you Johnny-come-latelys… I’ve been involved with the whole computer thing from the very, very, very beginning. Even before the very, very, very beginning; before most of you whippersnappers were born.

My first computer was the original Apple Macintosh: no hard drive, one slot for a floppy. You had to boot off your floppy, then swap discs. You people with your namby-pamby hard drives... you can't even imagine how tough it was in the old days.

No – wait. That’s not right. Before that, I had a Kaypro. Green characters on a dark screen - it was like wearing night vision goggles. But I actually hooked that sucker up to the (text-only) Internet, through GEnie, after only a month or two of trying.

No – wait. That’s not right, either. I had an analog computer even before that. Any questions? I thought not.

It was an Edmund Scientific. Word processing? E-mail? That sissy stuff that came much later. Math problems, that's what this baby was designed to do. To find the solution to equations that would previously have required a team of top-notch scientists, all you had to do was set the problem up on dials one and two. You’d hear a tone emanating from the computer, and you’d adjust the third dial until the tone disappeared, then read the number that its indicator pointed to, et voila, you had your answer.

Theoretically.

I don't believe The Edmund Analog ever worked, since the tone never actually disappeared, but at its lowest volume, you were probably within 10,000%, plus or minus, of the true answer. Yeah, we rounded in those days... now's it's a lost art. Young people today...

No – wait. Oh my God, no, this is it, the first computer I ever had:

Made by Hasbro, the Think-A-Tron was digital in the sense that a player piano is digital - hole in paper versus no hole in paper. On or off. One or zero. Think-A-Tron could answer any question in the world. It was a great leap forward, making Magic 8-Balls instantly obsolete.

The box states on the left (in red type) that Think-A-Tron "thinks, answers, and remembers." Yet just above (in black type) it claims that Think-A-Tron is a "machine that thinks like a man." Hey, you can't have it both ways, Hasbro.

Multiple choice questions are printed on little punch cards. You select the answer you believe to be correct, then feed the punch card into the machine. This produces a spectacular light show on the center panel, with lights randomly blinking on and off. The machine then clatters like a newsroom teletype, and the lights eventually resolve into either A, B, C, T or F.

This was impressive, because at the time the Think-A-Tron did this, circa 1960, all we knew about computers was that they had blinking lights, as seen in movies and on TV.

Like today’s Internet, the Think-A-Tron was primarily concerned with trivia. My brother and I would set up the ol’ Think-A-Tron and then match wits with each other, keeping score with the purpose-built dials on the front of the machine.

The source of Think-A-Tron’s trivia questions was The Book Of Knowledge, so it should come as no surprise that Think-A-Tron was awarded the coveted seal of approval from The Book Of Knowledge. Believe it or not, this ground-breaking children’s encyclopedia did not arrange its subjects in alphabetical order. This was supposed to encourage browsing.

And, again, believe it or not, the Book Of Knowledge had a preface that included this sentence:

The editors have sought to convey to this vast multitude of men and women of tomorrow such an understanding of the world they live in as shall make their lives happier, and save the waste of precious years at school.

I like the way these editors think, so much so that I'd even say they think like a man. And it makes me sick to think of the precious years my brother and I wasted in school simply because the parental units denied us our own complete set of The Book of Knowledge.

Sadly, we never even made it through all of Think-A-Tron's 300 questions. After a while, my brother refused to play Think-A-Tron, because he always lost. He could not figure out why I was consistently smarter than he was. Although I am consistently smarter than him, in this case there was a specific explanation for my infallibility.

Ladies and Gentlemen, I believe that I may have been the first computer hacker in the United States. Yes, even before Matthew Broderick in War Games.

You see, the Think-A-Tron's digital OS was a series of contacts in the machine’s interior card tray. When a card was inserted, a punch-out determined which of the contacts would be “live” when the crank was turned... and would thus determine the answer that ultimately appeared onscreen after the light show.

I realized that if I could figure out which card punch location corresponded to which answer, I'd never lose. It took months of mental anguish to crack the code: the cunning programmers at Hasbro (many of whom worked on Enigma) had been devilishly, deviously clever: all the circular punched holes are red herrings; they mean nothing. It's the cut in the right edge of the card that determines the answer. Damn you, Merill and Helal Hassenfeld!

Once I perfected the hack... from that point on, I had nary a wrong answer. My brother, my family, the whole neighborhood... they were in awe. I looked like the 60's Ken Jennings, when, in reality, I was merely the latest incarnation of Charles Van Doren.

Like Van Doren, I went too far, and hubris brought me down. I jumped the shark when I claimed I could beat Think-A-Tron while blindfolded. My family gathered 'round me and fell into an eerie hush as I dramatically donned the blindfold. I told my brother to shuffle the cards, and when he finished, I did that annoying magician thing about was he thoroughly satisfied and would he like to shuffle again. He didn't. I squared the deck up, removed the top card, felt the edge cut and said "True."

I felt my way towards the Think-A-Tron, inserted the punch card, turned the crank, and when the engineered-in noise stopped, I knew a "T" was lit up on the screen. Dumbfounded silence from my audience was my sweet reward. I selected the second card. The third.

I gave the correct answers for one hundred consecutive cards, and I would have gone on, but the silence was too eloquent - it spoke of pride from my parents and abject humiliation from my brother. I gave them all a break and removed my blindfold.

They were gone. Gone not like just-left-the-room gone, but gone-gone. The car was no longer in the driveway. I had outsmarted Think-A-Tron. My father, I later learned, had outsmarted both of us.

Think-A-Tron and I flunked the Turing Test; the total lack of natural language conversation during the demonstration should have tipped us off. The deceivers were deceived.

And not for lack of trying. Hasbro did their research and put their all into the Think-A-Tron, as the recently declassified photo above now confirms.

Even so, at that time, it was pretty clear: neither the Think-A-Tron nor I could reasonably claim to "think like a man."