Apple was joined in the PC market by hundreds of other companies, including "Big Blue" itself--IBM. When the giant computer manufacturer launched its own PC in 1981, it expected to sell 250,000 units over five years. Again, the popular hunger for computing power was underestimated. In a short while, IBM was selling 250,000 units a month. Penetration of personal computers has now reached between 15 and 35 percent of all homes in the major industrialized countries. There are said to be 50 to 90 million PCs in use in homes and offices throughout the world, and the number is still rising.
And though the PC revolution would probably have happened without Wozniak and Jobs, it may not have happened as quickly. It's worth remembering that the catalyst for all this was a magazine article about phreaking.
Computers are more than just boxes that sit on desks. Within the machines and the programs that run them is a sort of mathematical precision that is breathtaking in the simplicity of its basic premise. Computers work, essentially, by routing commands, represented by electrical impulses, through a series of gates that can only be open or closed--nothing else. Open or closed; on or off. The two functions are represented symbolically as 1 (open/ on) or 0 (closed/off). The route the pulse takes through the gates determines the function. It is technology at its purest: utter simplicity generating infinite complexity.
The revolution that occurred was over the control of the power represented by this mathematical precision. And the argument is still going on, although it is now concerned not with the control of computers but with the control of information. Computers need not be isolated: with a modem--the boxlike machine that converts computer commands to tones that can be carried over the phone lines--they can be hooked up to vast networks of mainframe computers run by industry, government, universities, and research centers. These networks, all linked by telephone lines, form a part of a cohesive international web that has been nicknamed Worldnet. Worldnet is not a real organization: it is the name given to the international agglomeration of computers, workstations, and networks, a mix sometimes called information technology. Access to Worldnet is limited to those who work for the appropriate organizations, who have the correct passwords, and who are cleared to receive the material available on the network.
For quite obvious reasons, the companies and organizations that control the data on these networks want to restrict access, to limit the number of people wandering through their systems and rifling through their electronic filing cabinets. But there is a counterargument: the power of information, the idealists say, should be made available to as many people as possible, and the revolution wrought by PCs won't be complete until the data and research available on computer networks can be accessed by all.
This argument has become the philosophical justification for hacking--although in practice, hacking usually operates on a much more mundane level. Hacking, like phreaking, is inspired by simple curiosity about what makes the system tick. But hackers are often much more interested in accessing a computer just to see if it can be done than in actually reading the information they might find, just as phreakers became more interested in the phone company than in making free calls. The curiosity that impelled phreakers is the same one that fuels hackers; the two groups merged neatly into one high-tech subculture.
Hacking, these days, means the unauthorized access of computers or computer systems. Back in the sixties it meant writing the best, fastest, and cleverest computer programs. The original hackers were a bunch of technological wizards at MIT, all considered among the brightest in their field, who worked together writing programs for the new computer systems then being developed. Their habits were eccentric: they often worked all night or for thirty-six hours straight, then disappeared for two days. Dress codes and ordinary standards were overlooked: they were a disheveled, anarchic bunch. But they were there to push back the frontiers of computing, to explore areas of the new technology that no one had seen before, to test the limits of computer science.
BREAKING AND ENTERING
