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Connecting - Go where only your ears can take you
By Simon James | July 24, 2008
I Just read a great article about the film War Games over at Wired Magazine. War Games came out at an exciting time where home computing was just starting to take hold and long before the word ‘hacker’ entered into the publics consciousness. Against a backdrop of 80’s USA/Russia nuclear nervousness it told the story of a young computer wizkid trying to impress his girlfriend by hacking into his school computer to change their grades. Things take a more serious turn when he hacks into a mysterious game called Thermonuclear War and inadvertently starts World War 3.
The Wired article includes some quotes from legendary phone phreak and computer hacker John Draper aka Captain Crunch (he got his name from the Captain Crunch cereal which came with a whistle that he used to hack into phone networks), who acted as a technical advisor on the film. I produced a radio feature with Ken Hollings for BBC Radio 3’s Between the Ears slot back in 2004 called Connecting, which invited listeners to ‘Go where only your ears can take you’. We interviewed Captain Crunch, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, Joe Engressia and Mark Bernay who all talked openly about the early days of personal computers and phone and computer hacking.
Much of the music and sound design you can hear is created my manipulating original recordings of the phone networks of the 60’s and 70’s. The aim was to take the listener into this ‘blind’ world where communication was all about voices, sound and dialing tones.
My favorite quote comes from Joe Engressia, the blind phone phreaker who has spent his life using the phone networks to connect with people around the world and to escape a difficult childhood.
He says:
“All these beautiful systems, technically excellent and stuff, so many of them have long become obsolete and they are dust now, and this one I’m talking on which is the latest will be too. But you know, the people and the memories and the good words we say to each other somehow exist forever”.
You can listen to the feature here.
July 25th, 2008 at 5:30 am
After seeing the film (WarGames) I spent the rest of that year doing all of the weekend work I could to save up for my first modem (300/300 or 1200/75) which put the EEPROM writer I had wanted on hold for the next to years
Thanks for the Connecting link.
L_N
July 25th, 2008 at 1:30 pm
thanks for the feature!
i was just wondering, do you have the other episodes online as well?