8 Online Fads You Didn't Know Were Invented Decades Ago
#4.
Hacking
Hacking... yeah, we've all been there, right guys? Breaking into some poor bastard's CPU, flooding his library scripts, remotely exploding his water heater... OK, we have no idea what hacking really is, but we are fairly sure it has something to do with computers and the Internet.
Hacking!
Actually Been Around Since...
As it turns out, what we today understand as "hacking" started as far back as the fucking 1950s, and they called it Phone Phreaking.
Hacking!
Phone Phreaking exploited a flaw in the computerized switch boards of the time, which transferred calls via a single sound frequency of 2600 Hz. In 1957, a blind seven-year-old named Joe Engressia found out that by whistling the right tone, he could reset his phone and dial numbers on it without paying a dime.
Later on another "phreaker" named John Draper discovered that he could produce the Hacking Tone of 2600 Hz through a toy that came free with Captain Crunch.
Hacking!
In the 1970s, phone companies switched from single frequency to multiple frequency technology, so phone phreakers became more sophisticated as well. Draper designed and built the "Blue Box," a device which produced necessary dial tones for each number through a portable keyboard pad. The Blue Box phreakers could "hack" phones to make long distance calls for free and even hold secret conference calls with each other, basically the predecessor to IRC chat rooms.
The Blue Box, which here is black for some reason.
Of course, they didn't have anything like the technology to do the large-scale assaults hackers do these days, like DDoS attacks.
Oh, wait...
#3.
DDoS Attacks
To DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service Attack) someone means to flood their computer (or server) with so many requests that it shits all over itself and shuts down, sort of like during the Super Bowl when everyone and their brother orders a pizza and backs delivery up for three weeks.
Without pizza, there is chaos.
Actually Been Around Since...
While this is certainly a technique favored by legions of slighted Internet nerds flamed on a Battlestar Galactica forum, people have been doing it since the 1970s with something called Black Faxes, which meant rigging a fax machine to continuously send a full black page to another fax machine.
The attack was meant to use up all the toner in the receiving machine (which was balls expensive at the time), screwing your target twofold by wasting their money and rendering their fax machine useless until they dropped the cash to refill the toner. Theoretically, a more diabolical person could fax something other than just a simple black page, such as a 500-thousand word piece of erotic Star Wars fanfiction.
"Please, just stop! I'll do anything, just stop sending this... this...
YODA COULDN'T FIT IN CHEWIE'S ASS, THE PHYSICS ARE IMPOSSIBLE!"
But fucking with people's computers goes back even before fax machines, back to when computers were the size of a building and used those cardboard punch card programs to operate. Enter the Lace Card, a typical IBM computing punch card only with every single hole punctured.
When inserted into a computer, the card would disintegrate and all of its pieces would have to be manually removed for the computer to be able to operate again. It was sort of like shitting into someone's DVD-ROM drive--simple, classy and effective.
#2.
Instant Messaging, Email and Chat Rooms
"What? Now you're going to tell us people sat around in some primitive chat room before World War II or some shit? Oh Cracked, your rampaging alcoholism makes for the cutest factual errors. I shall take to the message boards to insult you from a distance without any repercussions."
Actually Been Around Since...
Well, keep reading and learn about The Teleprinter.
A teleprinter was a large typewriter-like machine that went into common use in the early 1920s. You loaded a piece of paper into it, stuck a phone line in the back and used it to dial numbers to connect you to other teleprinters. Whatever you typed on your teleprinter's keyboard was automatically typed on the receiving machine, allowing for instant messaging across great distances, just like e-mail and... well, instant messaging.
But teleprinters could also be connected in a special loop, where one person's message would show up on a number of selected machines, basically making it an Internet chat room presumably full of flappers and speakeasy lushes instead of 13-year-old girls and your fiance's sexually frustrated roommate.
Flappers: just like these young men pictured, only with vaginas.
The Telex Net was established in 1920 as a worldwide teleprinter network with automatic switch boards that relayed connections from one end of the globe to another, enabling text based communication worldwide decades before even the most primitive incarnation of the Internet.
So really, when your grandpa is staring confusedly over your shoulder at the MSN conversation you are having with some dude in China, it's not the technology that's foreign, he just can't figure out where you put the paper in the damn thing.
#1.
Software File Sharing (Yes, Even Before The Invention of Floppy Disks)
Call us pretentious, but we're pretty sure half the crap you're listening to in iTunes while you read this article was downloaded from Bit Torrent, so you should be familiar with the basic premise of file sharing. You might be thinking there's no way this was possible back in the day, unless you had a guy stand in the middle of a public square shouting code at people.
GTA 4!!! Disc 2!!! 001101...
Actually Been Around Since...
All of you Mountain Dew-drinking game pirates worried that one day you'll get hurled back in time to the 1980s can now breathe a sigh of relief. In those days it was actually possible to share games over the radio, thanks to the ZX Spectrum, a 1982 home computer with a vast selection of software which occasionally came on audio cassettes (by our estimate, to put today's games on that format you'd need a cassette the size of the moon).
Shortly after its launch, the company that owned the Spectrum allowed some of its freeware programs to be aired on a few radio shows so people could record them at home. It took gamers about half of an ALF commercial break to realize they could share their entire game libraries with each other in the exact same way.
Nerds weren't any cooler back then, just in case you were wondering.
If you were a kid in Eastern Europe or Brazil after 1982 (we're going to go ahead and assume that's exactly none of you, at all, that are reading this article right now), all you had to do was tune in to your favorite pirate radio station and hit record on your ghetto blaster when the DJ said so. If there were no problems with the transmission, you could start playing Frogger on the spot. And of course gaming was immediately forever ruined as a profitable business.
Cezary also writes at DrownYourself(.com).
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ReplyI ghetto-blast my Frogger err'wher I go.
ReplyFax machines of the 70s didn't use toner. It's laser printers that use toner, and they weren't out of the labs yet in the 70s. Some later faxes used laser printing, though they were very expensive and only economical in high-volume.
ReplyWhat faxes did use, was thermal paper. A thermal print head, basically a print head with a group of little heating elements on it to make the pixels, printed on chemically treated paper, with a coating that went black when heated. The paper came in rolls, with a tendency to not stay flat, and the "ink" faded quickly.
The least-bad thing a black fax would do, is waste paper. But the worst is, it could burn out the print head, some of which weren't designed to be on all the time. So you could break someone's expensive fax machine permanently. Easy way was to tape a sheet of black paper into a loop.
Brazil is the 5th country in number of internet users in the world. 20-somethings and younger are also a majority. So, statistically speaking, a lot of your readers were kids in Brazil after '82 (this one and all her friends included) :D
ReplyI, actually, WAS a kid in Eastern Europe in the 1982. AND I had a Spectrum (good one, with 48 kB memory, not he crappy one with only 16 kB.) And a tape recorder.
ReplyAh, the good times...
I find it strange that you do not mention the fact that the blue box pictured in your article was built by steve wozniak and designed by steve jobs. Draper did invent the concept, but it's kind of interesting to note that the guy who invented the personal computer (wozniak) and the guy who designed the ipod (jobs) got to know each other by making the blue box.
ReplyTOO DAMN FUNNY. The only thing that bothered me was that cat who looked like it was in pain...
ReplyI think it is funny how much people from Brazil (and surroundings) and Eastern Europe didn't get the joke that of course SOMEONE from these parts would be reading this article.
ReplyI have to be that guy: A DDoS attack is when multiple systems attack a target (ie botnet style attacks). A DoS attack is when one system attacks a target (one punch card for the old computer one, one fax machine black faxing another one). That section is about DoS attacks, not DDoS attacks.
Replyfine
MULTIPLE PEOPLE
can send black faxes
God.
pre internet man looks like Adrock in the Sabotage video
ReplyThe telewriter thing still exists (in a way). Teletypewriters are uses be Deaf people. While they have become rather obsolete thanks to text messaging, they are still used today. Next time you see "TTY" next to a phone number, it means it's for teletypewriters.
Replyi really wish i hadn't clicked the popeye link...
ReplyI know I cant stop cracking up
I had to send it to a guy friend. Just because misery loves company.
Um... Is it bad if i recognize the image next to #6? Thank you, rule 34 -_-
ReplyI do too
I've been saying for some time now that emoticons should be accepted as part of standard language. Languages are designed to be spoken and as such the meaning of the same sentence can vary immensely, since you could use expression and tone of voice to interpret it; but any text only format strips language of this extra information. :o)
Reply Hide All See All 3 RepliesI read this in the voice of a pig thanks to the pig smiley.
It's a matter of time.
You have a valid point: It is way too easy to misunderstand the written word, especially when it's brief. No wonder the letter writers of history sounded so apologetic and needy...:I pray kind sir...."
The cats didn't find it difficult to stay still for 15 minutes, they were all dead. People would kill kittens, then dress them, pose them and photograph them. There were exhibitions of such things at least until the 1980s (by then, in the context of "how terrible our ancestors were")
Reply Hide All See All 4 RepliesThank you for ruining lolcats for everyone!
He made it better for me.
@drotog Could you please post a link to confirm this information? I've been searching around and I can't find any evidence to back up this claim.
Must have been all those violent cartoons---it desensitized them to the pain of others (and little kittens).
...Didn't Ludwig Wittgenstein also want to create some sort of code so people could understand each other better in written language?
ReplyI...I clicked on the Popeye link.
ReplyOh god.
It swallowed your soul!
Like nobodys biznes!
Thanks, Cracked. I never knew where 2600 Magazine got its name. I stupidly assumed it was a reference to the Atari console.
ReplyI was a kid in Britain and while there was a pirate radio station possibly within range, most pirating was copied tapes. The introduction first of CDs and later CD-ROMs felt like a blow to sharing even for those of us with a generally anti-piracy mindset.
ReplyYou pirates ruined the industry!
"If you were a kid in Eastern Europe or Brazil after 1982 (we're going to go ahead and assume that's exactly none of you, at all, that are reading this article right now)"
Reply--
Actually it was "Uruguay" and "1985", but other than that, yes I am. And I do remember an obscure radio show down here that did exactly what you describe; they would close each show airing a different game.
A Dual Cassette Deck was a blessing straight out of Heaven in those days.