Soon after my first arrest, I was interviewed by KOME and a few other stations
in the area. Because of this, and because I also dropped a hint that I was listed
in the phone book, I got swamped with lots of calls. Quite a few of them was for
offers of legal help, as well as journalists. I was very wary about having any press
people contact me, because I was convinced by my early attorney not to talk with
them.
One such person (A fan I suppose) sounded very interested in wanting to meet me.
If the amount of people that contacted me, I had only wanted to talk to a short handful
that sounded interesting and who might be in a position to help me. I don't recall
his name, but I remember having lunch with him at a smorgasbord eating "Pineapple
Fritters". Perhaps this story might smoke him out, and he might contact me.
During this time, I knew very little about computers, let along programming them.
I had taken a FORTRAN programming class at City College in San Jose, but the idea
of handing a stack of cards to an operator and coming back the next day to retrieve
the results was very discouraging, especially if your JCL cards were out of sequence
or have forgot to put a period after a numeric value... I also didn't think that
waiting for up to an hour just to get access to the key punch machine to punch in
the program was my idea of fun and it was certainly not "Interactive".
My discouragement with my first taste of programming was reflected in my poor grades.
Upon further meetings with this in-named person, he tells me of this dude Alex Kamradt
that has a computer in his garage, and you can interact with it through a teletype
machine. I let my friend talk me into going over to meet Alex. The best way to describe
Alex is that he looks like a tough gangster. Very muscular, with short wavy black
hair and a mustache, yet his voice so unlike his physical features. A very kind,
and alert individual and very knowledgeable about both hardware and software. He
had apparently inherited enough money to purchase a mini computer. It was a HP-2100
series, running BTI's version of BASIC. No system level programming was available.
Alex showed me around his suite and his computer. Then, it had 16 ports, and 12+
Mb hard disk system in 4 units that accommodated the 3.5mb platters.
He immediately gave me a "Free" account and eagerly showed me a large list
of games he had gotten from somewhere.
I sat down at a terminal with the BASIC manual and immediately started to write this
program that would use the 12th root of 2 to calculate and print out a table of musical
notes and their frequencies, because this was helping me in my Music computer. I
had brought a large collection of "EDN" magazines which some of them featured
programs written in BASIC, and I started typing them in to help me with some electronic
problems.
I was astonished by the amount of young kids hanging out, playing computer games,
and writing programs. Some of them were pestering me about what I was doing. At the
time, I had just received a research grant of $500 to work out the feasibility of
a good voice scrambling system. I needed to calculate complicated Chebychev and Butterworth
filter design circuitry and was interested in knowing the "Sensitivity"
of certain capacitor values when they change small amounts. It convinced me that
I could get away from having to use 1% tolerance capacitors as long as the resistance
tolerance was kept within 1%. GOOD, I didn't have to use super expensive high tolerance
capacitors which were hard to make and very expensive.
I wrote the program to print out a parts list, so as soon as I printed it out, I
went out to Haltek to get the parts.
Running my programs on Call also convinced me that I had to be very careful to keep
the ripple down to less that 1 db in order to get the frequency separation right.
I also put in the temperature curves in the program to give me the results I wanted
for the specified temperature range. I was able to measure each capacitor with an
accurate Capacitor tester I made with a Frequency counter. And after building each
circuit I was able to obtain amazingly repeatable results with NO TWEAKING. Sometimes
Alex would come in and quiz me on what I was doing, but my explanation probably wasn't
easy enough for him to understand Analog Circuitry, as Alex was a "Digital"
man. I was able to get a whoppin 20 db/octave edge curve on the filters...
Later on, another electronic engineer I encountered at Call Computer was working
on a Circuit Simulation program and he let me use it to verify my filter deign work.
I also needed a "Pot-Core" transformer design program to help me design
good high quality inductors I needed for some of the filters. In one evening, I finished
it, but it required lots of tables I painstakingly added, not getting much help from
the nosy teenagers that hung around with Alex.
The next day, I went out to order the parts, and yet again, my calculations resulted
in better than 1% accuracy on my calculations. WOW!! Good ol Cleo has saved me yet
again. I was able to complete the prototype and deliver it on time with little "guess
work" and little or no "Tweaking".
The next few weeks, I was modifying a really nice filter design program that would
print out the values and actually draw schematics. Being the sloppy person I was,
I left a printout on one of the tables in the computer room. Alex called me the next
day to chastise me for leaving a mess, and asked me to come into his office.
Alex then offered me a job that was paying me part time to help him administer his
machine and sign up customers to new accounts I was still Working with Hugle at the
time, but was really getting sick of being his "Show off" person and all
the interruptions that were slowing me down, not to mention the problems I was having,
getting the production parts for the chordless phone.
First off, Alex was using an incredibly crude method of computing people's storage
costs. Again, because BTI's basic made it difficult to do this, I offered a more
elegant solution.
The GOD account "@002" allowed a simple report on each users storage allotment,
but it was in a form that was unusable for billing, and it was impossible to pipe
this info into a file. So I designed a cable connection that went from one terminal
output to another terminal input which resulted in a file. Heck!! It worked GREAT!!
It only took about 45 minutes to run, instead of having a teletype punch out tape
at 10 chars/sec. In the old method, Alex would print this out to paper tape and read
it in again into his accounting program.
Before this pay job, I became such a Fixture in Alex's terminal room that Alex would
give me a FREE account if I would lead an effort to give his "Kids" some
focus and purpose instead of playing computer games, so I helped with the supervision
of getting the kids to work on new programs, getting them to work on Cleo. He called
it his "Development" project. At the time, BASIC wasn't that portable,
and lots of little nagging changes had to be made to all the BASIC programs he acquired,
So I helped assign Alex's Kids to doing tasks for Alex. At least I got a free account
and didn't really have to do much except answer questions or put the resultant work
up on the Library. Alex gave me the password to the "@001" public library
account. Because the @001 was a system wide account, it was possible to view other
users on the other ports.
Alex was also very careless, and on numerous occasions, I would do a "ROS"
command which would print out who was on, and what port they were using. You could
only get people ID's from the @00 series of accounts. When I noticed that a kid was
using a terminal logged into Cleo's GOD account (Like a UNIX root account), I went
in and yelled at Alex to be more careful. I asked the kid to finish up his game and
watched him carefully. He didn't even know he was on the GOD account.
After I got hired on, I was doing a wide variety of programming tasks and administrating
duties.
By then, Alex had moved Call Computer to 1961 Old Middlefield Way in Mt. view. At
one of his lavish parties of mostly gay people, a potential customer came to the
computer room door which had a sliding glass door for entry and he wanted an account.
So I politely ask the client to come inside and help him with his problem. He was
from Telewave, a company that helps businesses using Mobile radio to allocate frequencies
without interference with each other, and had to have a program written to make all
these calculations. So, after I explain and do the sales spiel, I go into Alex's
office to get the sign in book to sign him up. As I opened the door, with my client
closely behind, I find Alex's guests doing lewd sexual acts on the floor. I quickly
shut the door and ask the client to stay in the room while I fetch the books. I run
out to his big house in back to be greeted my Alex and his big smile, welcoming me
to his party. It was a Zoo inside with all of Alex's gay guests, but I manage to
vent my anger at Alex's loose security and get his guests to move back inside the
house so he don't scare away his customers.
It turned out that this Telewave guy ran up lots of hours on his computer but bogged
it down considerably with lots of calculations.
Sometime later, the inevitable happened, someone broke into Call Computer and was
mucking around with all the log files.
Alex probably left the terminal active and a young kid came in and discovered it
or obtained the password to the @002 account. I immediately put a "Hello"
announcement on all the developers accounts, asking them to please contact me for
reactivation. In the meantime, I learned that only the disk log file had been tampered
with and we lost a days worth of storage averages, not a big lose.
We changed all the key passwords and all the developers checked in except one or
two. Eventually word got out and later, the two kids admitted to getting into @002,
so we changed all the key passwords and haven't had anymore problems. It didn't take
me long to look at the log files and I determined that one of the terminals went
from B950 into @002. B950 was the account given to Mt. View High School, and it was
located in the terminal room and took place just 2 days ago, but at a time when I
wasn't there. I quizzed a few of the kids, telling them that I knew who did it, then
a little while later, an apologetic kid came forth and admitted he did it. I scolded
him and said that the @002 account was NEVER to be touched, and that I had a special
program that watches it. I reactivated the developers accounts, and had no problems
since.
In the meantime, I was constantly hassling Alex to at least have a terminal sign-up
sheet and someone there all the time to log the terminal usage. Eventually, we compromised
and agreed that if I was in the term room at night that I would monitor it, but after
I left, it was someone else's responsibility. Eventually, I got one of Alex's kids
to do it. Watched him carefully for a few weeks until I was sure he could manage
it.
In the meantime, I was engrossed in a nasty engineering problem, trying to solve
why I was getting a lot of frequency drift on one of my filters when it crossed a
certain temperature range.
I had to use my friends Circuit analysis program and have it plot bode graphs of
filter responses, and correlate that with the temperature curves of the capacitors
I was using, and learned that one of the curves was really non-linear through the
+5 to -5 range (Normal outdoor temperature in winter). Soon the problem became apparent
as I calculated a massive phase shift that caused a nasty peak in the response curve.
By then, I had found an excellent source of large quantity capacitors rated at 1%
and had excellent temperature characteristics and my computer simulations looked
really encouraging.
Next day, I tried them, and headed out to my friends lab to run the tests. Yay!!
Another score for Cleo.
I was going to DeAnza college at the time, working on my EE degree, and I lived up
on San Juan Road, on the way to Lexington Reservoir.
I was living with Tom Processor, who I met while working at Hugle International.
Tom had a fully equipped lab with Techtronix, HP Spectrum analyzers which I used
to decrypt the FBI's scrambled communication, which was using Freq. Inversion at
that time. He had a huge collection of RF related parts, and I had an ASR-33 teletype
clanking along all day and night, and connected to Call Computer from home.
During that time, one of my acquaintances gave me the dialup numbers to the ARPA
net, drilled me on the do's and don'ts of the ARPA net usage, and encouraged me to
go in and explore around.
Then, it was open, and there was very little concern for security or locking people
out of things. I was intrigued by GreenBlatt's Chess program and although I was a
lousy chess player, I tried to beat the computer. I also found other chess programs
and with two terminals I was able to pit one against the other.
And of course I was using MACSYMA math program to help me with calculus.
Because I was so close to school, I had my classmates using the terminal to solve
problems. Each night, while doing my Chem. Lab reports, I would feed my lab data
into a BASIC program that printed out the results of chemical problems. There was
somewhat of a dispute with the Chem. lab teacher on the use of programs until I reminded
him that the Physics lab instructor encourages use of computers to analyze data.
After that, the Chem. lab instructor was forced to look at the source code we used
to verify that we know our chemistry.
Sometime later, someone introduced this amazing game called "Space war"
that used vector graphics display and real gravitational formulas on the behavior
of two rocket ships. When you shoot, you see a recoil, and a "Sun" in the
center acts on the ships. The "Sun" could have negative gravity. Other
features like bounce off the edges or wrap-around were offered. That game costs 25
cents, and huge lines of people wanted to play it.
Another game showed up in the Stanford Coffee shop at the same time.
In conclusion, my early work on Call Computer was my only exposure to computers,
and the concept of system level programming to us was very strange, until the Apple,
CPM, and MS-DOS came out.