The sound came first. If you were anywhere near a modem in those years you can play it from memory: the dial tone, the touch tones sprinting, the screech, then two machines settling into the long hiss that meant you were on. I could tell by ear whether a connection was going to be a good one. Of all the skills I still carry, that one is the least useful, and I have no plans to give it up.
Then the screen. An IRC client, a network called EFnet, a channel full of strangers who knew things. The scroll never stopped. Someone three time zones away explaining how a long-distance call finds its way through the switches. Someone asking the question I had been too embarrassed to ask. Regulars whose nicks I knew the way you know neighbors, signing on at the same hour every night, same as me.
And on the desk, the stack of 2600s.
2600 was a hacker magazine the size of a paperback, and it is hard to explain the grip it had. Readers mailed in photographs of payphones from other countries and the editors printed them, which tells you nearly everything about the culture in one image: here were people who found a payphone in Prague genuinely thrilling. The name was lore too. The story every reader eventually absorbed was that 2600 hertz was a tone, and that in an earlier era, people who wanted to know what the phone system did when nobody was looking found that the system would answer them. Curiosity, aimed at what was then the biggest machine anyone had built.
Seeing if I could
None of it was malicious. I know how that lands now, when “hacker” mostly arrives wearing a ski mask, so I will say it the plain way: nothing I got up to had a victim. The fun lived in the understanding. Could I follow a phone call end to end through the switches, just from reading how switches worked? Could I get the modem to negotiate a speed the box never promised? Could I take a trick from the magazine, work out for myself why it worked, and explain it back to the channel well enough that the room agreed I had it right?
Seeing if I could. That was the whole engine. It ran on back issues, library books, and the patience of strangers on IRC, and it never once needed anyone to lose anything for a win to count.
Every good trick had a person in it
Here is what I did not notice I was learning. The articles I kept rereading, the ones that went soft at the corners, had barely any code in them. Somebody talks their way past a front desk. Somebody calls an office with three words of the right jargon and a confident tone, asks for something small and reasonable, and hangs up holding the keys. In those stories every machine performs exactly to spec. What gives way is made of people: who trusts whom, who is in a hurry, who cannot quite bring himself to be rude to a stranger who sounds like a manager.
Computers were the reason I showed up. People turned out to be the curriculum. Every system I ever studied had a person load-bearing somewhere in it, and the writers of those articles understood that long before the industry started printing it on conference slides.
The same curiosity, still on the clock
Decades later, this is the job. Same curiosity, better funding, minus the screech.
When a client forwards an email that felt wrong to them, the first tool it meets is recognition. I know that voice. Urgent, a little flattering, needs one small thing handled outside the normal process, ideally before end of day. The suit is new. The trick is the one from the articles, and it still works for the same reason it worked on switchboard operators: it aims at decent people mid-task, and it sounds like someone they answer to.
So the protecting looks the way the learning looked. Study the system as it actually runs, people included. Assume the person who answers is busy and halfway through something else, because she is, and shape the process so those ordinary facts stop being a way in. When we train a team on this, the material is old school and ethical. Here is the trick. Here is why it lands on smart people. Then the unglamorous habit that beats it. Nobody in that room gets talked down to; I have too much respect for the trick, and more for the people it gets aimed at.
If your firm carries other people’s money or secrets, and you would rather the strange email land in front of someone who has been studying that voice since it arrived on newsprint, we should talk.
Some nights a connection comes up slow and I catch myself listening the old way, by ear. Still curious. Still seeing if I can.