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2400 bauds version:
I always wanted to do robots. My mother sent me (at 11 yo?) to learn
Logo, and I did. Got my first computer (TI99/4A). Got a Commodore 64 and
then a 128. Learned assembly on the Commodore, at around 12 years old. PC
enters life. Got hold of Turbo Assembler, Turbo Pascal, Turbo Debugger, etc
at school. Found friends to learn together. After struggling, I found Ralf
Brown's interrupt list, then Sourcer disassembler. The Stoned virus found
me, got totally hooked, and started collecting virii. Wrote my first “virus”
to bypass security at school.
Collected PC viruses, and wrote a few myself. Found more friends to
learn with, and we moved on to accessing openly available remote computers.
We thought we could even make (legal) money from what we loved. (Co) Founded
Core SDI/Core Security, wrote and released ABOs (Advanced Buffer overflows),
(co) created Core IMPACT, (this is no longer 2400 bps version and I’m not
liking it), I taught assembly and exploit writing, put together the exploits
writing team at Core... got fed up of the security industry, started
Disarmista (2008?), exclusively offering reverse engineering services for
“good reasons”. Got a call from a friend, along the lines of “hey, want to
come and do satellites?” – I said “no”, but there was really no reason to
say no. 15 years later I’m still doing satellites, and their security too.
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Now, the version for the historians and the really bored readers:
I started with computers at 10 or 11, and the order of events is fuzzy
now at 50. I always liked opening toys to see how they worked, and that
earned me the nickname “Ingegneri disarmista” as a kid. For some reason I
still can’t understand, I always said "I want to build robots". In 1985
Argentina there weren’t many options, but my mother found a place to send me
after school to learn some coding. I had no computer at the time, so I could
only touch a keyboard to use Logo on a TI99/4A, once a week. I moved the
turtle around, learned geometry and “programming” with lists, it was really
fun and eye opening. Then one day my parents showed up with a TI99/4A for
me, around 1986. I thought I could do Logo on it, but I discovered I needed
a memory expansion and something else, so I was confined to Basic and a few
other things... I don't even remember what I did with the TI, likely Basic
and very few games... Then I got a Commodore 64.
As I gained access to some games (though I don't remember anyone paying
for them, except for a guy at 'Valente Computación' who had his own intros),
I started wondering how to write them. I knew Logo and had learned some
Basic, but that surely wasn't enough. There had to be something else. One
day I got my hands on a "Tu Micro Commodore" magazine, and there I found a
strange listing with PEEKs, POKEs, and lots of DATA statements with infinite
numbers. Of course, I started changing the numbers randomly, and sometimes
I was lucky enough to see an effect (other than a crash). The "Tu Micro
Commodore" became my window to the world. I religiously waited for the next
one arrived (in Argentina, from Spain), and read it through many times. I
started compiling together my list of PEEKs, and POKEs, and "Page 0"
addresses. It wasn't until I got my Commodore 128 with its built-in
"Machine Language Monitor" that I finally understood I needed to learn
Assembly... and I did. I got a "Commodore 128" book by Data Becker, where I
truly started learning things. I took it to the beach, and read it back and
forth, taking notes. I remember I learned boolean logic from it, and
“discovered” De Morgan's Law by drawing in the sand. The first things I did
in assembly were things to move sprites. Assembly routines to have sprites
fall with gravity and jump with the joystick's button - different routines
I then put together to make a really crappy platform game. I also had an
assembly monitor for the 64, so I did both. The most “advanced” thing I
remember was playing with the horizontal raster interrupts, to implement
smooth scrolling on a part of the screen. The next for me was to try to
figure out how they were playing sampled music, but then...
Then I started secondary school in 1988, where they had BBC Micro
computers, using the same 6502 as the C64 and a built-in assembly monitor
too, so, first day at school in front of a BBC I pulled out my C64 memory
map (from memory) of the C64 and started POKEing around... with not much
luck. The assembly did work, so I knew I had tools to start again. I figured
out some stuff but then, very soon, they brought the first PCs to school.
And that was a completely new and unknown world. I was 12? 13? By then. And
even though I was most of the day at school, I still had the breaks and
nights to go, heh. I remember a conversation with my father that went smth
like:
>>> I don’t know what to do. I know all about the Commodore 64.
If we get a PC I will be helpless, and it took me forever to
get my C64 memory map complete. <<<
I’m not sure what the answer was, but it didn’t really matter. There was
only one way out, starting again from scratch. With no modem and no
Internet. First thing: get an assembly monitor (AKA assembler)... I was
offered a point at Fidonet. Even without a modem, my node pal got me a 5.25"
floppy every day, and I gave him back my messages and some file requests.
Amazing! The World was connecting. I went on like this without a modem for
many years, becoming Richie++ (sorry!). At school I met Futo, the smartest
person I know (sorry everybody else, you know it’s true). Together, we
learned most things and even started our first company: Technique and
Methods. We wrote DOS tools, kinda like Norton (we had TFF to Find Files,
TMD to delete multiple files, TFD to find dups, etc). Then around 1989, we
published “Too much info Two”, a Sidekick help file packed with all the
information we’d gathered, including Ralf Brown’s interrupt list, and other
stuff on PC hardware, PC chip programming, and so on. I really hate that all
this has disappeared. I had floppys until not so long ago... maybe they are
still somewhere. Or maybe Futo has some of it.
And then, we finally got our hands on a Disassembler (Sourcer Commenting
Disassembler)! Oh yes, how could I live without it! It was around 1988?