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Not having access to the source code was only a minor inconvenience since, thanks to a raft of disassembly programs and an intimate knowledge of assembly language, the code used in those days was pretty easy to decipher.

Perhaps my greatest claim to fame was reverse engineering and rewriting the BIOS for the once-popular Epson QX-10 microcomputer.

In a little under a month of all-nighters, I had designed and implemented a raft of new features that significantly increased the power and utility of these great little computers.

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Gone was the 16-character type-ahead buffer, replaced with a 64 character one.

Gone was the paltry 278Kbyte per floppy storage, replaced with 380Kbytes.

All the function keys became fully user macro-programmable with default values set up for Wordstar (the leading word-processor of the day).

Although these machines came standard with 128K or 256K of RAM, they used the CP/M 2.2 operating system so only special applications (that were few and far between) could access this extra memory. Rather than waste this valuable resource, I added RAM-based background print spooling that allowed users to print large documents without tying up the computer while doing so.

While I was at it, I eliminated a couple of bugs that existed in the original BIOS (one of which used to corrupt large files) and generally improved performance by a significant margin.

This "hack" was a commercial success and I sold copies of this enhanced operating system to many Epson QX-10 dealers at a price that represented a very healthy hourly-rate for that month of hard work.

Shortly afterwards, I also wrote an entire graphics library to harness the power of the QX-10's (for the time) advanced graphics hardware and also knocked up a high-precision transcendental math library in assembly code -- from scratch.

Looking back, those were some of the most fun projects I've ever undertaken and some were great examples of real, good, old-fashioned hacking.

It was very refreshing therefore, to see on TV recently that good old-fashioned hacking isn't (yet) dead.

Some clown (or clowns) have hacked the Grand Theft Auto (GTA) game to add (or unlock) scenes that are so graphic in their depiction of human nudity that they had to be fuzzed out when show on TV (sigh!).

Given the other complaints that have been fired at the levels of violence in GTA I really can't see what all the fuss is about.

What are we telling our kids?

It's okay to shoot police and hookers, engage in acts of gang-violence and generally break the law with impunity -- but (gasp!) consensual sex is something far far worse?

While I can sympathise a little with those who are worried that their very young kids might be exposed to the depiction of sexual acts -- I would have to ask what idiot parent would give a kid that young a copy of GTA anyway??

Good on the hackers who did this for at least keeping the spirit and reality of real hacking (as opposed to cracking) alive.

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