When Nova introduced hacking to the mainstream

35 years ago, a young system administrator named Cliff Stoll shared a story on Nova, a PBS documentary program. Stoll introduced his audience to a brave and unfamiliar world of computers, networks, and hackers. Movies about computers and hackers were nothing new, but this wasn’t a movie, and I wasn’t the target audience. This was real, and the target audience was middle-aged people like my dad.

Like Cloak and Dagger, only real

The Cuckoo’s Egg reads like a spy novel. It introduced computer hacking to a mainstream audience.

Cliff Stoll was an astronomer who had run out of grant money. But he was good enough with computers to get hired on to run his school’s computer systems. That might seem like a strange career path today, but I followed a similar career path a decade later. In my case, I was a struggling journalist that the journalism school hired to run their computer systems.

His adventure started with two seemingly trivial and unrelated events. The school had 75 cents worth of billable computer time they couldn’t account for. And there was a complaint from another college that someone was using the systems Stoll administered to try to break into a computer on their campus.

Cliff Stoll probably was not the first person to catch a hacker in the act. But he was the first to document the process that he followed. He wrote a best-selling book, and then that book was dramatized into the Nova TV program aired Oct 2, 1990, titled The KGB, the Computer and Me.

How Cliff Stoll took hacking mainstream

Today, that book, The Cuckoo’s Egg, is a book that computer security professionals generally expect other security professionals to have read. I captured my thoughts when I read it more than a decade ago in a blog post. Today, we call what Stoll did incident response. It’s a whole area of specialty in computer security, and large corporations often have teams of people doing it. But it was brand new in 1990. And make no mistake, the way he set up a decoy so he could catch the hackers in the act was absolutely brilliant. While some of his methods are obsolete today, not all of them are, and his thought process is timeless.

But we weren’t the original audience. Indeed, one of the problems he had to solve was the NSA wasn’t interested yet in computer security. So he wrote the book like a spy novel. And he seemed more intent on making science cool than computers cool. Or at least showing how the scientific method could solve a computer problem.

The appeal

The book and the television program appeal on more than one level. If you find the Cold War interesting, they both provide a view into the later years of the Cold War as the events were unfolding, rather than looking back at it. I don’t believe Russia ever stopped fighting the Cold War, and that’s one of the reasons that the common perspective on it today doesn’t line up with what I remember growing up in the middle of it. People held grudges against Toshiba for years because they sold the Soviets machine tools that improved their nuclear submarines. Russia still remembers it as a big deal.

From a computer history point of view, the televised version is interesting. It is a dramatization, but it was well done. The computer room shown in the television program looks the way I remember computer rooms looking in the late 1980s. Lowering myself under the raised floor and crawling around to pull new cable or find where an existing cable was going was something I still had to do 15 years after the program aired.

And although the computers involved in the main plot all ran Unix, in the televised version, you get to see plenty of IBM PCs and even a Macintosh playing supporting roles. It gives you a chance to see these computers in their natural setting in the late 1980s. The systems Stoll used lived a long life, so anything he used was something I was still used to seeing until 1999, when Y2K wiped out a lot of those older systems.

Even the late, great Radio Shack makes a cameo appearance.

And being on call all the time and the stress it puts on your personal life is something any IT professional can probably relate to.

Why you should read the book and watch the Nova episode

I recommend watching the TV show and reading the book. Both for different reasons. Although it is difficult for the TV show to do the book justice, the TV show does an excellent job of visually capturing the time and place. The TV cannot match your imagination, but when you don’t know what to imagine, the TV dramatization certainly helps to fill in a lot of gaps.

You can watch the documentary on archive.org and vintage copies of The Cuckoo’s Egg are inexpensive on Ebay.