Doomsday and the First Hacker

1086 and 1986. In the first of those years, William the Conqueror had the property of the whole conquered England written down, villages, mills, pigs and people, in a survey so thorough and so final that a century later the English started calling it the Domesday Book (yes, Domesday – it is simply the medieval spelling, attached to the book some 200 years after it was written), the book of the Last Judgement. In the second, the BBC decided to mark the anniversary with a digital successor. Only one of those two records can still be read today, and it is not the younger one.

The BBC Domesday Project was an undertaking of immodest proportions. Over a million Britons, most of them school children, documented their own country in 1986: photographs, maps, statistics, the everyday life of the street they lived in. A people’s database two decades before Wikipedia, stored for the centuries to come on special laser discs. The important word is “special”. Those discs could be read by one single drive coupled to a modified school computer. Within fifteen years the drives, the computers, the format and most of the companies that made all of it were gone, and Britain’s most modern archive was good for nothing.

It was saved in the end by an emergency academic operation that had to imitate the dead hardware in software. The team scoured cellars and second-hand shops for working pieces of the old kit, simply to have something to check the emulator against. A few years later they would probably have saved nothing at all.

Traditionalists and champions of the good old days are enormously fond of this story. They see in it proof that the conservative solution won: the parchment of 1086 lies in the National Archives and can be read by the naked eye equipped with a little Latin, today just as it could nine hundred years ago, while the modern medium lasted fifteen years. But William’s scribes knew nothing of formats, data migration or backward compatibility. They simply happened to hit on a medium that needs no reader, because they did not have many other options.

An unreadable record is still the lesser danger to your data. A channel that can be read can also be written to by somebody. London found that out as early as 1903.

On the fourth of June, the physicist Ambrose Fleming was demonstrating at the Royal Institution the marvel of his employer Guglielmo Marconi: the wireless telegraph. The message was to travel through the air all the way from Cornwall, and Marconi had assured the public in advance that the transmission was secure and private. No stranger, he claimed, could so much as hear it.

Before the demonstration even began, the Morse receiver in the hall started chattering away on its own and printing a single word: rats, rats, rats. Then it added a mocking limerick about a young fellow from Italy who diddles the public. Somebody entirely unknown was corresponding with the lecture hall over the secure and private channel.

Fleming wrote an indignant letter to The Times: scientific hooliganism, whoever heard of such a thing, would the culprit kindly come forward. The culprit came forward at once and with relish. Nevil Maskelyne, a stage magician from a famous family of illusionists and a capable inventor, whom Marconi’s patents had squeezed out of the field.

It might have looked like a sally by an offended magician against a conceited inventor. But Maskelyne was not acting for his own ego alone. He had been hired by the cable telegraph lobby, whose monopoly, built on wires laid along the ocean floors, was threatened by wireless, and which wanted public proof that the novelty was not what it promised. Maskelyne then obligingly described the method in the technical press: an ordinary transmitter a short way from the hall was enough. That evening he destroyed nothing and stole nothing from anyone, he merely pointed out a hole that Marconi kept denying. It tends to be called the first ethical hack in history – and, much as today, it was carried out on a competitor’s payroll.

So much for the facts of our own world. How far the idea of a perfect archive can be pushed, and where the line runs between ethical hacking and terrorism, you will find out in the story Version Conflict.