Three ancient hacks
(Besides Harlan Ellison, Michael Crichton, and Clive Cussler.)

In the late seventies, the only thing of any use I ever learned from my estranged father was the joy of "mute."

Younger folks may not remember, but the time was that there were no remote controls (unless you counted an external tuner with a long wire attached as a "remote control") and when commercials interrupted the programs, people just endured the mindless jibber-jabber raping them in the ears.

My father's elegant solution to this was to splice a toggle switch located beside his armchair into one of the leads on the TV's speaker. The term "mute button" was unknown at the time -- this was a "Bullshit switch." I modified every livingroom set we had to incorporate a "bullshit switch," right up until the mid-eighties, when IR remotes with mute buttons became ubiquitous. I'm not sure I would let a ten-year old hack a TV today, and back then they had some monster capacitors in them. My mum was pretty relaxed.

Also, in 1986, before residential conference calling was available, and when it was necessary for young nerds to have a separate phone line for BBS, I made Prankenstein. Prankenstein was born from an old answering machine, a guitar amplifier, two phone lines, two massive rotory phones (one of which figures prominently in the next hack,) a bunch of wire, and a common light switch. It was used to simultaneously call take-away places with similar names, connect them together, and then record the confusion as they each thought they were dealing with some drunken or retarded idiot who couldn't quite work out how to place an order. Good times.

The only ancient hack that I'm really proud of is the device I used to compensate for the sad fact that the 300 baud modem I used for my BBS (running on a computer with a 2.5MHZ Z80 CPU and 128kb of RAM) didn't have an "auto answer" feature. I took apart one of those old analog phones (with a ringer mechanism like this, insulated the clapper from the rest of the mechanism, attached a wire to it and then fixed some aluminum foil over it. I attached another wire to the screw that held one of the bells in place, and connected these wires to the black and orange wires on the cable from a busted Atari 2600 joystick, which was plugged into the nine-pin D-SUB port on my computer. The code (BASIC, natch) for my BBS ("Grandfather's Alligator Farm," since you ask,) included a bit to initiate a handshake if the "Fire" button on the joystick was pressed.

These are all from before I turned 16 - most of the twenty-three years that have followed (especially in my professional life) are built on a solid foundation of kludge.
(Larry_Mudd, Fri 21 Aug 2009, 3:26, Reply)