Fall 2013
From Holland Library to hacking history
Of all the ways a college student can find trouble, at least Ralph Barclay started in the library.
It was 1960, and he was wandering through the engineering library, then on the third floor of Holland, when his eye was drawn to a freshly minted Bell Systems Technical Journal. Inside, amid some positively mind-numbing treatises, he found the article, “Signaling Systems for Control of Telephone Switching.”
Years later, this one article would be referred to as “the keys to the kingdom,” a plain-spoken description of how the phone system evolved and, unbeknownst to the authors, the means by which an 18-year-old electrical engineering student from … » More …