>>Uh, so speaking at Def Con is kinda tough I’m gonna put this here so it’ll be easier for everyone. There’s- there’s thousands of you, you all look like a swarm of people, so.


>>Louder! We can’t hear you! [inaudible]


>>I’ll just hold it, can you hear me now?


>>Yeah! 


>>We’re all good? Alright. Um. So you can see a quote here it’s from a science fiction book it’s about when we get out into space and we discovered that all the species we’re expecting to run into, we missed em. Not by distance but by time, they’re all dead. Millions of years gone they- we we we finally found them and they’re millions of years gone and we go down to their planets and we try and figure out who they were and we discover that all the data from these advanced civilizations is lost. We don’t know what they did because they stored all this stuff on things that evaporated quickly, they were destroyed by time, a term that we’re going to get to called ‘bit rot’ and it’s important as we move further into this digital age that we take time out of our lives to find and protect the data that needs to be protected.

So a good bit of this talk is going to be discussing the methodology and the importance of what we- we as a group of hackers need to do to protect some of this data and some of our tools and certain aspects of our professional skillsets are uniquely suited to that. So without further adieu this is amateur digital archeology and uh hacker is just another word for amateur um if you wanna be professional you go over to Black Hat ha- Def Con is about the amateurs, it’s about the new guys, the young guys, the people who don’t know any better yet. That’s what a hacker is. A hacker walks into something and says I’m a hobbyist I'm gonna figure this out. So you might be wondering why any of this is important. This is uh a subgenre of technology but if we’re in Mosul watching Isis get annihilated and you have a reporter walking down the banks of River Tigris and finds three dead bodies he could either look at them take a photo write a blurb and keep going or he could dig through their pockets and if you dig through their pockets you might find that they have a cell phone on them and if they have a cell phone on them that cell phone might have a memory card and if there’s a memory card there might be pictures and data. So there was a great article done by these two guys from BBC where one of the guys dug through some pockets, found some photos, was looking at the photos and realized the place he had been staying in was the same place they had been staying in, so he dug around and found a whole bunch of data related to these three guys, these three foot soldiers, he figured out that they were an artillery squad, that they had received certain orders, that they’re- he identified who they all were then he start going back to the places they came from and built a composite sketch on who these guys were these random nobodies who worked for Isis. And this gives us a unique insight into who these people were at this momentous moment in time something that we are talking about right now, a hundred years from now people might not understand, they might look at a newspaper and go what the h**l is Isis, whose Mosul? Come on. Um and this is- this is what we call primary source information if you’re familiar with uh Howard Zinn who wrote A People’s History of the United States he wrote a history of the united states focused on primary source information the things that you find where people experienced history, saw history, and they provide a biased perspective but they provide a biased perspective that’s unmarred by not knowing, not having been there. Um this is what the US National Archive has to say about primary sources and their importance in developing critical thinking for chi- children but it’s also truly important for any historian to build an idea of where their version of history sits in relation to the people who lived it.


Um this is what our friend Adam has to say at NYC Resistor on EEPROMs which are a primary source information, he says ‘find a board with a brain.’ if you’re a hacker any sort of chip you see that has a brain, has memory, is primary source information. SO this is kind of the thrust of what we’re gonna be talking about. And in regards to amateur archeology it’s uh part of being an amateur is recognizing your limitations, you’re not a professional archeologist or anthropologist and you shouldn’t think of yourself as one, you should- you know- do what they expect you to do but also recognize that you have limitations, you’re not gonna go up here and start dropping a professional grade pureview paper what you can do however is protect data for them to write their paper. And the other great thing is because you’re dumb you can accomplish things that other people didn’t think were possible, like flight.


And uh I know some of you guys here might be a little pissed off that Joe Random Idiot managed to get their hands on something that’s probably of historical significance and should probably be in a museum uh it’s important that you remember this is Def Con and we are way more Lando Calrissian than we are Professor Jones [laughter] most of the people here are perfectly okay with that, but for those of you who are still concerned, the National Air and Space Museum has several GRiD compasses and several GRiD cases, these are the styles and machines that we have um they also have one that was flown several times and they have never released information related to what data was on them they’ve only ever said ‘here’s laptop, it’s off, it’s sitting in a booth’ it’s like a dead machine, you don’t have a full composite idea of what they did and why they did it.


Um this is from recent news, this was published maybe a couple weeks ago. It hit our Ars Technica and the photo there is a photo of an old tape system, these were the data systems that did the analysis for pioneer 8 through I believe 10 and that’s the OIG report number uh that URL that I referenced in the beginning and will reference throughout has a lot of this data available if you wanna dig through the actual data I went through and it’s sad that the machines that analyze pioneer missions basically ended up sitting outside of a contracting office, in the elements, and an engineer brought them home, put them in his basement, and they got so destroyed by mold and the elements that when OIG finally found them and tried to see if there’s any data they can pull of them or any significance to them they actually said it’s safer to destroy them than it is to try to analyze them because of the mold. It was a toxic uh health hazard to the investigators. Um it’s important that we protect a lot of this data because it’s starting to go away and I- this is a really good project that has a direct tie to Def Con and to NYC Resistor. 


Our friend Chris Fenton wrote a P- FPGA Implementation of the Cray 1. The Cray 1 if you’ve never heard of the Cray Supercomputer Company you can ask someone else here it’s- it’s a formative moment in supercomputing history. The Cray 1 operating system is gone as far as anyone knows, if anyone here has access to an original Cray 1, talk to me or enter it in the archive later, the reality is is as far as anyone knows that operating system is lost to history most of the people who had Cray’s burned their media when they were done. 


Um he did find a guy who is willing to give him a disc pack that he thought had Cray 1 on it and brought it back from Australia and he built an analog reader, read the analog wave form, and I got an email while I was at Def Con saying ‘hey I’ve got about 40 gigs of analog wave form that I need to analyze and find bits in’ and it just so happened I was sitting next to Jason Scott of Internet Archive and handed him the phone and he immediately helped them host it and within a couple days they had two guys from Sweden and Norway who had written a- analysis software to figure out the bits and they start figuring out file systems and then they were building it and writing it in emulation and the next thing you know the Cray 1 XMP Project’s off and running to the races you’re able to kind of ressurect maybe not Cray 1 but a Cray operating system that otherwise would have been lost. And none of these people are professionals or are getting paid for this, this is what people do in their free time. This is Jason Scott form the Internet Archive if you run into him at Def Con, give him a hug, he’s a good guy. And the other question you might be asking is a Cray is an exotic machine, it’s something cool from history why do I give a s**t about a 386? And fundamentally the machine we’re gonna be talking about is a 386 with a math co processor so maybe closer to a 486 or a 387 whatever you wanna call it, that’s what it is, the importance of it is where it’s at in history, what it did. And you should never judge a book by it’s data, like, this guy writes 140 character messages and they are considered incredibly important, I’m not getting into the politics of the person, but the data is important it it defines aspects of our life, it defines market movements, and things like that, and I know europeans have this approach to data that says things should have- we have a right to be forgotten, Star Wars Kid has a right to be forgotten, he shouldn’t be judged his entire life based off of a five minute video but at the same time we’re losing so much data that defines who we are and is important in understanding the scope and impact of things that are of historical significance and sometimes the context matters. 


The Trump Presidential Library ironically does expose a major flaw in our archival knowledge. He writes so much s**t on Twitter, he just did a policy initiative on Twitter, and announced it there. That for the first time ever internet archivists who are real archivists actually have to figure out how they’re gonna address social media. How do we get this data, store it, put it in a library because it is important, it’s- it’s incredibly important for future historians to understand how legislature evolved, how historically these things occurred. And the other one in this list is Soundcloud, I’m- I’m not sure how many of you are familiar with Soundcloud, but Soundcloud is a cultural um I’m not sure what you call that, just a huge value. It’s all these ar- artists producing music, and then disappearing. Or becoming popular, but there’s so much music in there that defines our culture as we evolve across an entire geo- geo political spectrum, as the internet begins to bring us together, we get to see these independent components start to, to meld and uh they just announced 40 percent layoffs and there’s a real fear that Soundcloud will disappear and then all the data will disappear and a lot of these artists won’t be able to repost it. So the internet archive’s trying to figure that out. I recommend donating if you give a c**p. Um GRiD, why is the GRiD Laptop important? The GRiD laptop was the first laptop, arguably. It was the first clamshell ever and uh that was the GRiD Compass that was the pre generator, prior to the ones we’re going to be talking about which are GRiD Case. Um this URL highly recommend grabbing it’s uh Computer History Museum got 4 of the original founders of GRiD to talk about how GrID was developed, what it was important for, and it’s kind of a great loser’s story for the Pirates of Silicon Valley. These guys developed their own laptop, the first one ever, it was beautiful, they had Xerox PAR- park people, they stole people from the early Apple and they developed their own first operating system called GRiD OS and then they sat in a meeting with IBM and IBM was like ‘hey would you like to license our- your operating system for our new IBM PC?’ and they said ‘no of course not why would we do that?’ 


And then MS-DOS destroyed them. Billiot- Bill Gates is personally responsible for annihilating GRiD. and uh here’s a further NASA history provided by one of the engineers that worked on GRiD. The Compass was the first laptop in space by a matter of microseconds. TI had a laptop on the same shuttle flight- and you have to think about this, this is the first personal computer that made it into space. That’s huge! It’s the tri-quarter, it’s it’s the first time that uh an an astronaut’s able to use a computer on the space shuttle that isn’t like a guidance system or a component that specifically does a job. It- It changed the way we approach space.


Um GRiDs were huge in the US government as well. A lot of people who know anything about GRiDs know that they have a- a reputation as being the government's computer as being the rugged computer, they originally were designed for businessmen and none of that’s entirely true but the US government did use a lot of them. The NSA used em. They had a software written called Scrubbing Bubbles that scrubbed bubble memory of any data. Um the NRO used em, supposedly the football was at one point a GRiD. Uh NASA used them, SPAWAR and other military forces used em, supposedly these guys brought, you know, demolition charges with them to destroy em when they were you know potentially compromised. And marines and aliens in 1986- used em to fight aliens, so. There’s a gratuitous shot of a GRiD fighting aliens [laughter] I know a lot of you were expecting me to be like, ‘I found aliens on the laptop’ this is as close as I got.


But before we get into the task of ripping apart this, let’s talk about how the h**l you get your hands on old NASA gear and this is kind of a big storyline. Um you can buy pretty much anything as- at a government auction. The uh government auctions occur as like- Govliquidation Com or all these private enterprises that sell stuff or they occur at a state level, New York State for instance has an EBAY store and stuff gets sold there I mean it’s whenever they’re done with it and it no longer has value it gets sold and uh this is a great quote from a French guy, Francois, he was talking to a guy on Ebay who got visited by the FBI and they were like ‘hey where the h**l did you get all this s**t?’ cuz he started selling some stuff on Ebay and he had gotten it as scrap and what he was selling was Apollo Guidance Computers [laughter] anyone who knows anything about NASA or your own history knows the Apollo Guidance Computer is the first micro controller in silicon, it is a formative component of all of technological history, as we were landing people on the moon, we developed the first silicon parts, and we developed the first silicon micro controller. So everything that any of you do is in- is impacted by this, this device. And the AGC is formative. Some guy in France bought it off an Ebay guy who just happened to have a fully functional AGC. How does this happen? Like how does the AGC- any of them make it out into the world where some guy can buy it on Ebay, why was it sold as scrap? Nobody can tell you. And yet this one guy in France, if you hit his Youtube feed, has an AGC. Um I do recommend when you’re done after this, he’s got a great breakdown of how you access memory, how he read some of the data, and uh he talks about the operating system, he can’t pull the operating system off the AGC he has without destroying it although there is a copy of data for another AGC component that he doesn’t have um the question is how do we preserve the data that was on an AGC? And some of you may know that that’s out there now, it’s on GitHub. Uh the way it was preserved is one guy went to MIT and found the printed copies of all of the source code and transcribed them into a laptop. And he did this about 7 or 8 years ago and uh just recently a NASA intern found out about it and posted it to GitHub and suddenly there’s poll request against you know 1960s software [laughter] People were founding bugs. So in this case we found software hiding in hard copy, that’s pretty cool. So you’re al- some of you might be sitting here going this is entertaining, but it’s- it’s not great, we’re talking about formative components of our history this is like, Wilbur and Orville’s first flight, these, the- try to imagine going to a yard sale and finding the first airplane, it shouldn’t happen. So you might be asking yourself, well what do I do about it? Where in my life do I find this sort of history lying around? And what I want to tell you is this is Def Con man, there’s history happening here today. People are developing things, doing things, you don’t know it at the time, I was at HAR, Hacking at Random in 2009, getting camera’d with a bunch of Italians that there- at their embassy, and two years later I’m watching in the news, and then I’m watching in a movie that exact event occurring because there was this young blonde haired jerk who was like ‘I’m going to put all of your secrets on the internet’ and that happened, so Wikileaks basically occurred initially lat HAR. History is happening all around us, all the time.

So you might be asking specifically, ‘well that’s not like a NASA flight system, how the h**l do you get your hands on a NASA flight system?’ I found them being auctioned um there are a couple auctions that specialize in space memorabilia and some of the lesser ones, not like Christie's, which will sell you things for ten grand will sell you things for nothing at all, because nobody knows what they are or whether or not they’re important. The space shuttle is one of those areas where nobody really cares because it’s not Apollo, we didn’t land on the moon and a lot of people don’t see it as formative, even though it’s the early days of spaceflight, we’re talking about the first laptops in space and yet nobody cares, but they will, it’s history. 


If you’re ordering from an auction be careful, everything about auctions are shady. A lot of upper tier auction houses put a lot of effort into establishing where something came from, what it is, we’re going to talk in a moment about how you identify an artifact and authenticate it. Auctions don’t necessarily do that. This is the original auction that I saw, there’s two of them a year apart, the first one was the STS-41 PS - PGSC um as far as I can tell, they made that up. Uh the space shuttle payload and general support computer that came later, they didn’t make up, I guess the first one had some paperwork with it so they just kind of assumed, the other one, had none so they just also kinda were like, ‘well we have this thing, but we don’t know where it’s providence is from’ Uh you might be wondering how much these things cost me when I bought them, they ca- the first one I actually put in the bid for 1,337 dollars [laughter] and that’s what I got it for uh second one a little bit less. Um so authenticating artifacts, this is important uh as some of you may know, I once forged Shmoocon badges um easiest way was visually at first, because you’re looking at images on the internet, how do you visually identify this as being accurate, this is a Smithsonian shot, from the Smithsonian website saying this is a PGSC GRiD case as opposed to a compass there are things that you can identify immediately the blue velcro, NASA loves velcro, they love that light blue color uh look for where it is placed, that sort of thing, look at the font used on the text and lettering added, look for the modification specifically done. You can see that they modify the power supply, you can see that they added a fan, and it’s important, the fan. Anyone who knows anything about space travel knows that convection doesn’t work in zero G so any laptop without a fan is gonna die. It’s the same reason that an a- astronaut will die if the circulation stops in any of their spacecraft, the Co2 will pool in front of their face and they’ll die from C02 even though there’s plenty of oxygen, the convection doesn’t work.


Hard Copy is the other one, if you have the opportunity and you can find data, you can see on there there was a sed number listed, a- a part number as well um and you can go look on either Hard Copy files which I didn’t have a tthe time, or you can go to their website and look for those sed numbers. I found exactly one reference to that particular sed number. But it did identify it as a PGSC system and it specifically identified that sed number and several others. This comes from the NASA website, also here’s a snapshot of a video of a NASA astronaut on the shuttle, working with a PGSC, same style and design. So it looks legit, we buy it. Shouldn’t the memory have been pulled right? I mean DOD did work for NASA did work for the DOD in the 1990s so here’s the problem with buying something that’s from that age, you don’t want to accidentally release classified materials. They don’t go dead until 50 years after. So if you see something classified, you don’t put it on the internet, you call your local government agency and say ‘hey guys I got this thing maybe you could you know not kill me and take it off my hands’ be a good citizen you know. And put that guy up there so you know I’ve got both sides of the political spectrum. Um nothing that’s ITAR covered there’s- you’re not going to get a notification on whether or not something’s ITAR and that means International Traffic in Arms Regulation and if you ever work for a military contract you realize that certain things are verboten. You don’t give them to other countries, for instance, anything that might show like how a rocket works. That could be used for a weapon. It used to be that crypto used to be under ITAR but you know not so much these days. The other one that you see is this unclassified mark that means cla- unclassified but not for public release. Don’t release that either because even though it’s not dropping classified data, if you’ve ever worked for the US government it’s potential that you violated your own release clauses and you might go to jail anyways, so don’t do that.




Um storing an artifact is the other problem, you know bought something expensive and you don’t want to see it destroyed over time also if any of you ever come across something like this and you wanna protect it you wanna know how you can put it in a shed without it you know deteriorating. So electronics like beer, love beer temperatures. Cool, not cold. Dark. Those are the things that electronics love and we’ll talk about why. Um the cool environment cold is basically because a lot of things don’t do well in heat, they get destroyed over time or rapidly, cold is an arresting thing and it’s thermodynamics at the end of the day but it’s- it’s better for everything. Uh dark is good because some things are UV sensitive such as ROMS, uh displays, signage, housings, these things don’t seem that important to a hacker, but they’re important for storings. Uh not damp not humid but you also don’t want super dry because you could destroy rubber gaskets. Um clean clutter super important you don’t wanna have rats and roaches and other little bugs so wherever it’s stored you want it to be clean and you want to treat it like evidence and that’s where the forensics side of this comes in anyone who does digital forensics, you’ve got the skillsets to do digital archeology, you mark everything, you walk into a room you take photos, you mark and identify everything, you wanna know where it happened, how you found it, even if you bought it from an auction you wanna take a photo of the outside, see how everything was laid out, where things were um in in this laptop’s case I’m gonna talk about I’m going to be talking about key caps that were on the top keys, they were falling off as soon as I pulled the thing open, in fact there are several taped to the outside, unless they’re labeled, you don’t know where they were so you wanna get that first photo before they all fall off. Important. 


Keep logs, log everything you do, so that people who come after you if someone finds it in your house and you’ve been hit by a bus they know what the h**l you did and where it came from um paperwork and chain of custody are huge this is something you talk about in evidence, you talk about who had it when, how did it get there as few hands as possible on it, same deal with anything that’s an artifact, you wanna make sure that people know where it came from, how it got there and you wanna make sure that Jimmy who really believes in aliens didn’t get his hands on it and added a bunch of data, you know? Um when working with the unit try to have someone else in the room cause what happens if you open the case and you find a wristwatch in there and you’re now like ‘well this is part of it’ but everyone else is like ‘that’s just a random thing from Caseo you found’, you know? And log everything you do, plan every action, don’t ever do anything outside the plan. That’s a hard one for us because we are very free form, and anyone who breaks computers is definitely freeform it’s what we do but you do need to plan this is what I’m gonna do today, these are the things I’m gonna do, and here’s how I’m gonna try to do it and if you fail you’re done for the day you do it again the next day. This avoids you doing something stupid and breaking something we all end up down a rabbit hole and get creative, you don’t want to accidentally destroy something. Plan stuff out.

Now we’re gonna talk about Bit Rot, every bit is bound by thermodynamics which means every bit will die, everything we love, everything we believe in will die eventually, sorry. [laughter] The lifespan of magnetic media is about 5 to 10 years effectively it can last about as long as 50 but don’t expect it and we’re gonna talk about that here the laptops that I have were originally commissioned in about 92 and the discs were not in good shape um you can fully expect a mechanical hard disc to fail, they suck. Cool environments do prolong life we all remember the old knock knock knock trick where you put it in the freezer for a little bit and the- the knock of death sometimes goes away, you get enough time to pull it off, cold environments help um but if it’s too dry gaskets can go and s**t gets in and annihilates the disc. The other one is it’s like a car if you don’t spin up the disc regularly all of the juices inside, the mechanical oils and such, capacitors, they- they- they sit stagnant and they can become a problem, dangerous. Also read heads can get stuck, you never know. 


Lifespan of flash is a lot bigger I’m go- it says you can expect 10 years safely but perfectly honest, flash is good for about 100 years, generally. Um floating gate’s gonna be a problem in the end it will kill any flash device in the end no matter what you do. Some ROMs are UV sensitive so if they have an exposed UV chip you’ve seen them they’ve got a little glass top on them and you see a chip exposed, if they’re sitting in UV they’re not gonna immediately go but you leave them there for you know, 3, 4 years you’re gonna start losing bits. 


Extreme heat or cold is bad for them but not regular stuff we experience nuclear furnaces should be avoided [laughter] and uh do not store them in anything that takes skin off of people. They’re very resilient except when you’re on a rug and that’s where this next bit comes from, grounding bracelets are important when dealing with chips, I remember working as a computer engineer when I was young and I actually annihilated several old PDIP chips just by standing on a rug and static electricity was enough to blow a fuze and now you’re not reading s***t.


Capacitors and other gooey elements, older stuff, if you have anything 50 years or old or you encounter it don’t plug it in. Replace the f**king capacitors, and if you don’t want to replace capacitors for whatever reason at least disconnect them and check them first to see if they’re still firing within the tolerances that you’re expecting. Most people what they do though is they’ll actually haul them out and put the new capacitor inside the old one so you get the same aesthetic um I restore some old radios and that’s how they do it. Anything new is going to die a lot quicker than anything old. We have laptops and motherboards that die within 3 years because some of the caps just go that quickly they- are s**t’s more sensitive, it dies quicker. 

Um and when powering on thermal imaging can be super helpful. What you’re seeing in this image is basically me trying to power on the laptop much later on and you can actually see the residual heat from the power supply we attached to it, this was not stock, and you can see power distribution running through one of the cables and then going nowhere. That’s about a 3 degree variance and it lights up like a Christmas tree. If you see something approaching a thermal shock value, it’s gonna light up a lot faster. So this is ghetto but it’ll give you a pretty good idea if something’s gone horribly wrong and usually with enough time to pull the power. Um before you get into going into the elements let’s talk about physical inspection the device- of the device. We pulled out two of em initially I had one a year prior to the other but this is a photo of two of them together. You can do an initial physical inspection as we talked about you can see the uh the speaker uh the- the fan. Good indicator that it’s- it’s a space laptop, velcro good indicator. You can also see sed numbers which helped us identify it in space you can also see the key caps taped to the outside, that’s not a good sign. The other thing you can see is the back the backs interesting cause it tells us this laptop was modified this tells us it was a flight system. The power adaptor’s been changed. There’s also two high density ports where the modems used to be so if you find the back of an old 1530 or 1520 and take a look at it you’ll discover that those are just standard RJ45 modem ports and the power supply was just a standard socket, now gone.

This is the front, you pop it open, looks like a standard old 1980’s laptop, pretty cool, you gotta love the keyboard. And uh you also see the key caps, key caps are interesting and they’re gonna become more interesting later. You also see a little door and if you flip it open you find two app ROMs sitting in there and you go ‘hi there, what’s your name?’ You got you 26, and you 25 and what that tells you is somebody didn’t pull the data from the unit, you got Christmas. It’s- It’s a great feeling and you also know because it’s an app ROM it probably didn’t die so you pull it out you throw it in your uh your little universal programmer and hit the read button and you can read all the data right off uh the GQs are kinda nice granted but they only run on Windows.


And uh you run strings because you’re a hacker and you know how to read a binary the first time you see it, and it’s the 1980s no one was obfuscating s***t so you run strings. 


And you see a copyright, some guy from GRiD in 1988 his- he was funny, he’s like ‘my name’s Slick’. So you get internet sleuth mode here’s a photo of me in internet stock art you know sleuthing. And you find Timothy Slick Carlson and you send him an email because Timothy Slicks Carlson like everyone is on Linkedin and he lives in the Philippines and he’s retired now, he’s an awesome dude and Timothy responds and goes, ‘holy s***t you found my code’ [laughter] Tim had no idea that any of it had ever been on the- in space but he knew that the government had bought them, he knew that it had been used for stuff, but he was also kinda like, ‘that’s my code, but that’s my code from 1988 and these laptops are from like the 90’s why the h**l are they still using it?’ he also was like, ‘some of your code’s from Peter Norton which we would never have used’ so he’s giving us a pretty good idea that maybe these are not things from GRiD and then he being a hacker starts you know hex sevening and pulling out and running in DOSbox and starts telling us you know the language it’s written in and he’s a super happy guy and tellin’ us all the information we ever wanted to know. And that’s where our story about the GRiD being the first in space came from. He also pointed out this, there’s an echo line in one of the scripts that identifies the laptop as a PGSC Application ROM Diagnostics Utility, PGSC is payload and general support computer says it outside on the case, that’s how it was advertised which means whoever put this thing together, custom built an app ROM for it, so it’s probably not fake, right? Somebody wrote an app ROM, who would do that? And there’s another uh thing that comes up when you start researching PGSC and that’s a thing called SPOC um it’s obviously not a reference to Star Trek, uh everyone who’s ever mentioned it from US government has very clearly said it’s not a man- it has nothing to do with with Star Trek but it is the space shuttle uh personal onboard computer, the first laptop in space and the PGSC is the pregenerator when they switched over to GRiD case and the GRiD compass and The SPOC has a marked moment in history as being the first laptop in space, being the first time they added one of the most important applications that they’ve ever had and we’ll get to that in a moment, but here you can see the Smithsonian for instance pointing out it has nothing to do with Star Trek. Here is a SPOC in a forward compartment of the orbiter. Orbiter’s just nerd for space shuttle and anyone who ever says orbiter they’re either from the 1980’s and have a beard and worked at NASA or they’re a comic book nerd.


According to the people who worked at GRiD at the time the SPOC survived the Challenger disaster, to give uh credit to the uh the compasses where credit is due, they were incredibly resilient machines and they used uh thing called bubble memory. So supposedly these two machines that were on the uh the Challenger did survive.


Uh the PGSC took over for the SPOC in 1988 the P- The SPOC was very limited it ran basically two applications we’re gonna talk about one of them that we’ve been able to recover but the other one’s basically lost to history. The second ah- the first one was a tracking application for the order, the second one was basically a run book application where if they saw an error code they could type it in, get a list of what to do. It sounds ridiculous to us that this is something that would have been a problem back then but you have to remember that they’re up there in space on a very complex machine with limited communications and no digital equipment at the time.


Uh they didn’t really have an app store but it is important to note that GRiD did have it’s own version of cloud storage in the 1980s. A little bit ahead of their time. This is the shuttle tracking application as it was written uh before this they had to do dead reckoning which means they had to basically look out the window and see where they were to figure out where they were over Earth, there was no other way to figure it out other than asking ground control and letting them figure it out. So this is the application that most of these laptops were initially set up to run and that’s why there was usually one in the cockpit it would d- identify where over Earth they were. 


This application is available on the URL that I posted you can grab it and if you can get it to run it’s basically GRiD OS emulated running in DOS. Um and now that we’ve visually inspected the laptops, let’s get onto the fun stuff. I went a little further into digging into data that’s out there, you wanna cross corroborate when you’re doing digital archeology, it’s not as much fun as the hacking part, but it’s going to tell you important things. Supposedly this was for STS-41 so the first thing I did was pull up all of the image data on STS-41, here you can see an astronaut sleeping next to a PGSC system it is about mid riff to their- to their right. Um none of these matched up with the laptops I had, the serial numbers if I could see them didn’t match and there was no key caps on them so this was a pretty good indicator these were not the ones I was looking for. But the PGSCs were used for a lot of stuff, some of them were actually used for ground development to develop uh different payloads for scientific missions, some of them were automated check and verify that the payloads running, one of them was used for the original GPS analysis, when they deployed the first GPS satellites they wanted to make sure they had gotten it right and they fired up a PGSC system which was a GRiDcase 1530 to connect to the first GPS receiver and identify they were getting the correct data. 


The PGSC interestingly did not have an orbiter communications link, it had no internet, it was not linked to anything. There was possible to put a multiplexer in but they didn’t do that so that gives you pretty good scope of what these things did and what their purpose was.


Now this was a great photo when I saw this, this was about 3am and I’m digging and I’m finding nothing, and then I find this guy and this was a later mission, this is STS-94, the later missions they had better cameras so I could read the day- the serial numbers and the serial number on that one I believe is SN 1073 which is the highest serial number I saw, the ones I have are SN1044 and SN1045 with references to 43 and 46 in the paperwork. I see an SN 1001 in the first PGSC system that I see that’s a GRiD case. So they made probably at least 73 GRiD cases. Um what’s interesting about this one though is if you look real careful you can tell that a bunch of the keys in the app function level have key cap tops, they have stickers on them. This one, STS-64, no key caps, but you can also see that there’s another laptop hidden underneath. You look at one of mine, those are the key caps, pretty important. Here you can see em again, STS-47 has the key caps but you can also see there’s no SAIC logo over the app ROMS, a bunch of them had SAIC logos, a bunch didn’t it seemed like the earlier units in the PGSCs didn’t have SAIC- did have SAIC logos, later ones didn’t, didn’t contractor did the afterwork and changed the logos out. Here you can see a SAIC logo next to a non SAIC logo, no keycaps, key caps. It’s a later laptop. So what’s interesting about the key cap ones is they’re all related to space lab and microgravity science laboratory. All the uh flights correspondence missions, anything related to those key tabs seemed to be related to space lab. These systems probably didn't fly because all the space lab photos I could find are either S/N 106 units or S/N 1073 units. That’s where I am right now, just doing visual inspection. Now let’s look at the paperwork that came with one of them one of them came with a folio bunch of paperwork, the other one came with nothing. What’s interesting about this particular piece of paperwork is it tells us how much these things cost, 40K, in current dollars that’s about 70,000 dollars a pop. The original retail value on one of those laptops is about 5,000 so they paid about 35,000 extra dollars to have them modified for flight and they probably had about 73 of these done between 1988 and 1997 to give you an idea of cost of just this system.


Also interesting here is you have a rea- a- a life history log which tells you things about dates, when was it first in the NASA receipt? And that’s 1992. So it’s definitely not a um it’s definitely was reduced to a ground system in 92, vanished for 2 years and came back in 94 as part of the space lab. You can see a full life history log that’s again corresponding and you can see the modifications, 40 megabit hard disc, RS-422 diagnostic P-ROMs, Epoxy everywhere and that RS-422 connector thing tells us what one of the boards is. This was a heavy modification, it was the most odd modification inside the laptop, it’s an entirely custom board that replaces the modem. This was an R- RS-422 serial interface made by Rockwell International that interfaced with the space shuttle. So we’re gonna remove the housing and get in there and actually look at some of the hardware right now. You see the appROMs, you see me trying to replace one of the batteries and turn it on, that failed. But you can also see that they modified the battery, they changed the way it interfaced so that they could swap the battery out, that wasn’t a stock modification, you see epoxy in all the chips. You can see our lifelogs that were added to it and you can see that one of them ran for 3,700 hours the other one for about 1,500, that’s a long time. This was not space shuttle use. You can also see that they had an odd and even bios and you’ll see that in a lot of old computers where they had like a 16 bit bus but 8 bit bios chips it would put odds and evens on the memory in there so you- they’d be interleaved when you pulled them out. 


We tried to pull it out initially with a dip- uh dip 28 cable and it didn’t work because their power was still attached and I didn’t want to cut the ca- the power cable, so if you ever wanna do this, you have to cut the power and ground so that you’re not attempting to power the entire laptop when you’re pulling the data off the chip. We lucked out however, initially I thought they were just soldered in because of all the epoxy, but they weren’t there was actually a socket board there so we were actually able to pull it out and we were able to get the bios off which was super important cause the disc geometry information for the IDE discs was in the bios. 


The IDE discs were terrible, they were developed by a company called Conner. Conner is in Scotland and Scotland should feel ashamed for ever having produced these people. [laughter] 


This is what Tim Carlson who worked at GRiD had to say about the Conners, he was ‘oh no Conner Peripherals’ apparently they had a problem called ‘stiction’ in which the read heads would stick on the disc and their line engineers would you know being the 1980s hit it with their knuckles and let it keep going. So I had high hopes for this when it actually spun up, that was not the case however, uh it did spu- spin but they were very corrupted uh I needed to find an ATA card because they did not have an ability to understand LBA and anything USB throws LBA at it it eventually went ‘just go oh that’s CSH, I know that!’ and starts feeding the wrong data. So we found an old ATA card, managed to get GNU ddrescue to run which was the only thing that was able to apparently continually try and pull data, and what we ended up pulling was about 20 megs of a 40 meg hard disc, randomly spread out, but enough to figure out what was on it. And it was basically MS DOS it was running Do- diagnostic ROM software, it was called a DDSE flight mode system. And um inside you can see some of the strings, uh, what the interesting one on the right shows a file listing and I’ve been unable yet although I’ve only been into one laptop’s disc, the other one I have not been into, has a thing called astro 2 dot bat which could be real interesting because I’ve never seen that one on any of the paperwork, app wise.

But most of its diagnostic data and you can see Tim Carlson again showing up all over the d***n place having written all of the diagnostic data for these machines. The binaries if you want if you want to dig into them with me are actually on PGSC dot space and uh we’re working on restoring right now a stock GRiD 1520 to run some of the applications but it’s basically dead um one of the things we have to do is actually drummle open a- a CMOS chip and then hot wire it and we’re working on that but the next thing is replacing the display. Lessons learned here are that my weak a*s methodology did yield results. We cross corroborated between multiple sources, we identified these laptops were NASA systems, they were flight modified, we know the time spans they operated in, how long they ran, we know what they did, we know what applications were on there, we found the guy who wrote em. So all of that worked really well, we also know that it’s pretty unlikely that these ever flew. We went through all of the flight logs, all of the flight data on Youtube and the national archives and could not find the serial number that would have matched from that sed number that was on there, we also identified that the weird a*s module that was in there was likely an RS-42- 422 rockwell interface for the space shuttle. And we figured out that they were used primarily for long life testing initially they would have been the first batch that would’ve been tested before they went from a 711 sed number to anything above that, the 713 is appeared to have been used initially to do shock testing, in fact one of the logs in there that’s not posted shows a screw that came out of one of the displays and that was a send back to GRiD and they responded. Um they also did the EMI test on it. Disks show significant bit rot which tells us the discs don’t survive that long even if they’re in really good shape, in this case they were. Flash memory was intact.


The easiest way to do recovery work on NASA gear is to work, there I’m gonna shout these guys out, I worked there for a little bit, and there was a group called LOIRP which actually did lunar [inaudible] orbiter project they recovered um magnetic media from the first lunar cause orbiters sending back- they were sending back perfect copies of data but we didn’t have the da- the capacity to read that data, we recorded all this data but we didn’t have the equipment at the time to read it, so these guys took over at McDonald’s and started reading all the data and found the first Earthrise photos ever taken, amongst other things, high resolution images of the moon used for plotting landing sites. So LOIRP is a really cool project, I sent a URL, next to it by the way is a ICBM that they’re working on restoring [laughter]


And by the way that’s in the unsecured part um i- if you wanna do this and you don’t wanna go get a job at NASA there’s a organization called Space Apps Challenge which allows you to go work on their data, they have huge volumes of data that nobody can do anything with because it’s not indexed or searchable, nobody knows how to do anything with it. And we’re running into this glut of historical, important data just being lost because there’s so much of it created, they get paid to do the development, the advanced research, when they’re done there’s no funding to put it where it needs to be to be saved so if you have the opportunity that’s one way you can contribute.


So this is gonna be my- my thank you board it’s uh that website is going to continue to get more data when I pull the next discs but it has most of the ROMs we’ve done shaw tests between them so we know the ROMs are not bit rotted uh it has the disc images for the first one as far as we’ve been able to pull them, they may get better over time and it has a bunch of applications and research papers related to PGSC systems if you wanna read through them including information on how the applications were written at the time, they wrote entire research papers on why they used DL displays, why applications were written the size that they were for tolerances and readability, the irony was the space shuttle at the end of the day was, ‘can this astronaut read it’. Um Computer History Museum, much love to them for having given me an hour and a half video of the original creator’s talking about it and to Def Con Goons etcetera and all those that I can not remember so does anyone have any questions cause we have like two minutes. [applause]