Though it wasn’t yet called “hacking,” the earliest known incidents of modern technological
mischief date from 1878 and the early days of the Bell Telephone Company. Teenage boys
hired by Bell as switchboard operators intentionally misdirected and disconnected telephone
calls, eavesdropped on conversations, and played a variety of other pranks on unsuspecting
customers (Slatalla 1).1
first hacks The first bona fide appearance of a computer hacker occurs nearly 100 years later, in the
1960s. A “hack” has always been a kind of shortcut or modification—a way to bypass or
rework the standard operation of an object or system. The term originated with model train
enthusiasts at MIT who hacked their train sets in order to modify how they worked. Several of
these same model train hackers later applied their curiosity and resourcefulness to the then
new computer systems being deployed on the campus (CNN 1). These and other early
computer hackers were devout programming enthusiasts, experts primarily interested in

modifying programs to optimize them, customize them for specific applications, or just for the
fun of learning how things worked. In many cases, the shortcuts and modifications produced
by these hackers were even more elegant than the professional programs they replaced or
circumvented. In fact, the most elegant—and enduring—hack from this period is the UNIX
operating system, developed in the late 1960s by Dennis Ritchie and Keith Thompson of Bell
Labs.
The 1970s produced another type of hacker, one focused on telephone systems. Known as
“phreakers,” these hackers discovered and exploited operational characteristics of the newly
all-electronic telephone switching network that enabled them to make long distance calls free
of charge. The phreaker movement is an important early example of anti-establishment
subculture that spawns influential hackers and visionaries in the realm of the personal
computer. 2
the golden era Hacking enjoyed a golden era of sorts in the 1980s. The introduction of turnkey “personal”
computers by Radio Shack, IBM, Apple, and others is a turning point in hacker history.3
 Now
computers were no longer limited to the realms of hardcore hobbyists and business users;
anyone, including existing and yet-to-be-realized hackers, could acquire a computer for their
own purposes. Modems, devices that enabled computers to communicate with each other
over telephone lines, were also more widely available and significantly extended the hacker’s
reach.
It was just this sort of capability that was explored and popularized in a number of popular
books and films at this time, beginning with 1983’s movie, War Games. The central
character, a young, suburban hacker, taps into a remote military computer by dialing into it
from home using a personal computer and an acoustic coupler, an early type of modem. War
Games was followed in 1984 by Steven Levy’s publication of Hackers: Heroes of the
Computer Revolution, in which he details early hacking history and summarizes the hacker
credo of this and earlier eras: “Access to computers, and anything that might teach you
something about the way the world works, should be unlimited and total.”
a split forms Although hacking expanded and enjoyed glorification during its golden years, a divide was
forming within the hacking community by the late 1980s. An increasing number of hackers
were no longer satisfied with benign exploration of systems merely to learn how they worked.