1878 Teenage boys mischievously misdirect and disconnect telephone
calls at Bell Telephone Company
1960 The term “hacker” is used by MIT train enthusiasts who hacked their
train sets to change how they work. Later, these same enthusiasts
emerge  the first computer hackers
1968 Dennis Ritchie and Keith Thompson develop the UNIX operating
system, possibly the most elegant hack of all time
1969 The Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) launches the first
four nodes of ARPANET (the system that eventually morphs into the
Internet) at UCLA, Santa Barbara, University of Utah, and Stanford

1970 Phreakers, another type of hacker, exploits the newly all-electronic
telephone network to make free long distance calls
1971 Ray Tomlinson writes the first email program and uses it on
ARPANET (now at 64 nodes)
1975 Bill Gates and Paul Allen form Microsoft
1976 Stephen Wozniak, Steve Jobs, and Ron Wayne form Apple
Computer
1978 Randy Seuss and Ward Christiansen create first personal computer
bulletin board system, still in operation today
1980 Usenet is created by networking UNIX machines via telephone
1981 Ian Murphy is the first hacker tried and convicted as a felon
1983 ARPANET splits into military and civilian sectors; the civilian sector
later evolves into the present-day Internet
The film War Games popularizes hacking
Richard Stallman makes the first GNU announcement via Usenet
1984 William Gibson coins the term “cyberspace” in his novel
Neuromancer, the first hacking-related novel
The most famous hacker group, Legion of Doom, is formed
Steven Levy publishes Hackers: Heroes of the Computer
Revolution, which summarizes the hacker credo of “freedom of
technology”