brief history of hacking

Computer hackers have existed almost as long as computers In fact, "hackers" have been in existence for more than a century. In 1878, just two years after the telephone was invented by Alexander Graham Bell, a group of teenage boys hired to run the switchboards were kicked off of a telephone system in New York.


The reason? The boys were more interested in knowing how the phone system worked than in making proper connections and directing calls to the correct place. In essence, they were trying to "hack" the system to see how it worked.
Originally, "hacker" did not carry the negative connotations now associated with the term. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, computers were much different than the desktop or laptop systems most people are familiar with. In those days, most companies and universities used mainframe computers: giant, slow-moving hunks of metal locked away in temperature-controlled glass cages. It cost thousands of dollars to maintain and operate those machines, and programmers had to fight for access time.

Because of the time and money involved, computer programmers began looking for ways to get the most out of the machines. The best and brightest of those programmers created what they called "hacks" - shortcuts that would modify and improve the performance of a computer's operating system or applications and allow more tasks to be completed in a shorter time.

Not until the early 1980s did the word "hacker" earn disdain, when people like Kevin Mitnick, Kevin Poulsen and Vladimir Levin (more on them later) began using computers and the internet for their own questionable gains. Still, for all the negative things hackers have done, I believe they provide a necessary (and even valuable) service, which I'll elaborate on after a brief timeline of some of the high points (or low points, depending on how you look at it) in the history of computer hacking

Computer Hacking: A Timeline

1971: Computer hobbyist John Draper discovers that a toy whistle included in a box of children's cereal reproduces exactly the 2600-hertz audio tone needed to open a telephone line and begin making free long-distance calls. He adopts the moniker "Captain Crunch," after the cereal and is arrested dozens of times in the next few years for phone tampering.

1975: Two members of the Homebrew Computer Club of California begin making "blue boxes," devices based on Draper's discovery that generate different tones to help people hack into the phone system. Their names? Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs, who would later go on to found a company called Apple Computers in 1977.

1983: The movie "War Games," starring Matthew Broderick, is released in theaters. Broderick plays a teenage hacker who taps into a Pentagon supercomputer nicknamed "WOPR" and nearly starts World War III. (WOPR is a spoof of NORAD's old central computer processing system, which had the acronym "BURGR.")

In one of the first high-profile cases against computer hackers, the FBI arrests six teenagers from Milwaukee known as the "414s," named after the city's area code. They are accused of breaking into more than 60 computer networks, including those of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center and Los Alamos National Laboratory. One hacker gets immunity for his testimony; the others are given probation.

1984: Eric Corley begins publishing an underground magazine called 2600: The Hacker Quarterly, which quickly becomes a clearinghouse for telephone and computer hacking. The following year, a pair of journalists from St. Louis begin publishing Phrack, an electronic magazine that provides hacking information.

The Comprehensive Crime Control Act is passed, which gives the Secret Service jurisdiction over cases of credit card and computer fraud.

1986: Congress passes the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act and the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, which makes it a crime to break into computer systems. In typical congressional fashion, the law doesn't apply to those individuals largely