A Short History Of Hacking

Believe it or not, the history of hacking goes all the way back to just before the end of the 19th century. As the telephone lines began to be strung all over the nation, so did the hackers (although the term would not be created until many years later). It was in 1878 that a group of teenage boys who worked the switchboards began playing practical jokes on callers. The pranks were harmless but annoying.

The first true hackers was probably a small group of students at MIT. They had access in the early 1960s to several large mainframe computers and more or less experimented during their free time. This was called "hacking", but at the time a hacker was someone who could push the envelope and make the machines do magic.

During the late 1960's and 70's a phenomenon known as phreaking began to surface. A phreak was a person who could "outsmart" the phone system and make free phone calls all over the planet. The word phreak comes from a play on words: phone and free.

You see, this began when good old Ma Bell (which is how the phone company was often referred to in those days) changed their system from a reliance on human operators to a system managed by computers. The computer system was based upon multi-frequency tones. Some youngsters discovered they could fool the phone system by whistling the appropriate tones.

Thus began a small, anti-establishment subculture known as the phreaking movement. Abbie Hoffman (a somewhat deranged political activist from the 1960's and 70's) popularized the movement by referring to it in his newsletter Youth International Party Line.

The idol of phreakers was a guy known as Captain Crunch (whose real name was John Draper). His name came from his ability to use the whistle found in a box of Captain Crunch cereal to fool the phone system. John could make the phone system do just about anything, and he enjoyed making it perform greater and greater tricks.