History Of Hacking prt 1 By CEO of TIA

Somewhere in the book of history, back in the days, when hackers were actually hackers, many things happened, good and bad, for better or worse.

Hacking as a concept predates computers and the internet.

The year was 1878, there were a bunch of teenage switchboard operators who worked on Bell Telephone System just two years after its invention (1876 - by Alexander Graham Bell), who were able to manipulate calls to misdirect them to unintended destinations, it was documented however, that they did it for fun, for curiosity and for pranks.

Year 1971, there was a guy named John Draper, famously known as "Captain Crunch". Draper discovered that a toy whistle found in Cap'n Crunch cereal boxes could emit a 2600 Hz tone which is the exact frequency used by AT&T's long-distance trunk lines for system control.

Using this whistle, Draper could manipulate the telephone network to make free long-distance calls by tricking the system into thinking it was receiving valid control tones. This discovery is considered one of the most iconic hacks in history, it was called "Phreaking".

It is worth noting however, that "Captain Crunch" never adopted the "hackers' mindset", so who was the first "Hacker" as it is understood by our nowadays terminology?

The term "hacker" originally referred to skilled individuals who experimented with technology to push its limits. The earliest "hackers" were members of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's (MIT) Tech Model Railroad Club (TMRC) in the late 1950s and early 1960s. These students explored ways to manipulate and improve the performance of electrical circuits and, later, early computers.

The TMRC hackers modified software and hardware to make systems more efficient or add features while "Phreakers" discovered vulnerabilities in telephone systems by experimenting, leading to intentional hacking practices, however, those "Hacks" were never malicious or intended to harm anyway, rather, they aimed to find flaws and/or to improve performance.

During the 1960s, hackers at MIT experimented with early computers like the IBM 704 and PDP-1. They wrote clever programs and found ways to bypass limitations to make machines perform better.

It is worth noting that hacking as we know it started coincidentally, as the first "hacks" were often the result of engineers and students finding creative ways to overcome system limitations.

In the computing world, one of the earliest recorded hacks was the "Creeper Virus" in 1971, created by Bob Thomas as an experimental program where Thomas was attempting to demonstrate that a code or a program could actually replicate itself without human intervention. "Creeper Virus" moved across ARPANET (which evolved to what we today call "the internet"), displaying the message: "I’m the creeper: catch me if you can." This wasn’t malicious but demonstrated the concept of self-replicating programs.

... But then, years later, "skiddies" happened...

(stay tuned for part 2)

By Elie Ghabash