For decades, the word hacker has been automatically linked to personal computers, but history shows that hacking as a practice long predates the unforgettable IBM PC. Punched cards, telephones, and telegraphs were the favorite targets of experts and enthusiasts alike, focused on demonstrating weaknesses, earning a few extra dollars, and in more critical cases, saving lives. Today we'll name a few of them.
These days, if someone guesses a Facebook password, they're a hacker. If they crack a program, they're a hacker. If they use a VPN, they're a hacker. If they can replace a hard drive, they're a hacker. If they don't use Windows, they're a hacker. Anything that falls "outside" normal use of a personal computer can earn someone the hacker label, even if they're just exploring other paths.
In truth, these explorers date back to the early 20th century, at the very dawn of wireless communications. Curious about what hackers did during the pre-IBM PC era? Then let's look at some cases.
Nevil Maskelyne
This British magician and inventor had a close relationship with the development of wireless telegraphy, and had plenty of reasons to clash with Guglielmo Marconi, who controlled a wide number of patents. When the Italian engineer openly declared that "his" wireless telegraphy was "secure and private", Maskelyne decided to prove otherwise. During a public demonstration organized by Marconi in June 1903 that was to connect two wireless telegraphs separated by 480 kilometers, Maskelyne managed to inject into the transmission the word "Rats" over and over, followed by a mockery about "a young fellow from Italy" (Marconi was 29) who "deceived the people". That was enough to turn Maskelyne into the first hacker.
René Carmille
Carmille was the controller general of the French army and an expert in punched cards, with control over the machines that the Nazi-collaborationist government of Philippe Pétain used to process "demographic information", meaning the tracking of Jews and other "Untermensch" in France. Carmille volunteered and handed over his systems... but not before modifying them so they would never punch information in the so-called "Column 11" (Religion) of the cards, saving thousands of Jews. Carmille was actually a double agent for the Resistance, and found a way to fool the Nazis for two years. Once they discovered his maneuver, he was captured and personally interrogated for two days by Klaus Barbie, "The Butcher of Lyon", and sent to Dachau, where he died in January 1945. The man who hacked the Holocaust.
David Condon
The '60s and '70s were marked by the practice of phreaking, which aimed to exploit weaknesses in the telephone system to access special services like long-distance calls. However, the first phreak started his activity in 1955. His name was David Condon, and he basically discovered that blowing a Davy Crockett toy flute into the phone could generate the 1,000 Hz tone that enabled free calls, reserved for the phone company's technicians. In theory, the flute was only supposed to attract canaries and parakeets, and at an original price of 49 cents, nobody expected much, but today there's no doubt Condon got his money's worth.
Joe Engressia
Maybe Condon was the first known phreak, but the one who popularized these hacks was Joe Engressia, better remembered by his second name, Joybubbles. Born blind and with perfect pitch, Engressia discovered he could dial phone numbers by tapping the hook rapidly and whistle accurately the tones compatible with long-distance calls, a skill he turned into a service while studying at university (he "sold" his whistles for a dollar). His popularity among other phreaks (boosted by Esquire magazine coverage) inevitably got him into trouble with Ma Bell (the nickname for the Bell Telephone Company) and the FBI, which had tracked his activities for two years, between 1969 and 1971. A true genius with deep mental scars from abuse suffered at the hands of one of his teachers, Engressia "returned to his childhood" in 1988 and changed his name to Joybubbles three years later. He became an inspiration, and Hollywood even used parts of his life to shape some characters (like Whistler in the movie Sneakers).
Allan Scherr
The concept of a password was invented and implemented by MIT professor Fernando Corbató in 1962. Besides providing an extra layer of privacy for students and researchers using shared servers, passwords also limited their time on them, just four hours per week per account. One of those researchers, Allan Scherr, got tired of the time limit and designed a punched card to force the server to print all the passwords for registered accounts, so that when he used up his quota, he only had to log in with a different user. Three years later, Scherr ended up in IBM's ranks, but his story as the first password thief is unforgettable.
Carlton Tucker
Does the name not ring a bell? I personally can't blame you, but Professor Tucker holds a very special place on this list as the first to use the word hacker with a negative profile. The year was 1963, and phreaks were making a real mess with MIT's telephone system. Tucker declared in the institute's newspaper that these "hackers" had taken control of the private links between MIT and Harvard and transferred the cost of their long-distance calls to a nearby radar station. One of their favorite methods was to connect the PDP-1 computer to the phone network and test each available line until they found a tone. Although Tucker said he would do everything possible to warn and protect those involved, he also reminded them that if the phone company caught them, they would end up in prison, and that MIT expelled "two or three students" per year for phone abuse.
RABBITS?
Unfortunately, we don't know the identity of the original hacker, but we do know his creation. At some point in 1969, a mysterious user installed a small program (now known as RABBITS) on the Burroughs 5500 at the University of Washington's Computing Center, whose only role was to make a copy of itself every time it ran. Those two copies became four, and four became eight... until the system collapsed from overload. Nine years later, someone ran a similar variant called Wabbit on an IBM System/360. From a technical standpoint, RABBITS and Wabbit are not viruses or worms, but rather apply the concept of a fork bomb, a true classic among DoS attacks.
Ray Tomlinson and Bob Thomas
Ray Tomlinson is the creator of email. Bob Thomas developed what many consider the first computer virus, Creeper. In its original version, Creeper did nothing more than display a message ("I'm the Creeper, catch me if you can!"), move to another system, and delete the previous copy. Tomlinson had the bright idea to give Creeper superpowers (the virus no longer moved but multiplied) and let it loose on ARPANET. Fortunately, Tomlinson also wrote the antivirus Reaper, a kind of digital Terminator with the sole task of destroying every copy of Creeper it found on systems. Almost 50 years have passed since Creeper's birth, and in essence, all modern viruses have something of it inside.
Wozniak and Jobs
Despite our sympathy or rejection, this team couldn't miss. After reading the famous article about Joybubbles and the other phreaks in Esquire magazine, Steve Wozniak got in touch with John "Captain Crunch" Draper and learned to build his own blue box. Wozniak had become obsessed with that article, and even reproduced it on his typewriter, a backup in case he lost the text. After making some optimizations (and several prank calls that extended as far as the Vatican), Wozniak showed his blue box to Steve Jobs, and as expected, the younger of the two Steves saw a profitable business in the device. Wozniak built the blue boxes at a cost of $75, and Jobs sold them to students for $150. Illegal to the core, but they earned some money...
John Walker
Any basic search on John Walker will reveal he is one of the founders of Autodesk (the parent company of the famous AutoCAD)... but he also wrote ANIMAL in 1975 for the UNIVAC 1108 system. At first glance, ANIMAL was a question-and-answer game that tried to guess what animal the user was thinking of. In the background, ANIMAL worked with another program called PERVADE to create copies of both in every directory the user could access, including structures on magnetic tapes, which guaranteed its leap to other compatible systems. ANIMAL couldn't do any harm and largely respected the absence of permissions, but that didn't change its status as the first Trojan.
