In the 1970s the cyber frontier was wide open. Hacking was all about exploring and figuring out how the wired world worked.
Around 1971 a Vietnam vet named John Draper discovered that the giveaway whistle in Cap'n Crunch cereal boxes perfectly reproduced a 2600 megahertz tone. Simply blow the whistle into a telephone receiver to make free calls; thanks for using AT&T.
Counterculture guru Abbie Hoffman (above) followed the captain's lead with The Youth International Party Line newsletter. This bible spread the word on how to got free phone service. "Phreaking" didn't hurt anybody, the argument went, because phone call
s emanated from an unlimited reservoir. Hoffman's publishing partner, Al Bell, changed the newsletter's name to TAP, for Technical Assistance Program. True believers have hoarded the mind-numbingly complex technical articles and worshiped them for two d
ecades.
The only thing missing from the hacking scene was a virtual clubhouse. How would the best hackers ever meet? In 1978 two guys from Chicago, Randy Sousa and Ward Christiansen, created the first personal-computer bulletin-board system. It's still in oper
ation today.