The original meaning of the word "hack" was born at MIT, and originally meant an elegant, witty or inspired way of doing almost anything.

Prehistory (before 1969)
In the beginning there was the phone company — the brand-new Bell Telephone, to be precise. And there were nascent hackers. Of course in 1878 they weren't called hackers yet. Just practical jokers, teenage boys hired to run the switchboards who had an unfortunate predilection for disconnecting and misdirecting calls ("You're not my Cousin Mabel?! Operator! Who's that snickering on the line? Hello?").

Flash forward to the first authentic computer hackers, circa the 1960s. Like the earlier generation of phone pranksters, MIT geeks had an insatiable curiosity about how things worked. In those days computers were mainframes, locked away in temperature-controlled, glassed-in lairs. It cost megabucks to run those slow-moving hunks of metal; programmers had limited access to the dinosaurs. So the smarter ones created what they called "hacks" — programming shortcuts — to complete computing tasks more quickly. Sometimes their shortcuts were more elegant than the original program.

Maybe the best hack of all time was created in 1969, when two employees at Bell Labs' think tank came up with an open set of rules to run machines on the computer frontier. Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson called their new standard operating system UNIX. It was a thing of beauty.

1969 - Arpanet, the forerunner of the internet, is founded. The first network has only four nodes.

 
John Draper, Abbie Hoffman

Elder Days (1970-1979)
In the 1970s the cyber frontier was wide open. Hacking was all about exploring and figuring out how the wired world worked. John Draper, a Vietnam vet, makes a long-distance call for free by blowing a precise tone into a telephone that tells the phone system to open a line. Draper discovered the whistle as a give-away in a box of children's cereal. Draper, who later earns the handle "Captain Crunch," is arrested repeatedly for phone tampering throughout the 1970s.

1971 - First e-mail program written by Ray Tomlinson

Counterculture guru Abbie Hoffman followed the captain's lead. His Yippie social movement starts YIPL/TAP (Youth International Party Line/Technical Assistance Program) newsletter helps phone hackers (called "phreaks") make free long-distance calls. "Phreaking" didn't hurt anybody, the argument went, because phone calls emanated from an unlimited reservoir. Hoffman's publishing partner, Al Bell, eventually changed the newsletter's name to TAP, for Technical Assistance Program. True believers have hoarded the mind-numbingly complex technical articles and worshipped them for two decades.

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 Seuss and Ward Christiansen, created the first personal-computer bulletin-board system. It's still in operation today.

Two members of California's Homebrew Computer Club begin making "blue boxes," devices used to hack into the phone system. The members, who adopt handles "Berkeley Blue" (Steve Jobs) and "Oak Toebark" (Steve Wozniak), later go on to found Apple Computer.

Robert Morris

The Golden Age (1980's)
1980 - In October, Arpanet comes to a crashing halt thanks to the accidental distribution of a virus.

Author William Gibson coins the term "cyberspace" in a science fiction novel called Neuromancer.

In 1981 IBM announced a new model — a stand-alone machine, fully loaded with a CPU, software, memory, utilities, storage. They called it the "personal computer." You could go anywhere and do anything with one of these hot rods. Soon kids abandoned their Chevys to explore the guts of a "Commie 64" or a "Trash-80."

1983 - The internet is formed when Arpanet is split into military and civilian sections.

In one of the first arrests of hackers, the FBI busts the Milwaukee-based 414s (named after the local area code) after members are accused of 60 computer break-ins ranging from Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center to Los Alamos National Laboratory.

The 1983 movie War Games shone a flashlight onto the hidden face of hacking, and warned audiences nationwide that hackers could get into any computer system. Hackers gleaned a different message from the film. It implied that hacking could get you girls. Cute girls.

Comprehensive Crime Control Act gives Secret Service jurisdiction over credit card and computer fraud.

Two hacker groups form, the Legion of Doom in the United States and the Chaos Computer Club in Germany.

2600: The Hacker Quarterly is founded to share tips on phone and computer hacking.

Computer Emergency Response Team is formed by U.S. defense agencies. Based at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, its mission is to investigate the growing volume of attacks on computer networks.

At 25, veteran hacker Kevin Mitnick secretly monitors the e-mail of MCI and Digital Equipment security officials. He is convicted of damaging computers and stealing software and is sentenced to one year in prison. He is the first person convicted under a new law against gaining access to an interstate computer network for criminal purposes.

First National Bank of Chicago is the victim of a $70-million computer heist.

An Indiana hacker known as "Fry Guy" -- so named for hacking McDonald's -- is raided by law enforcement. A similar sweep occurs in Atlanta for Legion of Doom hackers known by the handles "Prophet," "Leftist" and "Urvile."

The territory was changing. More settlers were moving into the online world. In Milwaukee a group of hackers calling themselves the 414's (their area code) broke into systems at institutions ranging from the Los Alamos Laboratories to Manhattan's Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. Then the cops put the arm on them.

1986 - In August, while following up a 75 cent accounting error in the computer logs at the Lawrence Berkeley Lab at the University of California, Berkeley, network manager Clifford Stoll uncovers evidence of hackers at work. A year-long investigation results in the arrest of the five German hackers responsible.

The Great Hacker War Occurs - To pinpoint the start of the "Great Hacker War," you'd probably have to go back to 1984, when a guy calling himself Lex Luthor founded the Legion of Doom. Named after a Saturday morning cartoon, the LOD had the reputation of attracting the best of the best — until one of the gang's brightest young acolytes, a kid named Phiber Optik, feuded with Legion of Doomer Erik Bloodaxe and got tossed out of the clubhouse. Phiber's friends formed a rival group, the Masters of Deception. Starting in 1990, LOD and MOD engaged in almost two years of online warfare — jamming phone lines, monitoring calls, trespassing in each other's private computers. Then the Feds cracked down. For Phiber and friends, that meant jail. It was the end of an era. Operation Sundevil was the name the government gave to its 1990 attempt to crack down on hackers across the country, including the Legion of Doom. It didn't work. But the following year Crackdown Redux resulted in jail sentences for four members of the Masters of Deception. Phiber Optik spent a year in federal prison.

 
Mitnick - Wanted Poster

Crackdown (1988-1995)
At the Cern laboratory for research in high-energy physics in Geneva, Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Cailliau develop the protocols that will become the world wide web.

Robert Morris appears with his Internet worm in 1988. Crashing 6,000 Net-linked computers earned Morris the distinction of being the first person convicted under the Act's computer-crime provision. Is punished by being fined $10,000, sentenced to three years on probation, and ordered to do 400 hours of community service.

Kevin #2 — Kevin Poulsen — was indicted on phone-tampering charges. Kevin #2 went on the lam and avoided the long arm of the law for 17 months. He, Ronald Austin and Justin Peterson are charged with conspiring to rig a radio phone-in competition to win prizes. The trio seized control of phone lines to the radio station ensuring only their calls got through. The group allegedly netted two Porsches, $20,000 in cash and holidays in Hawaii.

After AT&T long-distance service crashes on Martin Luther King Jr. Day, law enforcement starts a national crackdown on hackers.

Hackers break into Griffith Air Force Base, then computers at NASA and the Korean Atomic Research Institute. Scotland Yard nabs "Data Stream," a 16-year-old music student named Richard Pryce. The british teenager curls up in the fetal position when seized. His online mentor, "Kuji", is never found

A Texas A&M professor receives death threats after a hacker logs on to his computer from off-campus and sends 20,000 racist e-mail messages using his Internet address.

Kevin Mitnick was arrested again after he is tracked down via computer by Tsutomu Shimomura at the San Diego Supercomputer Center. This time the FBI accused him of stealing 20,000 credit card numbers. He sat in jail for more than a year before pleading guilty in April 1996 to illegal use of stolen cellular telephone numbers. He eventually spends four years in jail and on his release his parole conditions demand that he avoid contact with computers and mobile phones.

On November 15, Christopher Pile becomes the first person to be jailed for writing and distributing a computer virus. Mr Pile, who called himself the Black Baron, was sentenced to 18 months in jail.

The US General Accounting Office reveals that US Defense Department computers sustained 250,000 attacks in 1995.

I Love You Virus

Zero Tolerance (1995-1998)
Seeing Mitnick being led off in chains on national TV soured the public's romance with online outlaws. Net users were terrified of hackers using tools like "password sniffers" to ferret out private information, or "spoofing," which tricked a machine into giving a hacker access. Call it the end of anarchy, the death of the frontier. Hackers were no longer considered romantic antiheroes, kooky eccentrics who just wanted to learn things. A burgeoning online economy with the promise of conducting the world's business over the Net needed protection. Suddenly hackers were crooks.

In the summer of 1994 a gang masterminded by a Russian hacker broke into Citibank's computers and made unauthorized transfers totaling more than $10 million from customers' accounts. Citibank recovered all but about $400,000, but the scare sealed the deal. The hackers' arrests created a fraud vacuum out there in cyberspace.

Popular websites are attacked and defaced in an attempt to protest about the treatment of Kevin Mitnick.

A Canadian hacker group called the Brotherhood, angry at hackers being falsely accused of electronically stalking a Canadian family, break into the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. Web site and leave message: "The media are liars." Family's own 15-year-old son eventually is identified as stalking culprit.

The internet now has over 16 million hosts and is growing rapidly.

Hackers pierce security in Microsoft's NT operating system to illustrate its weaknesses.

Anti-hacker ad runs during Super Bowl XXXII. The Network Associates ad, costing $1.3-million for 30 seconds, shows two Russian missile silo crewmen worrying that a computer order to launch missiles may have come from a hacker. They decide to blow up the world anyway.

In January, the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics is inundated for days with hundreds of thousands of fake information requests, a hacker attack called "spamming."

Hackers break into United Nation's Children Fund Web site, threatening a "holocaust" if Kevin Mitnick is not freed.

Hackers claim to have broken into a Pentagon network and stolen software for a military satellite system. They threaten to sell the software to terrorists.

The U.S. Justice Department unveils National Infrastructure Protection Center, which is given a mission to protect the nation's telecommunications, technology and transportation systems from hackers.

Hacker group L0pht, in testimony before Congress, warns it could shut down nationwide access to the Internet in less than 30 minutes. The group urges stronger security measures.

Spread Virus, Spread...

New Milennium (1999 On)
As the millenium approached, general cyber-hysteria over the infamous Y2K bug was further inflamed by several serious hacker attacks. Well-documented by the media, these invasions were experienced directly (perhaps for the first time) by the growing masses of casual web surfers. In the second week of February 2000 some of the most popular Internet sites (CNN, Yahoo, E-Bay and Datek) were subject to "denial of service" attacks. Their networks clogged with false requests sent by multiple computers under the control of a single hacker, these commercial sites crashed and lost untold millions in sales.

Recent attacks on seemingly "secure" sites such as The White House, FBI and Microsoft.com have proven that despite massive public and private investment in cyber defense technology and methodology, hackers continue to pose a serious threat to the "information infrastructure."

2000 - In May, a new virus appeared that spread rapidly around the globe. The "I Love You" virus infected image and sound files and spread quickly by causing copies of itself to be sent to all individuals in an address book. In March, the Melissa virus goes on the rampage and wreaks havoc with computers worldwide. After a short investigation, the FBI tracks down and arrests the writer of the virus, a 29-year-old New Jersey computer programmer, David L Smith.

In October 2000, Microsoft admits that its corporate network has been hacked and source code for future Windows products has been seen.

Since 2001, viruses and attacks have only snowballed - almost too many to mention.  See the timeline (our pages) and also check out the comprehensive timeline (off-site link) for more detailed information on specific hacks.