Today in 1963, the MIT student newspaper reported that many telephone services have been curtailed “because of so-called hackers,” the earliest known public use of the term.
According to Steven Levy in Hackers, members of MIT’s Tech Model Railroad Club in the late 1950s used the term a hack to describe “a project undertaken or a product built not solely to fulfill some constructive goal but with some wild pleasure taken in mere involvement… The most productive people working on the S&P [the Signals and Power Subcommittee of the club] called themselves ‘hackers’ with great pride.”
The 1963 article in The Tech described some of the wild pleasure-filled projects:
The hackers have accomplished such things as tying up all the tie-lines between Harvard and MIT, or making long-distance calls by charging them to a local radar installation. One method involved connecting the PDP-1 computer to the phone system to search the lines until a dial tone, indicating an outside line, was found…. To quote one accomplished hacker, “the field is always open for experimentation.”
Two of the most famous experimenters were Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak who, in 1971, developed (Wozniak) and sold (Jobs), as their first business venture, a “Blue Box” for making free long-distance phone calls. Wozniak told Dan Lyons in 2011:
I didn’t do it to make money but just to build a device to explore it, not to save money on phone calls. I was so honest I would not use the blue box to make long-distance calls. But if I wanted to play pranks, like route signals around the world and make them come back to the phone next to me. We did prank calls. I would call a hotel in Paris and make a reservation. At the dorms in Berkeley we would go door-to-door selling blue boxes. One hundred and fifty bucks was the price... We were doing a demo of a blue box in a dorm room. I called Italy, then asked for Rome, then asked for the Vatican. I told them I was Henry Kissinger calling from a summit meeting in Moscow. It was 5:30 in the morning in Italy. They told me to call back in an hour. I did, and I spoke to a bishop who said he had just spoken to Henry Kissinger in Moscow.