The Complete History of Hacking

[1963] Dartmouth College, located in Hanover, New Hampshire, incorporates the introduction to the use of computers as a regular part of the Liberal Arts program.

[1964] There are approximately 18,200 computer systems in the United States. Over 70% of those computers were manufactured by International Business Machines (IBM).

[1967] The Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) work with U.S. computer experts to form a network of Interface Message Processors (IMPS). The computers would act as gateways to mainframes at a variety of institutions in the United States and provide a major part of what would become the Internet in the years ahead.

[1969] The Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) originates ARPANET, a service designed to provide efficient ways to communicate for scientists. A Cambridge, Massachusetts consulting firm, Bolt Beranek and Newman, who won a ARPA contract to design and build a network of Interface Message Processors (IMPS) the year prior, ships (Sept) the first unit to UCLA and ships (Oct) the second unit to Stanford Research Institute. IMPS act as gateways to mainframes at a variety of institutions in the United States. Within a few days of delivery, the machine at UCLA and Stanford link up for the first time and ARPANET is founded. Later the network expands to four nodes. The first four nodes (networks) consisted of the, University of California Los Angeles, University of California Santa Barbara, University of Utah and the Stanford Research Institute. This system would evolve to be known as the Internet or the Information Super Highway.

[1969] Intel makes the announcement of a much larger RAM chip. It boasts of a 1KB capacity.

[1969] Ken L. Thompson, Dennis M. Ritchie and others start working on the UNIX operating system at Bell Labs (later AT&T). UNIX was designed with the goal of allowing several users to access the computer simultaneously.

[1969] The first computer hackers emerge at MIT. They borrow their name from a term to describe members of a model train group at the school who “hack” the electric trains, tracks, and switches to make them perform faster and differently. A few of the members transfer their curiosity and rigging skills to the new mainframe computing systems being studied and developed on campus.