An interactive history
The History of Hacking
Hackers didn't start with computers. They started with curiosity: people who wanted to know how a machine really worked, and what else it could be made to do.
Scroll through 200 years of coding and hacking, from a loom in France to today's ethical hackers. Along the way you can punch your name into a card, send a Morse message, scramble text like the Enigma machine and release a (harmless) internet worm.
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1801
The loom that read holes
In France, Joseph-Marie Jacquard built a loom controlled by a chain of punched cards. Where a card had a hole, a thread was lifted; where it didn't, the thread stayed down. Change the cards and the same machine wove a completely different pattern.
Why it matters: it was a machine following stored instructions. Punched cards went on to feed computers for more than 150 years.
1843
The first computer program
Charles Babbage designed a mechanical computer, the Analytical Engine, that was never finished. Ada Lovelace wrote long notes about it, including a step-by-step method for the machine to calculate Bernoulli numbers. It is widely seen as the first published computer program.
She also guessed that such machines might one day compose music, more than a century before anyone could try.
Why it matters: the idea that a machine could do anything you could describe in steps is the idea behind all coding.
1878
The first "hackers" were teenagers on the phone
When the first telephone exchanges opened, operators connected every call by hand. Some companies hired teenage boys for the job. According to many histories of the period, they were soon let go for pranks: listening in, cutting people off and connecting callers to the wrong person.
Why it matters: new network, same instinct. Wherever there is a system, someone curious will poke at it.
1903
Hacking a live demonstration
Guglielmo Marconi claimed his wireless telegraph could send private messages. During a public demonstration at the Royal Institution in London, the magician Nevil Maskelyne sent his own Morse code into the receiver. It tapped out "Rats" and some rude rhymes in front of the audience.
Why it matters: he showed that "secure" has to be tested, not promised. Security researchers still do exactly that.
1932 – 1945
Breaking Enigma
Germany's Enigma machine scrambled every letter through spinning rotors that moved after each key press, so the same letter came out differently each time. In 1932 Polish mathematician Marian Rejewski and his colleagues worked out how it was wired, and in 1939 they shared what they knew with Britain and France.
At Bletchley Park, Alan Turing and others built machines called Bombes to find each day's settings. Historians believe the codebreaking shortened the Second World War.
1947
The first actual bug
Engineers working on the Harvard Mark II computer found a moth stuck in one of its relays. They taped it into the logbook with the note "First actual case of bug being found". Computer pioneer Grace Hopper, who worked on the machine, loved telling the story.
Engineers already called faults "bugs" before then, but the moth made it famous. The logbook page is now in the Smithsonian.
1950s – 1960s
"Hack" gets its meaning
At MIT, members of the Tech Model Railroad Club used the word "hack" for a clever, playful solution to a problem. When some of them got time on the university's early computers, the word came along. In this original sense, a hacker was someone who loved exploring what machines could do.
In 1962 a group of them made Spacewar!, one of the first video games, on a PDP-1 computer, just because they could.
Why it matters: "hacker" started as a compliment. Many programmers still use it that way.
1971
Whistling into telephones
Long-distance phone lines used sounds to control the network. A 2600 Hz tone told a line it was free. "Phone phreaks" found that playing that tone let them control calls, and a toy whistle given away in cereal boxes happened to make it, which earned John Draper the nickname "Captain Crunch".
A 1971 Esquire article made phreaking famous. Two of its readers, Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs, built and sold "blue boxes" that made the tones, a few years before they started Apple.
1983
Hackers make the headlines
In the film WarGames, a teenager nearly starts a war from his bedroom computer. The same year, a group of Milwaukee teenagers known as "the 414s" broke into dozens of computer systems and made national news.
From then on, the news mostly used "hacker" to mean someone who breaks into computers, and the playful MIT meaning faded from public view.
1986
A law, and a manifesto
The United States passed the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, making unauthorised access to computers a federal crime. The same year a young hacker called The Mentor published a short essay, "The Conscience of a Hacker", which says a hacker's crime is curiosity.
Why it matters: both ideas are still true. Curiosity is the hacker's best quality, and using it on systems you don't have permission to touch is a crime.
1988
The worm that slowed the internet
Robert Tappan Morris, a graduate student, released a program meant to spread quietly and count the computers on the early internet. A mistake made it copy itself onto the same machines again and again. About 6,000 computers, roughly a tenth of the internet at the time, slowed to a crawl.
Morris became the first person convicted under the 1986 law, and the incident led to the first computer emergency response team, CERT. He later became a professor at MIT.
1993 – 1995
Hackers get together
DEF CON, first held in Las Vegas in 1993, grew into the world's best-known hacker conference. Today tens of thousands of people go, and much of it is about defending systems, not attacking them.
In 1995 the film Hackers came out, Kevin Mitnick was arrested after a long FBI chase and Netscape offered one of the first "bug bounties": rewards for finding and reporting problems in its browser. Mitnick later became a security consultant.
1999
Hacking looks cool
The Matrix filled cinema screens with falling green code and made hacking look like a superpower. The "digital rain" became the way films, games and websites say "computer".
It's still the most copied hacking effect. Our Matrix Rain and fake hacker screen exist because of it, and the story of the digital rain explains where it came from.
2000
ILOVEYOU
In May 2000 an email with the subject line "ILOVEYOU" spread around the world. The attachment looked like a love letter. Opening it ran a program that sent the same email to everyone in your address book and damaged files. It reached tens of millions of computers within days.
Why it matters: it didn't need clever code tricks. It used people's curiosity. Most attacks today still start with a message that makes you want to click.
2010
Code that broke real machines
Security researchers discovered Stuxnet, a piece of malware built to damage uranium-enrichment centrifuges in Iran by making them spin out of control while showing normal readings. It proved that code could physically break things in the real world.
Why it matters: power grids, factories and hospitals run on computers too, which is why defending them became a serious job.
2011
Anyone can look like a movie hacker
Hacker Typer appeared: a website where pressing any key types real-looking code, so anyone can look like a film hacker. It became one of the internet's favourite harmless pranks, and this site carries the idea on. Try it here:
Want the full version? Open Hacker Typer, Hacker Typer 2.0 or the hacker simulator.
Today
Hacking is a job
Companies now pay people to find their weaknesses. Bug bounty programmes reward hackers who report security holes responsibly, penetration testers are hired to break in with permission, and students compete in "capture the flag" contests that teach real security skills.
The people who protect systems learned the same way the 1878 telephone boys and the MIT model-train club did: by being curious about how things work. The difference is permission.
Curiosity is the best thing a hacker has. Just ask before you use it.
Sources and further reading
This timeline is a short, simplified tour. These pages go deeper on each moment:
- Jacquard machine; Ada Lovelace; Analytical Engine (Wikipedia)
- Nevil Maskelyne and the 1903 wireless demonstration (Wikipedia, "Nevil Maskelyne (magician)")
- Cryptanalysis of the Enigma; Marian Rejewski; Bletchley Park (Wikipedia)
- Harvard Mark II logbook with the moth (Smithsonian National Museum of American History)
- Hacker culture; Tech Model Railroad Club; Spacewar! (Wikipedia)
- Blue box; John Draper; "Secrets of the Little Blue Box", Esquire, October 1971
- The 414s; WarGames; Computer Fraud and Abuse Act; Hacker Manifesto (Wikipedia)
- Morris worm; CERT Coordination Center (Wikipedia)
- DEF CON; Kevin Mitnick; Bug bounty program (Wikipedia)
- ILOVEYOU; Stuxnet (Wikipedia)
Spotted a mistake? Let us know and we'll fix it.
FAQ
Who was the first hacker in the world?
There is no single first hacker. Early examples include the telephone operators of 1878 who played pranks on callers, and Nevil Maskelyne, who hijacked Marconi's wireless demonstration in 1903. The word "hacker" itself came from MIT in the 1950s and 1960s.
When did hacking start?
As soon as there were networks to explore. People were tampering with the telephone and telegraph long before computers; computer hacking grew from the 1960s onward.
What did "hacker" originally mean?
At MIT it meant someone who found clever, playful solutions and loved exploring what machines could do. The meaning "someone who breaks into computers" spread through the news in the 1980s.
Is it legal to learn hacking?
Learning is legal and encouraged, using practice labs, capture-the-flag games and your own devices. Accessing systems without permission is a crime in most countries.