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?"). Now you know why the first
transcontinental communications network hired female operators.
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.