Before the word “hacker” was wrongly associated with vandalistic script kiddies and mischievous virus writers, it was used to describe an underground culture.

This underground culture was made up of professional engineers and basement tinkerers obsessed with improving computer technology through unconventional, simple, yet brilliant tricks.

Out of this early 1960s hacker culture grew an offshoot of technological anarchists, otherwise ordinary nerds with an irrepressible desire to provoke and prod the establishment. Their exploits made them hacker gods and in some cases unexpected inmates.

1878: Young male switchboard operators at Bell telephone purposefully misdirect phone calls and listen in on the hilarious results. Bell only hires female operators from henceforth.

1961: MIT’s Tech Model Railroad Club receives its first PDP-1 computer, which it adopts as its toy of choice. The early members of the TMRC evolve a culture and slang all their own.

It’s at MIT that the term “hacker” is believed to have been born. TMRC understood hacking as inventing a quick, elegant fix for a complex problem without damaging or affecting the greater system.

• Dictionary of TMRC “language”

1969: Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson at Bell Labs create the crowning achievement of ’60s-style positive hacking: Unix.

The new operating system allows many different programmers to access a computer’s resources at the same time. Unix also works on different, competing computer platforms, which are plentiful in 1969.

• History of Unix

The US Department of Defense develops ARPANET (now the Defense Advance Research Projects Agency), the first high-speed computer network connecting universities, research laboratories, and defense contractors.

For the first time, disparate hacker groups from MIT, Stanford, Carnegie Mellon, and elsewhere can mingle and collaborate over a transcontinental network. The result is a deepening of hacker culture, lingo, and lifestyle.

• Read the Jargon File, the definitive hacker document from the ARPANET days.

1971: John Draper, aka Cap’n Crunch, discovers that the free whistle given away in Cap’n Crunch cereal boxes can be used to gain free access to phone networks.

The whistle produces a perfect 2,600-MHz tone, the exact audio wavelength needed to fool the phone company’s multifrequency system into giving him a free dial tone. The practice becomes known as “phone phreaking” or just “phreaking.”

• Read the original article on phreaking from Esquire Magazine, October 1971.
• Read Cap’n Crunch’s reaction to the article.

1971-1972: Berkeley engineering students Steve Wozniak, Steve Jobs, and Bill Klaxton contact Draper and ask to learn the ways of the blue box, the small, electronic tone device Draper invented to phreak phone networks.

Always the prankster, Wozniak’s first phreaked call is to the pope. Against Draper’s advice, Wozniak builds some blue boxes of his own and sells them for $150 a pop.

Some of the money earned from this illegal scheme is used to fund one of Wozniak’s side projects with Jobs, a personal computing venture that would become Apple Computer.

• Read Draper’s account of his first meeting with Woz.

May 1972: Draper is arrested for phone phreaking and sentenced to four months in California’s Lompoc prison, where he teaches fellow inmates the ins and outs of hacking Ma Bell.

• Read Draper’s account of his Lompoc hacking classes.

1980: Usenet is born, networking Unix machines over slow phone lines. Usenet eventually overruns ARPANET as the virtual bulletin board of choice for the emerging hacker nation.

1982: As hacker culture begins to erode, losing some of its brightest minds to commercial PC and software start-ups, Richard Stallman starts to develop a free clone of Unix, written in C, that he calls GNU (for “Gnu’s Not Unix”).

The purest strains of old-school hackerdom are believed to survive in Stallman’s free software movement.

• Author Steven Levy chronicles the evolution of “the hacker ethic” in his groundbreaking book, Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution.

1983: The movie WarGames launches a popular — if misconstrued — image of hackers headfirst into the mainstream media. Amateur interest in hacking explodes.

It’s around this same time that the term “hacking” begins to be widely applied to criminal computer behavior, confusing the original meaning of hacking forever.

The Atari 2600 has been added to the Strong National Museum of Play’s toy Hall of Fame list, an honor it richly deserves.

It’s actually the first electronic toy to make the list, which includes classics like Mr. Potato Head, marbles, checkers, and Barbie.

Museum curator Patricia Hogan said:

It may look primitive compared to the advanced video game systems available today, but it helped make these possible.

Damn straight, people. Know your roots.

Joining the 2600 on this year’s list of inductees were the kite and Raggedy Andy, though Raggedy Ann actually made it five years ago.

What’s that about? You let in Ann but Andy has to wait? Laaaaame.

Inspired by a love of retro gaming and a fair amount of booze, late one night a clever coder created Pac-Txt, an Infocom-style text adventure version of arcade classic Pac-Man.

Here’s how he explains the genesis of the project:

Well, I had just got back from a party where the concept of a Pac-Man + Zork hybrid came up as a joke. So, being 2am with a little alcohol in my system, I thought it’d be funny to code it up (as far as I could before collapsing).

So, a couple hours later it was looking complete-ish (minus the ghosts’ AIs and graphic assets).

The next morning [read: aftenoon] when I woke up, since I have an inability to realize sunk costs, I decided to throw some crappy AI in for the ghosts, put a few graphics on it (courtesy of FastIcon.com) and voila! A domain name purchase or two later, and here we go.

You just don’t find passion like that every day.

Though it’s good for a chuckle, the game actually isn’t all that fun, since your choices are pretty much limited to “forward,” “backward,” and “eat dot.”

Now, a text adventure version of Frogger, that would be exciting.

Source: Pac-Man, meet Zork via Cnet

Rockstar Games isn’t on the hook for the fact that hackers have removed the censorship filters from the PSP version of Manhunt 2, says Entertainment Software Ratings Board president Patricia Vance. What’s more, she doesn’t believe that the hack would change the game’s rating.

Contrary to some reports… we do not believe these modifications fully restore the product to the version that originally received an AO rating, nor is this a matter of unlocking content.

Well, hey. If restoring the game’s killing sequences to their original unretouched grossness doesn’t raise the game from an M to an AO, Rockstar should totally release a “Director’s Cut” version of the game, don’t you think?

At any rate, Vance says that because Rockstar was totally upfront with the board about the content in the game, they don’t believe that they omitted any required information from their submission.

Source: Ars Technica

Want to be rid of double-A batteries? Red Octane is here to help.

The Guitar Hero makers are offering a USB-rechargeable lithium battery pack that works with the new Guitar Hero III wireless controllers for PS3, PS2, and Xbox 360. Yes: the same device works with all three.

You can grab one for $20.00 USD off their website.

If you haven’t yet purchased Guitar Hero III, they offer bundles of the game, the recharge kit, and a whole mess of other stuff included for $130.00 USD.

Less than 24 hours after the game’s release, hackers have found a way to reinstate the violent scenes in the PSP version of Manhunt 2.

The hack restores the game to its original full-gore version, which means that Rockstar didn’t cut offensive material in order to get the M rating, they simply disabled it.

The question is, did they follow that route for simple expediency, or because they knew they could count on the gaming community to find a way to play the game the way Rockstar originally intended? Perhaps a bit of both.

Let the countdown to the ESRB’s inevitable freakout begin. I figure we’ll also be hearing from a certain Floridian lawyer before long, too.

Source: GamesIndustry