1970s:

The ARPAnet and the PDP-10 cultures grew throughout the 1970s. The facilities for electronic mailing lists that had been used to foster cooperation among research groups were increasingly also used for social purposes.

Also, computers come out of university labs and went into the street. This actually happened in a performance of the Community Memory Project, a group of hackers and activists that got together in California in the mid-70S, which believed that computers were communication media that could help people to get in touch with one another in an unprecedented way.

Computers thus began to be seen as a social tool, and therefore also as able to carry political values.

At the same time, computers were still largely feared as the most sophisticated tools of authority. They were still seen as part of the military machine that was responsible for the Vietnam War.

The anarchic and freedom traits of computer hackers seemed able to fit the cultural fabric of californian counterculture. Also they seemed able to renuvate the hyppie dream.

Felsenstein was able to persuade activists of the Free Speech Movement that computers could become tools of democracy, and that in order for this to happen people should have started to put their hands on them. He basically brought the hacker’s ethic outside the AI of the MIT.

The birth of computer Underground
The most creative, anarchist, dark-side of the political and artistic communties began to undestand the potential of Technology.
The genuine roots of the modern hacker underground can probably be traced most successfully to a hippie anarchist movement known as the Yippies.
The Yippies, who took their name from the largely fictional "Youth International Party," carried out a loud and lively policy of surrealistic subversion and outrageous political mischief.

Their basic tenets were flagrant sexual promiscuity, open and copious drug use, the political overthrow of any powermonger over thirty years of age, and an immediate end to the war in Vietnam, by any means necessary, including the psychic levitation of the Pentagon. The two most visible Yippies were Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin.


Abbie Hoffman

Yippies regarded electronic media as both playground and weapon. They enjoyed manipulating network TVs and other gullible, image hungry media, with various weird lies, mindboggling rumors, impersonation scams, and other sinister distortions.

Hoffman's most famous work is a book knwon as Steal This Book, which publicized a number of methods by which young, penniless hippie agitators might live off the fat of the system.

Steal This Book, whose title urged readers to damage the very means of distribution which had put it into their hands, could be seen as a spiritual ancestor of a computer virus or of a media hack.

Phone phreaking
Hoffman, like many later conspirators, made extensive use of pay- phones for his agitation work -- in his case, generally through the use of cheap brass washers as coin-slugs.

During the Vietnam War, there was a federal surtax imposed on telephone service.

Hoffman argued that in systematically stealing phone service they were engaging in civil disobedience: virtuously denying tax funds to an illegal and immoral war.

1971: Abbie Hoffman and a telephone enthusiast sarcastically known as "Al Bell" began publishing a newsletter called Youth International Party Line. This newsletter was dedicated to collating and spreading Yippie rip-off techniques, especially of phones.

Youth International Party Line, the YIP newsletter

As a political tactic, phone-service theft ensured that Yippie advocates would always have ready access to the long-distance telephone as a medium, despite the Yippies' chronic lack of organization, discipline, money, or even a steady home address.


Captain Crunch, Phone Phreaking pioneer

Because the phone network pre-dates the computer network, "phone phreaks" pre-date "computer hackers." In practice, today, the line between "phreaking" and "hacking" is very blurred, just as the distinction between telephones and computers has blurred. Phreaking could be seen as the early form of modern days cracking.




1977: Apple is founded. The first computers had a blue box, the phone-phreakers tool, a device for a modem. Captain Crunch, inventor of the blue box, was a good friend of Steve Wozniak.

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