Richard Stallman went on to form the Free Software Foundation and dedicate himself to producing high-quality free software.

It was also around this time that microchip and local-area network technology began to have a serious impact on hackerdom. Ethernet and the Motorola 68000 microchip made a potentially potent combination, and several different startups had been formed to build the first generation of what we now call workstations.

1985 Underground journalists "Taran King" and "Knight Lightning" launch Phrack, an electronic magazine based in St. Louis that provides information about computer hacking.

By 1995, when Unix became a commercial product for the first time, the most important fault line in hackerdom was between a relatively cohesive "network nation" centered around the Internet and Usenet (and mostly using minicomputer- or workstation-class machines running Unix), and a vast disconnected hinterland of microcomputer enthusiasts.

Within networked hackerdom itself, the big rivalry of the 1980s was between fans of Berkeley Unix and the AT&T versions.

Berkeley hackers liked to see themselves as rebels against soulless corporate empires. AT&T Unix never caught up with BSD/Sun in the marketplace, but it won the standards wars. By 1990, AT&T and BSD versions were becoming harder to tell apart, having adopted many of each others' innovations.

1986: Computer Fraud and Abuse Act

1987 A 17-year-old high school dropout named Herbert Zinn, known to authorities as Shadow Hawk, admits he broke into AT&T computers at Bedminster, N.J. Federal authorities say the teen - who worked from a computer in the bedroom of his suburban Chicago home - was close to tapping into AT&T's internal operations and the company's central switching system. Zinn, becomes one of the first people prosecuted under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act , which among other things makes it illegal to use another person's password.

1988 Cornell University graduate student Robert Morris, 22, launches a worm program onto the Internet that he wrote to exploit security holes on UNIX systems. The worm, programmed to penetrate other computers on the network and replicate itself, quickly spreads to more than 6,000 systems - approximately 1/10 of the Internet at the time and virtually shuts down the network by hogging system resources.

1989 Five West German hackers are arrested on espionage charges as a result of detective work by Clifford Stoll, a University of California, Berkeley, systems administrator who detected and investigated their systematic intrusions into U.S. government and university computer systems. Three of the hackers, who were charged with selling the information and software they obtained to the Soviet KGB, were convicted and sentenced to prison terms, but none ever spent any time behind bars. Stoll later wrote the book"The Cuckoo's Egg" about his pursuit of the hackers.

Kevin Mitnick is convicted of stealing software from DEC and long-distance codes from MCI, becoming the first person convicted under a new law against gaining access to an interstate computer network for criminal purposes. He serves a one-year prison term and upon his release on probation is ordered not to use computers or associate with other hackers.