Where does one begin a history of hacking?
Do we start with the creation of the computer, by J. Presper Eckert and John Mauchly? During World War 11 this pair of engineer and physicist approached the US Army with a proposal for an electronic device that would speedily calculate gunnery coordinates - a job that was then tedi-ously being done by hand. With the
government backing their way, the Electronic Numerical Inte-grator And Calculator (ENIAC) was born in 1946. It was a year after the war's end - the machine's designed function was now superfluous - but the dream behind its imagined future uses lived on.
Of course, the origin of the computer - the computer for god's sake - the most revolutionary invention since the telephone, can not be so easily summed up in a tidy paragraph of wartime patri-otic stupor. The real story goes back further, to Konrad Zuse, whose patent for a general-purpose electromechanical relay computer
in 1938 was turned down by the Patent Office as being not specific enough. It may have been ENIAC that spawned the next generation of computers, but ENIAC was a one-task machine. Zuse's contraption had the feel of modernity to it: a machine that would do... anything.
But is that where hacking began? Certainly not. The longing to do... anything has been in the human psyche for ages. Perhaps we should begin with the revolutionary creation of the telephone, culminat-mg with Alexander Graham Bell's historic "acci-dent" on March 10, 1876. The telephone was not an immediate best
seller. After all, you couldn't simply buy one and place it in your house and use it. Lines had to be installed. Networks had to be created to link home to home, business to business, and fi-nally, state to neighboring state. Almost thirty years of growth for the phone to spread throughout the country.
