MIT's computer culture seems to have been the first to adopt the term `hacker'. The TMRC's hackers became the nucleus of MIT's Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, the world's leading center of AI research into the early 1980s.  And their influence was spread far wider after 1969, the first year of the ARPANET.

        The ARPANET was the first transcontinental, high-speed computer network. It was built by the Defense Department as an experiment in digital communications, but grew to link together hundreds of universities and defense contractors and research laboratories. It enabled researchers everywhere to exchange information with unprecedented speed and flexibility, giving a huge boost to collaborative work and tremendously increasing both the pace and intensity of technological advance.

        But the ARPANET did something else as well. Its electronic highways brought together hackers all over the U.S. in a critical mass; instead of remaining in isolated small groups each developing their own ephemeral local cultures, they discovered (or re-invented) themselves as a networked tribe.

        The first intentional artifacts of hackerdom --- the first slang lists, the first satires, the first self-conscious discussions of the hacker ethic --- all propagated on the ARPANET in its early years.  Hackerdom grew up at the universities connected to the net, especially (though not exclusively) in their computer science departments.

        Since the days of the PDP-1, hackerdom's fortunes had been woven together with Digital Equipment Corporation's PDP series of minicomputers. DEC pioneered commercial interactive computing and time-sharing operating systems.  Because their machines were flexible, powerful, and relatively cheap for the era, lots of universities bought them.

        Cheap timesharing was the medium the hacker culture grew in, and for most of its life span the ARPANET was primarily a network of DEC machines. The most important of these was the PDP-10, first released in 1967. The 10 remained hackerdom's favorite machine for almost fifteen years.

        The ARPANET and the PDP-10 cultures grew in strength and variety throughout the 1970s. The facilities for electronic mailing lists that had been used to foster cooperation among continent-wide special-interest groups were increasingly also used for more social and recreational purposes. DARPA deliberately turned a blind eye to all the technically `unauthorized' activity; it understood that the extra overhead was a small price to pay for attracting an entire generation of bright young people into the computing field.

        As the PDP-10 and its operating system began to show its age, UNIX, developed by AT&T and made popular by Berkeley Software Distribution, came in to replace it.  Much more powerful and easier to use than its predecessors, UNIX became the backbone of the rapidly growing ARPANET (now metamorphosed into the Internet) and the operating system of most major systems at universities and government agencies.

        UNIX's impressive power was not nearly as important as two other factors:  its free cost and its freely available source code.  Berkeley Software Distribution, a part of the University of California at Berkeley, gave away the software for no charge.  This made the system software available to students and computer hobbyists everywhere.  It is from this base of students and hobbyists that hackers come from.  More importantly the source code for the software was distributed along with the binary version.  This allowed anyone with a little patience and know-how to understand how a modern operating system worked.  Hackers would routinely modify their version of UNIX to suit their needs.  This also allowed the hackers to peek into the guts of UNIX and see any bugs that could be exploited to break into the system.

        Due to the dominance of UNIX on ARPANET and several known bugs that allowed free access into the machines, hacking literally exploded.  Where as in the sixties and seventies hacking composed of mainly practical jokes and minor nuisances, the mid-eighties brought major crime into the world of hacking.  Kevin Mitnik stole over 100,000 credit card numbers.  Mark Abene gained total access to the nations phone system with a computer.  The break-ins were becoming more serious and far more frequent.  Lawmakers started to see the trend of hacking and enacted several tough laws punishing the computer users.  Many hackers went to jail, but most, aided with the anonymity of computer networks and the hacker culture, never got caught.

        In the early to mid-nineties the Internet was discovered by the general population.  Consumer computers powered by operating systems made by Apple and Microsoft were easy to use and affordable.  The world wide web turned the somewhat ominous UNIX interface into a series of pretty pictures and sounds.  The Internet was no longer the exclusive club of computer programmers.  Businesses followed closely behind the migration to the Internet, and soon start up companies such a Amazon.com and CDNow.com became corporate giants.  Electronic funds transfers and stock trades are just two of the practically infinite commerce activities that occur every minute on the now world wide Internet.  Unfortunately this gives a much larger target for hackers to shoot at.  The threat of computer crime and innovation of privacy are absolutely unprecedented in history, and every indication points to more economic and personal data being transferred to networked computers every day.