THE HISTORY OF HACKING AND UNDERGROUND BOARDS
The modern hacker underground was most probably started with hippie anarchist being Abbie Hoffmans and Jerry Rubin. Hoffman also published a book on computer viruses called "Steal This Book." He later committed suicide in 1989.
Interestingly enough, the very founders of Apple Computer Incorporated were hackers to begin with. They tried to make money selling blue boxes to fellow students in college dorms at Berkeley University, California. A magazine "Ramparts" even published how to create a blue box in the 1970s which of course, later put them out of business due to legal issues involved.
One of the more popular publishing's for hackers jealously carried out by "Emmanuel Goldstein," known as "2600: The Hacker Quarterly." He was an editor and publisher of the magazine, but not a hacker himself. In the words of the author himself, he believed "the privacy of governments, corporations and technical organizations should never be protected at the expense of the liberty and free initiative of the individual techno-rat.
Bulletin Board Systems, called BBS in short, are like oxygen to the life of the digital underground. A "bulletin board system" is actually a computer that connects users over the phone lines through modems and its used as an information and message passing center. Networks for large mainframes existed until the 1960s, but network for PCs run by private individuals was first achieved in the 1970s. The most successful personal "board" was created by Ward Christensen and Randy Sues in February, 1978, in Chicago, Illinois.
Bulletin Boards are managed by system operators (SYSOPS), run on different kinds of software and computers. It is a new form of an unregulated media. Even with global access boards come cheap and is free for a local caller. It does not cost much to SYSOPS so much in dollars as it does in time and energy, because he or she would be responsible for the running of the board. Boards can be differentiated in many ways, for example, by the amount of effort spent regulating them, by their degree of anonymity, their immediacy, their degree of community, their ease of access, their size, etc. There are boards to cover every imaginable and non-imaginable topics. Hackers feed on boards like their life depends on it, actually in the author's words "they live by boards, they swarm by boards, they are bred by boards." By the late 1980s, phone-phreak groups and hacker groups, united by boards, had proliferated fantastically.
Underground boards started around the same time the regular boards started. One of the first ones was EBBS. It later became a very important center for West Coast phone phreak elite. Once it went on-line in 1980, EBBS sponsored Susan Thunder, "Tuc", and "The Condor." These all are nicknames not real names, as hackers call it, these are their handles. Any history of underground boards, hackers, hacking, and phreakers would be incomplete without mentioning "The Condor". In this respect he is special and deserves a special treatment.
