Member-only story
Computer Hacking Began with a Cereal Box Toy
How People Exploited The Network Before The Network
Victorian Engineers built a vast network of copper cables and switching stations to relay text messages, and eventually two-way audio, between distant points. Sounds like Steampunk stuff, but it’s just the old Telegraph and Telephone systems of yesterday, that eventually evolved into the modern telecom and computer networks we use today. (Also memo to self: The phrase “Victorian Engineers” sounds cool, needs to be used more often!)
The telephone system was the Internet before the Internet, providing a pretty impressive capability to connect everyone’s home to countless other homes and businesses across the globe. But you know: Invent a technology, and people will begin messing around with it, almost immediately.
Thomas Edison for instance is said to have recorded the phrase “Mad Dog” on one of his early phonograph systems and then played it backward, causing the machine to utter an unspeakable (in the Victorian Era anyway) obscenity.
And who knows? Maybe Alexander Graham Bell’s first words to Watson were actually “Farts, Farts, Farts!”. If so, we probably would never have even heard about it. When it comes to the phone though, shenanigans were in effect pretty far back, starting with phone pranks.