In addition to reminding us that we should write it as hack, the RAE says that hack is equivalent to committing criminal actions against property. That is, as in the case of pirating, it is not necessarily necessary to use a computer to perform a hack. In any case, the duality between those two words suits us because, for the first hack in history, we have to resort to a ship captain. Specifically, the one that appeared on a cereal box.
Long before all telephone systems resorted to the internet, telephone companies used the numbers you dialed on the phone to make the connection. But in reality, there was not a super complex system when reading which numbers you dialed. By pressing each number, the phone emitted a different sound, and that tone is what traveled through the connection to the operator and indicated what to do with that call.
How a toy hacked the phone system
At a certain point in history, someone discovered that all those tones could be manipulated using tools that provided the right tone, and, miraculously, an Air Force technician who would end up working as a programmer and hacker discovered the perfect tool to do it: the whistle that was given away in the Cap’n Crunch cereal boxes.
Apparently, the whistle copied the tones perfectly by sounding around 2,600 hertz, allowing it to make free calls and hack the phone system. Over time, the sound was replicated automatically with small boxes called “blue box” that, without the need to match the sound with the whistle, allowed reproducing the tone that came out of it to deceive the telephone operators.
Upon discovering these boxes, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak created their own digitally and began selling them to students at their university. The money they earned pushed them to go further and finance the creation of Apple, so as both recalled in an interview, “if we hadn’t made those blue boxes, Apple wouldn’t exist today.”
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