Page "Hacker (term)" Paragraph 38

All three subcultures have relations to hardware modifications.

In the early days of network hacking, phreaks were building blue boxes and various variants.

The programmer subculture of hackers has stories about several hardware hacks in its folklore, such as a mysterious ' magic ' switch attached to a PDP-10 computer in MIT's AI lab, that, when turned off, crashed the computer.

The early hobbyist hackers built their home computers themselves, from construction kits.

However, all these activities have died out during the 1980s, when the phone network switched to digitally controlled switchboards, causing network hacking to shift to dialing remote computers with modems, when pre-assembled inexpensive home computers were available, and when academic institutions started to give individual mass-produced workstation computers to scientists instead of using a central timesharing system.

The only kind of widespread hardware modification nowadays is case modding.