Before Hollywood took the hacking phenomena under its wing, unless you were a clued-in techy, the world of hacking would be unfamiliar territory. In recent years, movies like The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, The Matrix and The Italian Job have managed to glamourize the high-tech thrill of breaking into servers, cracking door codes and hijacking security networks. But before television brought the hacker technology into our general knowing, hacking was still an occurring reality for some. So what is the history of hacking and where did today's sophisticated hacking begin? Late 1950s – The MIT Start Off with a Bang Hacking wasn’t always about computers. In fact, the first ‘hackers’ were roof and tunnel hackers, which the Massachusetts Institute of Technology was instrumental in introducing. These were people who entered roof and utility tunnel spaces without authorization, in other words getting into a place they shouldn’t be in – which is where computer hacking go