Whether you miss the good old days of Telnet or you want to know what hacking was like when security was nothing but an afterthought, Telehack is the game for you. The text-based hacking game is a simulation of a stylized combination of ARPANET and Usenet, circa 1985 to 1990, with a full multi-user universe and player interactions, including 26,600 hosts.
Before cloud computing, social media, and online shopping, there existed something called ARPANET, the precursor to the internet as we know it. When ARPANET expanded in the '80s, it became the wild west of computers. PCs were just becoming a thing and were no longer reserved for prestigious universities and national laboratories. And hacking didn't even become illegal until 1986 when the Federal Computer Fraud and Abuse Act became law.
After that, pop culture made hackers out to be super intelligent savants capable of doing anything with a computer, and movies like "WarGames" exacerbated the notion.
Hacking back then was far from what we'd be able to recognize today, involving modems and literally dialing up a computer. And hacks were much simpler, sometimes as simple as changing a file name. There's actually a fascinating Nova documentary that involves the story of a computer scientist discovering KGB hackers back in 1990. Watch it, and you'll see just how far we've come.
Thanks to the hard work of Forbin, who's named after the chief designer of a supercomputer in the "
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