WHO INVENTED IT AND WHY?

 

No one invented hacking—it’s human nature. For as long as technology has existed, there have been people who wanted to take it apart, reverse engineer it, and break it. Those broken stone tools left by cavemen? Probably right after some clever caveman invented a tool, some other assclown caveman started coming up with ways to break it. If anyone ever hands you an ax or a sledgehammer, you immediately start looking around for something to chop into pieces or smash.

The Global Positioning System satellite network grew out of a five-satellite navigation system launched by the U.S. Navy in 1960. It has since grown into a network of more than two dozen satellites, open to use by anyone in the world.

The utility of mobile telephones was established back in World War II, with the use of radiotelephones by troops in the field. Large-scale commercial deployment of gigantic radiotelephones was impractical. Routing traffic without interference was complex enough to give telecommunications engineers aneurysms, and the power requirements of the gadgets made them viciously heavy. Building a network of transmission towers was the most elegant practical solution—allowing mobile phones to be miniaturized microwave transmitters rather than gigantic shortwave broadcasters.

The first cellular network was built in Japan in the early eighties, by Nippon Telegraph and Telephone. If you do a Google image search, you can find thirty-year-old photos of Japanese businessmen hauling large, two-wheeled contraptions behind them. You might think those are rickshaws, but they’re not. They’re old cell phones.