Growing up before the Internet was broadly available, the telephone network had a real magic to it and exploring it was really kind of addictive. These days most of us take communication completely for granted and are constantly communicating with people all over the world via SMS, IM, email, etc. often with no thought for how amazing it really is.

I read Exploding The Phone[1] last summer and I couldn't put it down. The first couple chapters are great for putting in perspective how amazing and novel this new network was to people vs. the way they communicated before. The rest of the book catalogs some great profiles of different (and some pretty famous) people who were drawn to tinkering with the system for various reasons. Some are outright criminals and some of them are like many of those in the HN crowd, just without such overwhelmingly accessible general computing, networking, and open-source software to build with.

I grew up just on the tail end of any sort of telephone hacking and exploration that was still going on and watched as BBSes were eventually made obsolete by the Internet. Reading the book was a really nostalgic experience and put me in touch with a lot of great memories while also allowing me to be thankful for the new opportunities to tinker and hack that are available to us these days, really at a much higher level.

[1] http://explodingthephone.com