The 1970's were definitive years in the evolution of computer history and hacking. Guru hacker Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs founded Apple Corporation in 1977, born out of Wozniak's desire for his own personal computer. A democratic, open-source atmosphere characterized the Homebrew Computer Club and had always been present in the hacker community. Many members of the club had day jobs at firms like Hewlett-Packard, and Douglas Thomas notes, in Hacker Culture, that "hacking flourished in the computer labs of MIT, Cornell, and Harvard in the 1960s and 1970s. Most would go on to form Silicon Valley start-up companies" (xi). The 1970's were also a time of rebel experimentation, as demonstrated by the invention of "phone phreaking." John Draper, a.k.a. Cap'n Crunch, famously discovered that blowing the toy whistle found in Cap'n Crunch cereal boxes generated the 2600 hertz signal that authorized long-distance phone calls. According to Steven Levy, in his seminal book Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution, John Draper was also a member of the Homebrew Computer Club and "could easily be cajoled into yeilding the information about blue boxes to people who wanted to sell the boxes to people who wanted free calls--as Wozniak and Jobs had done door-to-door in the Berkeley dorms" (249). Bill Gates was arguably at the polar opposite end of this hacker spectrum and published his infamous "Open Letter to Hobbyists" admonishing computer "hobbyists" against stealing.

The experimental and carefree days of computer hacking were not destined to last. The commodification of the Apple Computer, as well as the formation of Microsoft Corporation in 1977, ensured that hardware and software would no longer be free for the taking. Capitalism had rather insidiously seeped its way into this hacker culture and forced most of the "true hackers" underground, where they have essentially remained for the past three decades. Pekka Imanen points out, "many hackers still distribute the results of their creativity openly, for others to use, test, and develop further" (46). But the fundamental image of hacking would change indelibly. The "true hackers" would come to represent a fairly small minority in the large underground community that developed in the 1980's and 90's. The Golden Age of Hacking was, regrettably, over.