The ARPAnet was the first transcontinental, high-speed computer network.

The beginnings of the hacker culture as we know it today can be conveniently dated to 1961, the year MIT acquired the first PDP-1.

For the first time, individual hackers could afford to have home machines comparable in power and storage capacity to the minicomputers of ten years earlier - Unix engines capable of supporting a full development environment and talking to the Internet.

Thompson and Ritchie were among the first to realize that hardware and compiler technology had become good enough that an entire operating system could be written in C, and by 1978 the whole environment had been successfully ported to several machines of different types.

With Bluetooth, anyone can setup an eight-computer, ad hoc, peer-to-peer network.

Does Facebook behave like a tool in my hand, or a firehose designed to spew at me in accordance with other peoples' agendas? Concretely: can I write my own client to present a filtered view of the Facebook stream, or have other people do that for me?