I think the grandaddy of all hacks must be awarded to BBN, the little think tank in Cambridge, MA. BBN invented TCP/IP, and, in 1969, built the very first Darpa-net using this protocol. All the other hacks: GNU, BSD, Linux, Apache, Bind, Perl, and so on, needed this primordial soup called the internet to thrive and develop.
See http://www.isoc.org/internet/history/brief.html for a brief history of BBN's role in building the first internet.
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I think the grandaddy of all hacks must be awarded to BBN, the little think tank in Cambridge, MA. BBN invented TCP/IP, and, in 1969, built the very first Darpa-net using this protocol. All the other hacks: GNU, BSD, Linux, Apache, Bind, Perl, and so on, needed this primordial soup called the internet to thrive and develop.
See
http://www.isoc.org/internet/history/brief.html
for a brief history of BBN's role in building the first internet.