The Prototype for Clubhouse Is 40 Years Old, and It Was Built by Phone Hackers

In the late 1970s, hackers forged a social media network using the dominant audio tech of the time — the telephone

Claire L. Evans
OneZero
Published in
9 min readApr 5, 2021

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A vintage landline phone
Photo: Busà Photography/Getty Images

POV: You’re a 14-year-old kid in Atlanta. It’s 1978, and the internet hasn’t been invented yet, so you mostly get your kicks over the phone…

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Claire L. Evans
OneZero

Into old technology and new biology. Author of Broad Band: The Untold Story of the Women Who Made the Internet (Penguin, 2018).