First Recorded Usage of “Hacker” (2008) | Hacker News Reader

First Recorded Usage of “Hacker” (2008)

manybutfinite.com

73 pointsdang18 comments

Open articleView on HN

Some of the links have since rotted. Here's Fred Shapiro's email reporting the discovery:

https://web.archive.org/web/20051023131548/http://listserv.l...

And here's the (unrelated) "paper with a most hilarious and offensive name":

https://web.archive.org/web/20080903094328/http://findarticl...

There are also the Tech Model Railroad Club dictionaries of 1959 and 1960, which include "hacker":

http://www.gricer.com/tmrc/tmrc-dictionary-intro.html

Why does this not count as an earlier recorded usage? Is it because those dates have not been independently verified?

I emailed Fred Shapiro, the editor of the authoritative Yale Book of Quotations, to ask him about the TMRC dictionaries. He replied:

"I am familiar with the 1959 occurrence of "hacker," which has been confirmed. The problem with it is not that it is unconfirmed, but rather that it is a general usage not a computer usage. For that matter, the 1963 usage that I discovered is also not specific to computers, although I believe that phone-hacking is pretty much the same phenomenon as computer-hacking. The earliest usage I am aware of that is specific to computers is dated 1968.

But the real issue here is whether "hacker" originally had malicious or benign connotations. Since the general usage of "hacker" in MIT culture is clearly the ancestor of the computer usage, as soon as the 1959 citation was discovered I conceded that I was probably wrong about "hacker" originally having malicious connotations.

Fred Shapiro, MIT Class of 1974"

In the late 1960's, in Johannesburg, my friends and I discovered a "hack" for payphones. In those days and at that place, people paid per-phone-call, so finding a way to call for free was great for a bunch of crazy teen-agers. What we discovered was that you could use a grounded wire to fool the phone company into thinking a coin was dropped into the coin slot. When the recording said "please deposit ..." we would scratch the wire to a metal part of the mouth piece. (There was a small hole in the plastic of the mic for some reason - that is what we used). The "ground" was the metal cage on the overhead light. For some reason, the scratch produced simulated the signal of a coin drop. Many silly school-boy prank calls ensued. I hang my head in shame.

As dang points out in this thread, The Tech Model Railroad Club was formed in 1946[1]. The TMRC dictionary was first written in 1959.

http://www.gricer.com/tmrc/dictionary1959.html

The TMRC, which is generally cited as one of the origin points of MIT hacking culture, defines the following terms:

  HACK:
  1) something done without constructive end;
  2) a project under-taken on bad self-advice;
  3) an entropy booster;
  4) to produce, or attempt to produce, a hack.

  HACKER: one who hacks, or makes them.

This predates the news article by 4 years.

Also, you can't be a 'so-called hacker' unless people are already using the term.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tech_Model_Railroad_Club

No doubt that's what 'so-called hacker' was meant to convey, but the issue in later decades has been to look for recorded usages.

Since Shapiro now agrees, it seems like the TMRC non-malicious usage of "hacker" has won.

Within the realm of blackhat or malicious hacking, many people may also make a distinction between cheating a corporation out of small amounts of money (phone phreaking, cable boxes) and doing things that directly hurt private individuals for the sake of profit. So even if the earliest uses of “hacking” referred to something illegal, it might not really refer to the same thing as blackhat hacking today.

In Boston's late 50s slang, a "hacker" was someone that tuned muscle cars/hot rods. It's no surprise that the earliest written occurrence of "hacker", in the modern sense, comes from Cambridge.

A Google Books search for "hacker" pre-1963 ( https://www.google.com/search?q=hacker&source=lnt&tbs=cdr%3A... ) shows that it was also used for taxi cab drivers, eg, https://books.google.com/books?id=puENBZpcOmoC&q=hacker&dq=h... .

Woah, I knew illegal cab driving in Baltimore was called “hacking” but never considered the term had old roots. Turns out it all comes from the use of Hackney horses in the 19th century. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegal_taxicab_operation

I think we're going to see this pushed backward. An example of deep roots, 'bus' as in data bus, goes back to bus-bars which is electrical engineering from the pre-WWII date. There were no data busses in the 1930s but bus-bar was well understood.

For analogous reasons I therefore believe we'll see "hacker" roots going back a lot further.

Well, there are hacksaws.

> The journal quotes George N. Clemson as follows:

"In 1884 we built a sawing machine for testing hack saws, in which we discovered that the blades we produced would cut twelve pieces of one-inch iron before re-sharpening was necessary. During the year 1886 we experimented with fifty-two kinds of hack saws."

And hack is an old German/Dutch word.

Maybe it's a stretch. But hacksaws are one of my favorite tools.

Totally off-topic, but hacksaws are also a favorite tool of mine. There is something totally fascinating to me about cutting through metal - likely because metal is typically strong and difficult to break. I have very fond memories of hacking things in my grandfather's shed when I was young, and to this day I really enjoy hacking through a drywall nail when doing home improvement tasks.

>fond memories of hacking things //

I think the phrase you're looking for is "sawing things". If you talk about using a chain saw you don't "chain a tree", you still "saw a tree". Your usage seems contrived.

Hmm. I see your point, that it does seem like I was contriving to use the term "hack" in a situation that might lend it to a (non-nefarious) precursor of the "hacking" term in the topic at hand. But in this case it was actually unintentional, and what I had in my head was more of "hacking things to pieces" as a boy who's found his way into his grandfather's shed is likely to do.

I'm sure that's how hacking came to be used for modifying cars, for example. And it's truly a specific example of the ad hoc, quick-and-dirty approach that we call computer hacking.

Long before personal computers, I was hacking on stuff. Explosives, rockets, guns, and whatever else my tween mind got curious about. I honestly don't remember when I heard the term "hacker". But in the early 60s, I was aware of Caltech ratfuckers vs MIT hackers.

And I'm pretty sure that I'd heard the term "hacker" in the NYC area. But not specifically about computers. More about mechanical stuff. And not about telephones either. That was phreaking. Phracking came later.

Both meanings can be expressed using a phrasal verb. To "hack into" something has the blackhat meaning, whereas to "hack at" or "hack up" something has the whitehat meaning. But to "hack" something, without the particle, only sounds right in the blackhat sense, e.g. "the hack the NSA" or "the hack a website". So I guess the noun "hacker" has the default sense someone who hacks into things/places.

In 80s California, the word hacker was very often "solving problems that are technically hard, doing it fast or otherwise in an exceptional way, and no concerns about legality" .. please recall that obvious crime like thieving, is only one end of lots of other possibilities, such as disregarding egregious and/or exaggerated legal claims by profit-oriented entities, copy protection, right to alter a consumer product, right to discuss publicly, etc

Yes, I very much agree with your assessment of the word Hacker in that place, around that time, I was there from '64-'92.

Previous to the negative connotations of the now common usage regarding Hacking computers, I took my first High School electronics class in 1969 in Sunnyvale, the word Hacker was already in use then.

Upon reflection though, it may be the word was used in the Ham Radio Community first, because my instructor, Robert Thorson, was also a Ham Radio Operator, and quite a cool cat.

As an arcane aside, my great Uncle, who like many of his generation (B. 1895), was a Maker, and built things in his home workshop (yes, he had a ubiquitous Shop Smith Multi-Tool and unlike most, he used the crap out of it).

When I was a child, about 1959 or '60, I asked him where he got a pull toy that he let me play with, and he told me it was "just something I hacked together out of scrap".

So he then had to explain to me what that meant, and he said it had to do with making things out of other things, and it often involved a hacksaw.

I was so excited about learning that word (hacksaws are cool to 6 years olds!) that I ran inside my Aunts house and told my parents.

It influenced me for life, and I've been hacking things together for decades now, just not computer code.

I was saddened that the "popular press" poisoned the word, it was very descriptive for what it was.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com