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Comment by idiocrat | Hacker News Reader

Well, the original definition of the word "hacking". Hacking on keyboard to exploit keypress timings, key combinations and key buffer overflows.

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A well known reference, Eric Raymond's "jargon file" a.k.a. "hacker's dictionary" offers 9 definitions, much broader and seemingly older than keypress timings: http://catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/H/hack.html

The original definition of "hacking" was "hacking code together". Move fast and break things. There are a lot of us OG and TNG hackers here. It's kind of the SV spirit.

"Cracker" is the term used commonly - as in "crack the nut"; i.e. gain access to systems / break copy protection etc. Then you have the phone guys, the phreakers, whistling for free calls.

Hacking (in the modern 'computer' sense) has been used since at least the late 50s and early 60s and used to mean experimenting with any technical machine or system. It wasn't until the 70s when it primarily became connected with programming.

> original definition of "hacking" was "hacking code together"

Hmm. Right spirit but not so much "hacking code together" going on at MIT's Tech Model Railroad Club in 1958.

"a project undertaken or a product built not solely to fulfill some constructive goal but with some wild pleasure taken in mere involvement, was called a `hack'".

(Steven Levy, "Hackers").

The Tech Model Railroad Club (TMRC) Dictionary [1], June 1959, by Peter R. Samson defines (comments in italics by PRS, 2005):

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

I saw this as a term for an unconventional or unorthodox application of technology, typically deprecated for engineering reasons. There was no specific suggestion of malicious intent (or of benevolence, either). Indeed, the era of this dictionary saw some "good hacks:" using a room-sized computer to play music, for instance; or, some would say, writing the dictionary itself.

  HACKER: one who hacks, or makes them.

A hacker avoids the standard solution. The hack is the basic concept; the hacker is defined in terms of it.

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[1] "An Abridged Dictionary of the TMRC Language", 1959: http://www.gricer.com/tmrc/dictionary1959.html

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