First Recorded Usage of "Hacker" (2008) | Hacker News Reader

First Recorded Usage of "Hacker" (2008)

duartes.org

46 pointsfalava8 comments

What about the 1959 TMRC Dictionary? [1]

  > 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.

(edit: The article claims that the 1963 usage was the "first", however on reading the linked listserv.linguist.org posting by Fred Shapiro, it appears that it's the first citation that uses "hacker" with negative connotations.)

[1] http://www.gricer.com/tmrc/dictionary1959.html [2] http://listserv.linguistlist.org/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind0306B&L=ad...

Here's what Shapiro says:

"The word "hacker" in its well-known computing sense has a first citation of 1971 (contributed by me) in the Historical Dictionary of American Slang. Here is an earlier citation, not precisely in a computing context but obviously the same term"

I interpret that as the only condition on the citation being "the well-known computing sense." He's definitely not saying "with negative connotations."

Even the phreaking stuff from the Tech is "not precisely in a computing context". I don't think the TMRC citation qualifies here, it's a very specific and different context (check some of its sibling entries), even if it shares some of that early magical MIT spirit.

But even then, the TMRC does also say:

"HACK: 1) something done without constructive end"

So, all in all, even taking the TMRC into account I think the origin of the word was already ambiguous, which it is. I think the small dash of mischievousness adds to the flavor of hacking.

The Google Ngrams graph for "hacker" may be of some interest: https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=hacker&year_st...

Growing up before the Internet was broadly available, the telephone network had a real magic to it and exploring it was really kind of addictive. These days most of us take communication completely for granted and are constantly communicating with people all over the world via SMS, IM, email, etc. often with no thought for how amazing it really is.

I read Exploding The Phone[1] last summer and I couldn't put it down. The first couple chapters are great for putting in perspective how amazing and novel this new network was to people vs. the way they communicated before. The rest of the book catalogs some great profiles of different (and some pretty famous) people who were drawn to tinkering with the system for various reasons. Some are outright criminals and some of them are like many of those in the HN crowd, just without such overwhelmingly accessible general computing, networking, and open-source software to build with.

I grew up just on the tail end of any sort of telephone hacking and exploration that was still going on and watched as BBSes were eventually made obsolete by the Internet. Reading the book was a really nostalgic experience and put me in touch with a lot of great memories while also allowing me to be thankful for the new opportunities to tinker and hack that are available to us these days, really at a much higher level.

[1] http://explodingthephone.com

Steven Levy's "Hackers" [1] is a great book, which begins at MIT at the middle of the last century, with the kids who loved model trains, and going out and messing with traffic lights around Boston.

1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hackers:_Heroes_of_the_Computer...

The Origins of The Hacking Jacket

http://www.ahume.co.uk/blog/index.php/the-origins-of-the-hac...

Is that MIT article real? It's almost too good to be true.

You can see a scanned version of The Tech from November 20, 1963 in the paper's archives at http://tech.mit.edu/V83/PDF/V83-N24.pdf.

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