Ask the Box

04 oct 06

"where did the word "Hacker" come from?"

wordorigins.com says it comes from "hacking bits off of something until it gives way", referring to chipping away at a problem, as it were.

in the movie "full metal jacket", gunnery sargeant hartman tells us that his orders are to "weed out all non-hackers who do not pack the gear to serve in (his) beloved corps". the actor (the same guy who now does "mail call" on the discovery channel -- r. lee emory -- thassit) apparently came up with the drill sargeant bits on his own, so we can presume that the use of "hacker" there is from the 70s.

so hartman means, in this case, that a hacker is someone who works hard at a job, goal or problem -- hacking at it until it's dead.

i also found something else:

Many telephone services have been curtailed because of so-called hackers, according to Prof. Carlton Tucker, administrator of the Institute phone system. [...] The hackers have accomplished such things as tying up all the tie-lines between Harvard and MIT, or making long-distance calls by charging them to a local radar installation. One method involved connecting the PDP-1 computer to the phone system to search the lines until a dial tone, indicating an outside line, was found. [...] Because of the "hacking," the majority of the MIT phones are "trapped." -- 1963 MIT student newspaper

here it seems like it's a metaphor of sorts, comparing the kids messing with the phones to something like termites; hacking little bits off of something to make it more broken.

so, this duality mirrors the duality of interpretations of the term "hacker".

this is so dumb that you'd really better not read any more about it, if you've never heard of it. so there's one camp that thinks "hacker" means "someone who does mischevious things with a computer", and another camp that thinks "hacker" means "someone who does smart things with a computer". there's a lengthy wikipedia article on it, which i guess shouldn't surprise me in the least.

of course, the mischevious things are also smart things. also, you can be a good-guy hacker if you snoop around security systems and break into stuff, as long as you alert the sysadmin of your target later and inform him of the weakness. i've also heard "white hat" hackers, "black hat", and even "gray hat".

i warned you how stupid this all is.

i don't think there was ever any sort of morality implicit in the term, and people who do smart things with computers are "hackers", whether they're launching cruise missiles or (i don't know) building $100 laptops for kids in zaire.