Originally, a hacker was anybody who tinkered with any kind of system, mechanical or electrical, in order to better understand how it worked. Today
hackers are persons who create or modify
computer software, typically with the goal of using software in a manner not intended by the original
computer programmer.
The motives from hacking can vary widely, from simply curiosity to malice or illegal acts. Thus in
computing, a hacker is a person in one of several distinct, but somewhat overlapping, communities and
subcultures:
[1]Today, mainstream usage of "hacker" mostly refers to computer criminals, due to the mass media usage of the word since the 1980s. This includes
script kiddies, people breaking into computers using programs written by others, with very little knowledge about the way they work. This usage has become so predominant that a large segment of the general public is unaware that different meanings exist. While the use of the word by hobbyist hackers is acknowledged by all three kinds of hackers, and the computer security hackers accept all uses of the word, free software hackers consider the computer intrusion related usage incorrect, and try to disassociate the two by referring to security breakers as "crackers" (analogous to a safecracker).
Programmer subculture of hackers
The computer security use is contrasted by the different understanding of hacker as a person who follows a spirit of playful cleverness and loves programming. It is found in an originally academic movement unrelated to computer security and most visibly associated with
free software and
open source. It also has a
hacker ethic, based on the idea that writing software and sharing the result on a voluntary basis is a good idea, and that information should be free, but that it's not up to the hacker to make it free by breaking into private computer systems. Academic hackers disassociate from the mass media's pejorative use of the word 'hacker' referring to computer security, and usually prefer the term 'cracker' for that meaning.
In this hacker culture, a computer hacker is a person who enjoys designing software and building programs with a sense for aesthetics and playful cleverness. The term
hack in this sense can be traced back to "describe the elaborate college pranks that...students would regularly devise" (Levy, 1984 p. 10). To be considered a 'hack' was an honour among like-minded peers as "to qualify as a hack, the feat must be imbued with innovation, style and technical virtuosity" (Levy, 1984 p. 10)
According to
Eric S. Raymond,
[20] the Open source and Free Software hacker subculture developed in the 1960s among ‘academic hackers’
[21] working on early
minicomputers in
computer science environments in the United States. After 1969 it fused with the technical culture of the pioneers of the
Arpanet. The
PDP-10 machine AI at
MIT, which was running the
ITS operating system and was connected to the Arpanet, provided an early hacker meeting point. After 1980 the subculture coalesced with the culture of
Unix, and after 1987 with elements of the early
microcomputer hobbyists that themselves had connections to radio amateurs in the 1920s. Since the mid-1990s, it has been largely coincident with what is now called the
free software and
open source movement.
Within the academic hacker culture, the term hacker is also used for a programmer who reaches a goal by employing a series of modifications to extend existing
code or resources. In this sense, it can have a negative connotation of using
kludges to accomplish programming tasks that are ugly, inelegant, and inefficient. This derogatory form of the noun "
hack" is even used among users of the positive sense of "hacker" (some argue that it should not be, due to this negative meaning; others argue that some kludges can, for all their ugliness and imperfection, still have "hack value"). In a very universal sense, hacker also means someone who makes things work beyond perceived limits in a clever way in general.
[3] That is, people who apply the creative attitude of software hackers in fields other than computing. This includes even activities that predate computer hacking, for example
reality hackers.
[23] More recent examples of this usage are
wetware hackers and
media hackers. According to the
Jargon File the word hacker was used in a similar meaning among radio amateurs already in the 1950s.
[24]The culture sometimes uses jargon which is "incomprehensible to outsiders".
[25] Examples are 'losing' "when a piece of equipment is not working"
[25] and 'munged' "when a piece of equipment is ruined".
[25]