Search the Community

One of the most egregiously abused words in recent years has been the word hacker. The term hacker was coined in the 1950s at MIT's Tech Model Railroad Club (http://tmrc.mit.edu/hackers-ref.html). The term was used to describe members of the club who were are exceptionally clever at problem solving. When MIT got a computer, a subset of the model train club also became part of the computer club, and they brought the term hacker with them to describe programmers who were exceptionally clever and playful at solving problems using computers. The abuse of the term began in the mid-1980s with a misunderstanding by a journalist writing about computer security-breaking who interviewed the hackers at MIT's Artficial Intelligence Lab. The writer wrongly attributed the term hacker to computer security breaking, and published it in a paper. Then the mainstream media picked this up and it has perpetually misused the term ever since. The unfortunate consequence of this confusion is the inadvertent vilification of all people who have ever been given the honorific of hacker. This is why intelligent people are fighting back by using the word correctly. Even Mark Zuckerberg uses the word correctly, as he demonstrated in his “hacker way” manifesto to investors before his company went public. A clever and playful chef can be referred to as a “food hacker.” A clever and playful writer can be referred to as a “word hacker.” A computer security-breaker is generally neither clever nor playful (although there are exceptions), so it's incorect to call him a hacker. He is more properly referred to as a cracker (think “safe-crackers” who crack safes). To refer to crackers as hackers is to overgeneralize. It would be like calling all NASCAR drivers Asian just because you saw one or two Asian NASCAR drivers. Imagine a young racing fan seeing Dale Earnhardt and saying, Look, mama! It's an Asian!