The word hacker began as MIT slang for pointless, playful tinkering
To most people a hacker breaks into computers. To many programmers it is a badge of honour for clever tinkering. Both meanings trace back to students at MIT around 1959, when model railway enthusiasts used the word for gleefully useless tinkering, and within four years the word had already acquired a darker edge.
The verb hack is Old English and meant to cut with repeated blows, so hackers existed in a very physical sense for centuries before computers. The modern use grew out of student slang at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In 1959 the first glossary of the Tech Model Railroad Club defined a hack as a project with no constructive aim, and a hacker as the person pursuing it, and before computers took over, the label covered pranks and playful fiddling with machinery.
The negative sense surfaced almost at once. In 1963 MIT's student newspaper, The Tech, used the phrase telephone hackers for students who disrupted phone service and placed unauthorised long-distance calls. Legal scholar Fred R. Shapiro has documented both the harmless tinkering and the illicit interference in early MIT usage.
Personal computers and modems carried hacker culture out of university labs in the 1970s and 1980s. High-profile break-ins and arrests, new computer-crime laws and the 1983 film WarGames pushed public usage towards unauthorised access, which is now the commonest dictionary meaning. Later, security consulting, conferences, coordinated disclosure of vulnerabilities and bug bounty programmes gave some hackers respectable careers; what separates a professional penetration tester from an intruder is permission and agreed limits.
Hacker communities are varied: free-software programmers, hardware tinkerers, phone phreakers, the computer underground, security specialists and hacktivists. Many prize skill, experimentation, sharing information and the respect of peers, and they argue about who may legitimately claim the name. Meanwhile the positive sense of a hack as an inventive fix has escaped computing entirely, in words such as hackathon, biohacking, growth hacking and life hack.
Source: Hacker
