Antedating of "Hacker"
Fred Shapiro
fred.shapiro at YALE.EDU
Fri Jun 13 16:36:12 UTC 2003
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:
1963 _The Tech_ (MIT student newspaper) 20 Nov. 1 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."
***
Note that the last sentence above contains what is essentially a 20-year
antedating of sense 5.b. of hack, v.2 in the HDAS. Also, this citation
makes it clear that the common theory that "hacker" originally was a
benign term and the malicious connotations of the word were a later
perversion is untrue. The malicious connotations of the word were present
from its origins in MIT slang.
Fred Shapiro
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
Fred R. Shapiro Editor
Associate Librarian for Collections and YALE DICTIONARY OF QUOTATIONS
Access and Lecturer in Legal Research Yale University Press,
Yale Law School forthcoming
e-mail: fred.shapiro at yale.edu http://quotationdictionary.com
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
More information about the Ads-l
mailing list