Tech (1882), Techie (1963)

[Fred Shapiro]

On Wed, 23 Feb 2005, Benjamin Zimmer wrote:

> As far as I know, the only long-standing campus newspaper other than the
> Harvard Crimson that has digitized its archive is MIT's paper, "The Tech",
> dating back to 1881: <http://www-tech.mit.edu/archives/>.

I used The Tech archives in 2003 to antedate the terms "hacker" and
"hack."  I repeat the posting below:


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


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