antedate hacker (UNCLASSIFIED)

[Wilson Gray]

A no-longer-dateable hapax (after 1972, but before the present):

One time, in the linguistics dept. at M.I.T., a new graduate student
who had earned an SB in computer science at M.I.T., referred to
himself as a "computer-hack" in the course of answering a question WRT
his background. I remember this only because of the fact that I, much
later than 1972, became acquainted with the term, "computer-hacker,"
and assumed, *very* wrongly, as has been conclusively shown in these
pages, IMO, that "hacker" was the later term.

Sadly, this student, who grew up to become a prof. of linguistics at
my alma mater, UC Davis, died at an extremely-young age. Otherwise, I
could merely e-mail him about this. Perhaps I misheard or something.

BTW, the publication, How To Get Around M.I.T., available to the
general public in the campus bookstore, the M.I.T. Coop [kuwp],
contains a lexicon of M.I.T. slang, if anyone cares. Or such was the
case about 35 or so years ago.

Time flies, irrespective of one's having of fun.

-Wilson

On Wed, Jul 28, 2010 at 5:24 PM, Shapiro, Fred <fred.shapiro at yale.edu> wrote:
> ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       "Shapiro, Fred" <fred.shapiro at YALE.EDU>
> Subject:      Re: antedate hacker (UNCLASSIFIED)
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> In 2003 I posted to this list serve a 1963 citation for _hacker_ that, although not precisely in a computing context, is 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."
>
> Fred Shapiro
>
>
>
> ________________________________________
> From: American Dialect Society [ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU] On Behalf Of Mullins, Bill AMRDEC [Bill.Mullins at US.ARMY.MIL]
> Sent: Wednesday, July 28, 2010 5:07 PM
> To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
> Subject: antedate hacker (UNCLASSIFIED)
>
> Classification: UNCLASSIFIED
> Caveats: NONE
>
> Someone has transcribed an interesting _Rolling Stone_ article, that may
> offer some hacker/computer antedates:
>
> http://wheels.org/spacewar/stone/rolling_stone.html
>
> There are some obvious typos, so any use of this should be checked
> against hard copy.  Or the entire magazine has been digitized and is
> available on CD-ROM (for only $25 or so at the local Barnes & Noble).
>
> [All cites in this post are from the above article]
>
> OED has two computer-related senses for hacker (n) -- 1976 and 1983.
>
> "Spacewar" by Stewart Brand.  _Rolling Stone_ Dec 7 1972 (p# unknown).
> "The hackers are the technicians of this science - "It's a term of
> derision and also the ultimate compliment." They are the ones who
> translate human demands into code that the machines can understand and
> act on."
>
> OED has hack (n) 7.a. 1983
> [same article]
> "Meanwhile, your photographer Annie, was tugged all over the lab to see
> the hand-eye rig, the number half-tone printer, various spectacular
> geometric display hacks, computer music programs, the color video image
> maker"
> [note: this word is probably related to, and probably has origins in,
> the MIT student term "hack" meaning "an elegant solution to a technical
> problem"]
>
> up in the sense of a computer system being "up" (online, available for
> work) goes back to 1547 in the OED (adv2 13.b.), but the first computer
> related cite in this sense is 1978.
>
> "His major project has been getting the ARPA Network up. ("Up" around
> computers means working, the opposite of "down" or crashed.) "
> [the corresponding sense of "down" goes back to 1965 in the OED (down
> adv 17.b.), so this sense of "up" can likely be antedated still
> further.]
>
> "Net" as a network is back to 1970 in the OED (n1 7.)  Another early
> cite:
> "At present some 20 major computer centers are linked on the
> two-year-old ARPA Net. Traffic on the Net has been very slow, due to
> delays and difficulties of translation between different computers and
> divergent projects. "
>
> This article also makes eerily accurate predictions of the
> decline/demise of print newspapers and record stores.
> Classification: UNCLASSIFIED
> Caveats: NONE
>
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>
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>



--
-Wilson
–––
All say, "How hard it is that we have to die!"––a strange complaint to
come from the mouths of people who have had to live.
–Mark Twain

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