[Ads-l] Antedating of "Hacking" and "Hack"

[Shapiro, Fred]

I apologize if I am repeating below antedatings that I contributed in the past, I have too many postings relating to "hacker" for me to wade through them all.

In 2003 I posted a 1963 citation for "hacker_" that, although not precisely in a computing context, is obviously the same term and is treated as such in the OED, where it stands as their earliest example of the computer 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."

What I want to point out now is that the last sentence of the citation above is a substantial antedating for the unauthorized-access-to-computer OED sense of "hacking" ("hacking" 4.b., 1983) and implicitly a substantial antedating for the unauthorized-access-to-computer OED sense of the verb "hack" ("hack" 15.c., 1982 and 15.d., 1983).

Wikipedia cites me as believing that the 1963 citation above invalidates the common theory that "hacker" was originally a benign term, but I have since backed off on that belief because Garson O'Toole found a related benign usage in the 1959 Tech Model Railroad Club dictionary,

Fred Shapiro



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