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

[dave@wilton.net]

I have a use of the verb "to hack" from 5 April 1955 in the minutes of MIT's Tech Model Railroad Club. It's not in the sense of accessing a computer system, but rather means " work on or play with." Given the MIT connection, it is clearly a precursor to that sense.
 
Onorato, Joseph and Mark Schupack, Tech Model Railroad Club of M.I.T.: The First Fifty Years (Cambridge, MA, 2002), 66.
 
"Mr. Eccles requests that anyone working or hacking on the electrical system turn the power off to avoid fuse blowing."
 
I don't know if I still have a copy of the book on the railroad club. If I do, it's packed up in a box in the basement.
 
I also have the 20 Nov 1963 use, but I may have gotten tipped off to that by Fred. I don't recall.
 
[ https://www.wordorigins.org/big-list-entries/hacker ]( https://www.wordorigins.org/big-list-entries/hacker ) 
 
-----Original Message-----
From: "Shapiro, Fred" <fred.shapiro at YALE.EDU>
Sent: Sunday, February 2, 2025 10:07am
To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
Subject: [ADS-L] Antedating of "Hacking" and "Hack"



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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