Subj : hacking away at the truth
To   : All
From : August Abolins
Date : Tue Apr 03 2001 05:10 am

Hacking away at the truth
By Kevin Self, Contributing Editor, Spectrum Magazine

For most, the term hacker brings to mind perpetrators of destructive exploits 
aimed at the Internet or computer systems. But Rich Haverlack of San Jose, 
Calif., reports an encounter with a more benign form of hacker. He discovered 
the reference in a freeware software package, the Gnu gcc freeware C++ 
compiler. In the source code, Haverlack found the comment "SCJ hacked this: 
6/28/68." Curious, he asked Technically Speaking for the origin of the term. 

The New Hacker's Dictionary, a collection of engineering and computer folklore, 
edited by Eric Raymond (MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass, 1991), contains two 
relevant, but contradictory, definitions. One describes hacker as: "Originally 
a quick job that produces what is needed, but not well." The other defines it 
as: "An incredibly good, and perhaps very time consuming piece of work that 
produces exactly what is needed." 

The search to find who first coined the phrase proved disappointing. The only 
etymological reference in The New Hacker's Dictionary mentions hacker as being 
originally applied to "someone who makes furniture with an axe." 

According to the Jargon File (http://www.jargon.org), an on-line predecessor of 
the Hacker's Dictionary, this term seems to have been first adopted as a badge 
of honor in the 1960s by the engineering and computing culture at the 
Massachusetts Institute of Technology Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and 
allied institutions. Although the Jargon file explains when the term appeared, 
Newton's Telecom Dictionary (Miller Freeman, New York, 1999) offers the best 
explanation of where it may have come from. There it states that a hacker is "a 
person who 'hacks' away at a computer until the program works." I don't know 
about most engineers, but that pretty well describes my approach to 
programming. 



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