Then there was the time I was playing Uplink on the laptop in bed one night and the wife asked what I was doing.
I was on the screen setting up bounces on proxy servers on the global map. Looks just like it does on TV and in the movies.
What else was I to say? 
The article in question is widely cited and the source has a pronounced reputation. I couldn’t have a greater belief in the seriousness of that essay.
It matters because it leaves us without a clear, succinct way to refer to people who create elegant and complicated code or hardware, and it maligns people who are doing creative and constructive work. Hacking has absolutely bupkus to do with breaching account security, or gaining access to accounts without consent (although some of the skills associated with hacking may be used for cracking).
It’s no different than if the press started referring to people who bomb buildings as “architects”, or to people who sabotage radio and television stations as “broadcasters”.
I’ve been around long enough to remember the original meaning of “hacker” with respect to computers. A hacker was a programmer who had no knowledge or discipline about software- someone who would flail away at a piece of code until it more-or-less worked. It was not a complimentary term.
The term “hack” originally meant a quick job that works, but not well. The term “hacker”, on the other hand originally meant
That’s not how people used it when I started getting involved with computers in the early seventies. It was used more like the term is used in golf: as a derogatory term for someone who doesn’t know what he’s doing. I remember when I got my first job after college in 1981, the head engineer for my company was dismayed when someone called him a hacker. I remember being surprised when people started using the term as a source of pride, which I think started happening in the mid-eighties.
In any case, words change meaning through usage, and there’s little anyone can do about it. It often happens when the jargon of an inside group becomes popularized. I wonder whether carnival performers get upset about what’s happened to the word “geek.”
All three meanings are widely used in software development and security. I thought everyone stopped being pedantic about it back when Slashdot was in fashion.
Sure you could, if you were super-gullible.
The term was used as source of pride back in the 60s, and possibly even used in a similar sense by ham radio and electronic tinkerers in the mid 50s. The mid 80s was a time when there seemed to be an explosion of people claiming to be hackers but without the drive or skills (what would later be called wannabees).
My guess is that it was written with tongue firmly interfaced with cheek, but taken seriously by paranoid oldsters.
btw, I’m hacking my life by shutting this laptop for the night.
Nope, the term was often a source of pride – for example, you might be called an ace Lisp hacker if you were really good at the language. A “hack” on the other hand, was a bit of clever but dubious programming.
I doubt that. The Florida legislature was explicitly targeting “hackers” when it passed the Computer Crimes Act (the first computer-specific criminal legislation) in 1977.
Really? Because the text is on-line and I can’t find the term “hackers” in it.
I have a copy of “The New Hacker’s Dictionary” by Guy Steele and in 1991, they were still fighting the good fight, trying to deprecate the use of “hacker” for malicious computer activities and substitute “cracker” instead. Obviously they lost the battle, but it’s pretty clear that at least at MIT (which is all that counts :-), hacker retained its original meaning at least into the 80’s.
Not in the legislative findings (F.S. 815.02), but in the committee reports and floor debate. I requested a copy of the full legislative record from the Florida Senate archives because I was writing a paper about the statute.
ETA: you can find a copy of the Senate report for the CFAA, the federal eqivalent, online, which says much the same thing. It’s in 1986 U.S.C.C.A.N. 2479 at 2488.
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how about a nice game of chess?
No. Global thermonuclear war.
A “hack” to me does not necessarily mean a clever piece of programming but writing some code that gets the job done while not doing the job properly. For example, putting some business rules in the database when all business rules should be in a services layer.
They lost that battle a lo-o-o-o-o-ong time ago. When I was first programming in 1980, “hacker” was the old common term used by business programmers (application, systems tech, and security types), to refer to people trying to hack their way into the system with malicious intent.
Ivory tower types who are desperate to keep the word for themselves remind me, a bit, of the Evangelical Christians who bristle at the phrase “Fundamentalist Muslims” on the grounds that The Fundamentals were an explicitly Christian set of books.
The word has flown, (often before the birth of some of its more rigid adherents), and the rest of us are not going to give it back.
Click the link and you won’t have to guess. Apparently that was the first article penned by Adequacy.org which achieved internet notoriety. For more on Adequacy’s modus operandi see The Adequacy Style Troll (AST): A Brief Refresher.