The History of Hacking
The History of Hacking

When did hacking begin? Could you describe early cryptographers as hackers, breaking codes through analysis or mechanical systems? How about the cryptologists at Bletchley Park in the forties, who broke the systems used by the German Navy’s Enigma machine? It’s much, much easier to nail down when the use of ‘hackers’ and ‘hacking’ first came into common parlance. It first appeared, in this sense, at MIT in the mid-1950s, in minutes from a meeting of the Institute’s Tech Model Railroad Club. Within a few years, the student newspaper was reporting on ‘telephone hackers’; enthusiasts who used electronic tone generators and other colour-coded boxes to manipulate the analogue phone systems used by AT&T and other telecoms providers in the United States. With time, the word ‘hackers’ was also used when talking about the computer enthusiasts who were configuring MIT’s PDP-1 computer to program music and make free phone calls.

From MIT, the term spread out into the general computing lexicon. The Jargon File, a glossary for computer enthusiasts published in 1975, lists eight different definitions for hacker, ranging from "a person who enjoys exploring the details of programmable systems and how to stretch their capabilities" to "a malicious meddler who tries to discover sensitive information by poking around". Like most contemporary sources, The Jargon File considered the latter group to be ‘crackers’ as opposed to ‘hackers’, but in a way the last forty years have seen the meaning drift from the first definition to the second.

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the history of hacking