Origins of hacking

American hams in the mid-1950s used the term “hacking” as an expression for the most imaginative adaptations of their devices, which served to improve their performance.

In the late 1950s, hacking was also from the model railroad club at MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), more precisely, the TMRC (Tech Model Railroad Club of MIT), which also made reference to adjusting their electronic and mechanical devices. The word hack was initially in the context of technology-brushing or corresponded to a word for a particularly clever or daring deed.

A student at MIT devised a clever trick. The use of the word hack has shifted to technology that is needed to perform the trick, and later became a clever technical solution generally used, without necessarily relating to the computer.

Hacker related to computer programming at MIT occuring first in the early 1960s in connection with the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (MIT). Together with the TMRC hackers and colleagues from other U.S academic institutions like Stanford, Berkeley and Carnegie Mellon, belonged to the origins of the academic hacker culture, which later emerged as the free software and open-source movement.

As members of the model railroad clubs, started to work with a DEC PDP-1 computer, it was now also slang in written form transmitted to the computer. In digital form, the first known use of the word, hackers became the issue of the student newspaper The Tech. Registered in November 1963 the technical school at MIT was at first only open to people who played around with the technology of the telephone networks.

The journalist Steven Levy describes in his book “Hackers – Heroes of the Computer Revolution”, another of the hacker subcultures that arose in the 1970s in the San Francisco area, on the west coast of the United States.

The Homebrew Computer Club had an interest in technological people who were enthusiastic about the idea of a personal computer, an idea that was dismissed by the then prevailing industry as absurd. Starting with the idea of computers available for all people and even for home use, practical projects and developments through to the birth of an entirely new industry in Silicon Valley.

They have the development of personal computer (microcomputer, and later home computers). The personal computer triggered a huge growth from the hacker community, with popular computer kits promoting the tradition of the hacker to really understand the technology.

One of the first programs that were developed on the PDP-1 at MIT, offered an interface to the telephone system that would allow unauthorized access to the exchanges. The manipulation of a telephone switching system, however, belonged to another sub-culture known as phreaking, whose supporters they Phreak (also called Phreaker).

Although there was considerable overlap in the early days of the academic hacker culture to the practices of phreaking, both subcultures were clearly distinguishable from each other: while in the academic hacker culture, overcoming barriers of safety played a minor role proving necessary to the adherents of phreaking culture to the central point of their activities.

The main difference between the original three subcultures is their mostly separate historical origin and development, which is why they are distinguished by their own distinct view of the hacker concept, tradition and folklore.

To a large extent mutually matching positions are mainly found between the academic hacker culture and the culture of phreaking and their descendants, of whom want the academic hacker culture seen as distant, like the subculture of software crackers.