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Was "hacking" as a lay person term ever the same as "hacking" as used by makers? If it was a shift, then yeah you're right. If it was a demonization as the publ
by ianhorn 6y ago
Was "hacking" as a lay person term ever the same as "hacking" as used by makers? If it was a shift, then yeah you're right. If it was a demonization as the public learned the term at all, then I'd say there's more reason to continue pushing to protect the term as a part of our community.
- caymanjim 6y agoUntil about the early 1980s, it exclusively referred to benign or prankish tinkering. It started to drift increasingly toward the prankish end, and then to the nefarious. Most early computer hacking—in the illegal sense—was also fairly benign (I wardialed my area and broke into the local supermarket computers to teach myself Unix and C). From the 90s on, its primary use (especially in the mainstream) has referred to illegal activity, whether gray- or black-hat. There was a concerted effort in the 80s and early 90s to use "cracking" for the illegal activities, but it never caught on.