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Word "hacker" has become very vague lately, but the definition used 10 years ago, did not include "people who build robots, or the people who built the chips th
by ild 11y ago
Word "hacker" has become very vague lately, but the definition used 10 years ago, did not include "people who build robots, or the people who built the chips that Unix runs on". Those were called Electric Engineers AFAIR. "Hacker" literally meant a guy involved with cybersecurity and therefore deeply into OS internals. Then the word went through transformation and today may easily mean "an Arduino hacker who made an automated bird feeder", "a RoR hacker who made a homepage with it etc.".
- luso_brazilian 11y agoI believe your view of the definition 10 years ago is the incorrect one. Paraphrasing he Djikstra (misatributed quote) [1] hacking is no more about computer security hacking than astronomy is about telescopes. AS can be seen in the Jargon File ("a collection of slang terms used by various subcultures of computer hackers" [2]) the definition for hacker "seems to have been first adopted as a badge in the 1960s" and "it was used in a sense close to this entry's by teenage radio hams and electronics tinkerers in the mid-1950s." [3] In the past years hacking (thanks to the connotation given by the mass media) became synonymous with "miscelaneous computer mischief, sometimes malicious and often related to computer network security" but that's a very recent phenomenon. [1] https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Computer_science#Disputed https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Computer_science#Disputed [2] http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/introduction.html http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/introduction.html [3] http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/H/hacker.html http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/H/hacker.html
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]