etymology - What does the word "hacking" or "hacker" come from?



Is there a history behind the word "hacker" and "hacking"?


Could it have anything to do with "hashing" i.e. using a hash function?



Answer



Following the Jargon file,



[originally, someone who makes furniture with an axe]



That's essentially the gist: you don't produce quality software, you don't develop, you don't project. You take an idea or someone else's piece of software and hack it roughly with a software equivalent of an axe, to form something that fits your own idea of "mostly working" — sometimes the idea being quite far from what general populace would find acceptable. Bypass limitations imposed for business or political (or even safety) reasons, bind different completely mismatching systems together for some weird results, and generally do to computers things that can't be named by any professional terminology, but are quite equivalent to hacking some item with an axe to make it function as something entirely different (say, turning an armchair into a swing).


So, this is not a morph of some word or direct use of some obscure meaning of 'to hack', it's a metaphorical use of the very basic meaning — to cut or chop with repeated and irregular blows.


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