Hacking

Hack is a term in the slang of the technology culture which has come into existence over the past few decades. As a noun, it has a number of related meanings. As a verb, it means creating or participating in a hack.

All of the modern meanings seem to be rooted in its widespread use as slang throughout the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), starting in the 1960s. There, the original meaning of "hack" was an elaborate and flamboyant student prank; it was used with hacker, meaning "one who perpetrates a hack". Past MIT hacks include:

* Covering the university's signature "Great Dome" (which seems to be something of a magnet for hacks) with tin foil

* Putting a fake (but convincing) MIT Campus Police cruiser on the Dome

* Decorating the Dome as R2-D2

* Hiding the university president's office by covering its entrance with a fake bulletin board

* Inflating a huge balloon on the playing field during a Harvard-Yale football game

* Turning the MIT Dome into a giant baseball with a Red-Sox logo after the Red-Sox won the World Series

* Making an image of Trogdor out of post-it notes

Over time, the meaning of the word there was expanded, perhaps through contact with the amateur radio community. It came to mean either a kludge, or the opposite of a kludge, as in a clever or elegant solution to a difficult problem. In the term "hack value" it also acquired a meaning of anything that was simultaneously fun and clever.

The initial hacker community at MIT, particularly those associated with the Tech Model Railroad Club, applied this pre-existing local slang to computer programming, producing the variant which first came into common use outside MIT. A "hack" now meant a clever or quick fix to a computer program problem, as in "That hack you made last night to the editor is working well". A hacker came into the lexicon as meaning one who hacks, using this definition. The surface implication (which might be a modest mocking and play on the literary definition) was a casual attempt to fix the problem, but the deeper meaning was something more clever and thus impressive.

It was used especially among