Dot Wordsworth

Mind your language | 16 July 2011

Hacking

issue 16 July 2011

Hacking

One useful quality of the term phone hacking is its imprecision. Generally it refers to gaining access to voicemail messages, often by guessing the default personal identification. This differs from tapping a telephone conversation. Tapping (a metaphor from tapping drink from a barrel) was already in use in 1869, with reference to electric telegraph wires.

Hacking, we think of as breaking into a computer system. But the Oxford English Dictionary suggests that hacker first meant ‘a person with an enthusiasm for programming or using computers as an end in itself’. The earliest example in print is from 1976. Seven years later, Byte magazine gave this account: ‘Hacker seems to have originated at MIT. The original German/Yiddish expression referred to someone so inept as to make furniture with an axe, but somehow the meaning has been twisted so that it now generally connotes someone obsessed with programming and computers but possessing a fair degree of skill and competence.’

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