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Hacking

There is a community, a shared culture, of expert programmers and networking wizards that traces its history back through decades to the first time-sharing minicomputers and the earliest ARPAnet experiments.   The members of this culture originated the term ‘hacker'.   Hackers built the Internet. Hackers made the Unix operating system what it is today.   Hackers run Usenet.   Hackers make the World Wide Web work.   If you are part of this culture, if you have contributed to it and other people in it know who you are and call you a hacker, you're a hacker.   The hacker mind-set is not confined to this software-hacker culture.   There are people who apply the hacker attitude to other things, like electronics or music — actually, you can find it at the highest levels of any science or art. Software hackers recognize these kindred spirits elsewhere and may call them ‘hackers' too — and some claim that the hacker nature is really independent of the particular medium the hacker works in.   But in the rest of this document we will focus on the skills and attitudes of software hackers, and the traditions of the shared culture that originated the term ‘hacker'.
Hacking is a form of art for some people.   Hackers have formed groups and even have conferences together to share their knowledge and abilities.   Hackers started with gaining access to free telephone calls through different sources and learning more about the internal workings of the nation's phone system and radios in the mid 1950's.   When computers were introduced, hackers found a new communication system to learn more about (Jamsa, 2002 p 15).
This is generally of interest to teenagers and young adults.   Self-taught hackers are generally more accepted in their "society" more openly than educated hackers.   Some famous hackers have gone on to create computer systems, such as Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson creating UNIX operating system.   Other kinds of hackers, known as crackers, have found their ways into federal...