Reversing

the term “hacker” has evolved quite dramatically over the years as the public’s awareness of technology has increased and as a sensationalist mass media continues to color the public’s opinion of hackers. In the beginning, a hacker was someone who worked passionately for the sake of curiosity and exploration. There were hardware hackers who took it upon themselves to remove the covers from computers to optimize their design (early computers were built out of discrete components, so they could be modified in meaningful ways with simple tools), and there were software hackers who labored to make the most compact and elegant code, since computational resources were scarce and slow. There were hackers who explored the ins and outs of the phone system, and those who explored the roofs and tunnels of buildings of university campuses. Quite often, early hackers engaged in all of these activities. Hackers would share their findings or results (hacks) with each other freely, as their rewards were not financial, but came from satisfying their intellectual curiosity and from the enthusiasm of their peers. As a result, hackers tended to form into meritocratic groups where member- ship and advancement were based entirely upon a person’s ability to hack.

As technology evolved and computers became faster and more inte- grated, hackers found that the effort involved in hardware hacking was not worth the benefits. The interesting pieces of computers were quickly becoming buried deep within hermetically sealed ceramic packages, etched into silicon structures that were difficult to see even with a good microscope. A difficult hardware hack that might double the perfor- mance of a computer was made moot within months by Moore’s Law. On the other hand, software hacking was beginning to focus more on applications and less on algorithms or optimization. The compactness or elegance of a program was no longer directly important as memory and processor power became cheap and plentiful. Besides, compiler technol- ogy had also improved to the point where compiled code ran almost as fast as hand assembly. By the late 80’s, the term “hacker” had grown to imply someone who could write volumes of C code in their sleep and create brilliant applications overnight. The old hardware hackers were either converting to software hackers, or retreating to university labs and corporations that could afford to support their expensive hobbies.

The term “hacker” at that time was increasingly associated with people who cracked passwords and programs to gain access to machines and software that was otherwise off limits. Hollywood was partly responsible for this stereotype, with a slew of movies that portrayed teenagers bringing the world to the brink of nuclear annihilation with a few keystrokes, or closet geniuses creating artificially intelligent cyber- monsters in their basement. 4 Unfortunately, the hyberbole of these movie plots was lost on the general public, and this dark impression of hackers eventually became a dominant part of the hacker stereotype. The inaccuracy of this stereotype contributed to the creation of a term for hackers that focuses primarily upon cracking systems and programs “crackers.”