How many times have you come across the term “hacker”? With that, was the term ever thought of in a positive light? More often than not, the word hacker is thought to refer to a computer criminal intent on circumventing network security protocols in order to gain unauthorized access to a computer terminal. Yet, this was not always how a hacker was thought of.
When the term hacker originally came to be it actually referred to a person similar to a hobbyist with a high level of expertise in solving problems and creating new technologies with computers. In the traditional sense, hackers were people like Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and Steve Wozniak, along with a myriad of other system designers and computer programmers from universities such as MIT, UC Berkeley CalTech and more.
Some notable achievements of computer hackers include the development of the World Wide Web and the Linux operating system, as well as the launching of the free software movement.
It is truly only a subgroup of this culture of computer technology enthusiasts that encompasses the criminal element. Yet, the media and general public have seemingly primarily embraced the negative meaning for the term hacker, much to the frustration of other hackers in general.
To help differentiate themselves from the unscrupulous minority of hackers among them, the term “cracker” was introduced to further identify those with unlawful intent. The term cracker in this sense is used in reference to a “safe cracker,” or someone attempting to break-in to a secure area and steal or otherwise alter the data inside.
It seems unlikely that the negative connotation associated with the word will ever change among the minds of most people, yet the fact remains that hackers aren’t all criminals. In fact, without hackers we wouldn’t have the technology we have today.