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.’
There is another group of people who loudly call themselves hackers, but
aren't. These are people who get a kick out of breaking into computers
and phreaking the phone system. Real hackers call these people
‘crackers’ and want nothing to do with them. Real hackers object that
being able to break security doesn't make you a hacker any more than
being able to hotwire cars makes you an automotive engineer.
There are people who apply the true hacker attitude to other things,
like electronics or music — but in the rest of this article we will
focus the skills and attitudes of software hackers, and the traditions
of the shared culture that originated the term ‘hacker.'