Hacker Culture & Clothing

Hacker culture is a subculture of people who love the intellectual challenge of creatively overcoming software system limits to generate innovative and ingenious results. Hacking is the act of engaging with activities (such as programming or other media) in a playful and exploratory mood. The distinguishing quality of a hacker, however, is not the activities themselves (e.g. programming), but rather how they are carried out and whether they are engaging and meaningful. Pranks at MIT were done by students to demonstrate their technical aptitude and intelligence, and so the name "hacks" was coined. Early instances included pranks done by students to demonstrate their technical acumen and cunning. As a result, the hacker culture began in academia in the 1960s, centered on the Tech Model Railroad Club (TMRC) and the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Initially, hacking entailed infiltrating restricted locations in a devious manner without inflicting significant damage.

The term "hacker" comes from a seventeenth-century term for a "lusty laborer" who reaped fields with a dogged and violent hoe swing. Although the concept of "hacking" existed long before the term "hacker" was coined — with Lightning Ellsworth being the most known example - it was not a phrase that the first programmers used to describe themselves. Many of the original programmers had backgrounds in engineering or physics.

Hackers have a certain look; here's an example of Hacker T-Shirts and Clothing.

There was a growing understanding of a style of programming that was different from the cut-and-dry methods utilized at first, but the term "hacker" was not coined until the 1960s to designate skilled computer programmers. As a result, the common denominator among all hackers is that they love "...the intellectual challenge of creatively overcoming and evading constraints of programming systems and attempting to increase their capabilities." With this description in mind, it's easy to see where the word "hacker" and the "hacker" subculture got their negative connotations.

The academic hacker subculture has evolved over time to become more conscious, cohesive, and well-organized. The creation of the first Jargon File in 1973, the declaration of the GNU Manifesto in 1985, and the release of Eric Raymond's The Cathedral and the Bazaar in 1997 are among the most significant consciousness-raising events. Bill Joy, Donald Knuth, Dennis Ritchie, Alan Kay, Ken Thompson, Richard M. Stallman, Linus Torvalds, Larry Wall, and Guido van Rossum have all been recognized as shared culture heroes as a result of this.

The commoditization of computer and networking technology has hastened the concentration of academic hacker subculture, which has paralleled and partly been driven by it. Hackerdom was dispersed across multiple operating systems and networks in 1975; today, it is mostly a Unix and TCP/IP phenomena, centered around several operating systems based on free software and open-source software development.