Originally a hacker was a poor golfer, someone who took too many stokes/hacks at the ball. In the early days of computing when data I/O was time consuming (ie punchcards) a hacker was someone who took too many tries to get their code to work. Eventually this came to mean anyone who spent a lot of time in front of a computer not just poor programmers. Sometime later some misguided sole mistakenly associated hackers with "hacking into" computer systems, and the media misnomer was born. Roger
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