The word hacker gets thrown around a lot. Most of us imagine some guy sitting in his parent’s basement with computers all around him breaking into bank systems or into government computers. That is in many cases how they are portrayed on TV and on the silver screen. Of course, just because you see it on TV doesn’t mean it is true. Nicely Done Sites will take a few minutes today to give you an understanding of exactly what a hacker is.

The term originally had nothing to do with computers. At MIT in the 1960s there were two types of students, those who attended class regularly and were always in the library, and those who slept instead of going to class and spent the night fooling around with a hobby. Guess which one was the hacker? As technology advanced and personal computers became popular and this particular hobby gained massive popularity with some students. The first hackers had an advanced understanding of computers, their hardware, networking, and how programming worked, which was is a foreign concept for many people even today.

Hackers were not all bad. Did you need someone to run your company’s network? Hire a system hacker. Need your password recovered? Get a password hacker and they’ll recover it. Need a new program to run something at your business? Hire a hacker. Hackers could most certainly get paid for their love of computers but it was originally not envisioned as their primary source of income, especially in the infancy of personal computing.

In today’s understanding the first part has not changed but what we know as a hacker means they are in some way related to a criminal enterprise. These are the people who break into computer systems to cause damage to them or steal information for their financial gain. They should be described as criminal hackers. A true hacker is someone who is curious about how something works and decided they are going to figure it out. Hacking is about knowledge and understanding in the end, nothing more.

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