Computers are very flexible machines constrained by software to operate in very specific ways. Hackers are individuals who come up with novel, complex, simple or elegant ways of writing new software that restates or replaces the existing constraints thereby exposing either some new functionality or some of the original flexibility of the underlying machine.
Why a person might want to do so varies; thus in computing, a hacker is a person in one of several distinct (but not completely disjoint) communities and subcultures:
* A community of enthusiast computer programmers and systems designers, originated in the 1960s around the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)'s Tech Model Railroad Club (TMRC) and MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. This community is notable for launching the free software movement. The World Wide Web and the Internet itself are also hacker artifacts. The Request for Comments RFC 1392 amplifies this meaning as "[a] person who delights in having an intimate understanding of the internal workings of a system, computers and computer networks in particular." See Hacker (programmer subculture).
* People committed to circumvention of computer security; also known as crackers. This primarily concerns unauthorized remote computer break-ins via a communication networks such as the Internet (Black hats), but also includes those who debug or fix security problems (White hats), and the morally ambiguous Grey hats. See Hacker (computer security).
* The hobbyist home computing community, focusing on hardware in the late 1970s (e.g. the Homebrew Computer Club) and on software (computer games, software cracking, the demoscene) in the 1980s/1990s. The community included Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak and Bill Gates and created the personal computing industry. See Hacker (hobbyist).
Today, mainstream usage mostly refers to computer criminals, due to the mass media usage of the word since the 1980s. This includes script kiddies, people breaking into computers using programs written by others, with very little knowledge about the way they work. This usage has become so predominant that a large segment of the general public is unaware that different meanings exist. While the use of the word by hobbyist hackers is acknowledged by all three kinds of hackers, and the computer security hackers accept all uses of the word, free software hackers consider the computer intrusion related usage incorrect, and try to disassociate the two by referring to security breakers as "crackers" (analogous to a safecracker).
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