Hacker culture is the shared tradition of the people who, in the original and self-applied sense, call themselves hackers. The Jargon File defines a hacker first as “a person who enjoys exploring the details of programmable systems and how to stretch their capabilities,” and elsewhere as “one who enjoys the intellectual challenge of creatively overcoming or circumventing limitations.” Under this definition a hacker is a skilled and curious builder; the popular use of the word to mean a malicious intruder is, in the File’s view, a deprecation the community rejects.
The culture took shape in the time-sharing research labs of the 1960s and 1970s, above all at MIT, where the Tech Model Railroad Club and the AI Lab produced people who treated programming as both craft and play. Steven Levy’s book “Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution,” whose opening chapters are available in full from Project Gutenberg, traces this lineage and gives the culture its best known narrative history, from the MIT mainframe hackers to the hardware tinkerers of the Homebrew Computer Club and the early game programmers.
Several values recur across the tradition. Skill is judged on its merits rather than on credentials or position, a stance the Jargon File ties to the broader hacker ethic. Cleverness is admired, especially the elegant trick or the surprising shortcut, and so is the willingness to dig into how a system actually works rather than accept its surface. Sharing code and knowledge is treated as normal and admirable, an attitude that later flowed directly into the Unix community and the free software movement.
The culture is also intensely verbal and self-aware. Its slang, in-jokes, and traditions are collected in the Jargon File, which functions as both a glossary and a cultural mirror. Terms like kludge, yak shaving, and the metasyntactic foo and bar are not just technical vocabulary; they encode shared attitudes about elegance, distraction, and the comedy of complex systems.
By the 1980s and 1990s the original lab culture had branched and spread. The Unix world carried its habits of mind into industry and academia, the free software movement gave its sharing ethic an explicit political form, and the open source community translated it into a development methodology. Throughout, the community has continued to insist on its own definition of the central word: a hacker is someone who builds, explores, and shares, and that meaning is worth defending against the criminal connotation imposed from outside.