Hack: A Long History at MIT

The Great Balloon Hack of '82 from MIT Admissions on Vimeo.
The Great Balloon Hack of 1982 by MIT Students at the Harvard Yale Football Game.

The term hack has many meanings by this point.  Originally, it meant a quick job that produces what is needed but not always so well.  It has also meant a job that was done incredibly well and produces exactly was needed to solve a problem.  In popular culture is has been used to describe something that must be dealt with such as, "I can hack being a NYCDOE principal."  In the design community it sometime has been used to describe something that is being worked on.  AT MIT, the term originally was applied to describe a low cost solution to an engineering problem.  At MIT, the term has evolved describing pulling a prank.  A hacker is someone, or often a group of people, who pulled the Great Balloon Hack of 1982 at the Harvard Yale Football team.  MIT has a culture know of students setting up pranks on basements, roof ledges, and steam tunnels of large, institutional buildings, to the dismay of Physical Plant workers and Campus Police.  Lately, it is commonly applied to computer programmers who "break in" to computer systems.

The early history of hackers is centered around MIT in the 1950's and 1960's. Naturally curious and intelligent MIT students who had been exploring the phone switching network and the control systems of the Tech Model Railroad Club were drawn to the computers of the MIT Artificial Intelligence. The director of the lab, Marvin Minsky, was sympathetic to the hackers' desire to explore and impressed enough with their accomplishments that he allowed them to have direct access to the machines, even though the true hackers among the group had by then dropped out of school to spend more time hacking. Legendary hacker figures from this time include Peter Deutsch, Bill Gosper, Richard Greenblatt, Tom Knight, and Jerry Sussman. 

Even with all of its different meanings there is only one to characterize hacking: ingenuity.  Here is an example:

In 1961, students from Caltech (California Institute of Technology, in Pasadena) hacked the Rose Bowl football game. One student posed as a reporter and ‘interviewed’ the director of the University of Washington card stunts (such stunts involve people in the stands who hold up colored cards to make pictures). The reporter learned exactly how the stunts were operated, and also that the director would be out to dinner later.  While the director was eating, the students (who called themselves the ‘Fiendish Fourteen’) picked a lock and stole a blank direction sheet for the card stunts. They then had a printer run off 2300 copies of the blank. The next day they picked the lock again and stole the master plans for the stunts — large sheets of graph paper colored in with the stunt pictures. Using these as a guide, they made new instructions for three of the stunts on the duplicated blanks. Finally, they broke in once more, replacing the stolen master plans and substituting the stack of diddled instruction sheets for the original set.  The result was that three of the pictures were totally different. Instead of ‘WASHINGTON’, the word ‘CALTECH’ was flashed. Another stunt showed the word ‘HUSKIES’, the Washington nickname, but spelled it backwards. And what was supposed to have been a picture of a husky instead showed a beaver. (Both Caltech and MIT use the beaver — nature's engineer — as a mascot.)  After the game, the Washington faculty athletic representative said: “Some thought it ingenious; others were indignant.” The Washington student body president remarked: “No hard feelings, but at the time it was unbelievable. We were amazed.”

You can see more examples of great MIT Hacks here.


MIT Pranks, Hacks and Creativity from Creating Innovators on Vimeo.