Reddit mentions of Nightwork: A History of Hacks and Pranks at MIT

>doing interesting stuff with code is the original definition of the word hack.

O RLY?

Here's an excerpt from the book, Nightwork:

>Armchair aficionados of the sport often assume that hacking was a twentieth-century phenomenon. But even before the Institute crossed the bridge from Boston to Cambridge in 1916, MIT students were hacking. John Ripley Freeman, renowned civil engineer and member of the class of 1875, noted in his memoirs that pranksters habitually sprinkled iodide of nitrogen, a mild contact explosive, on the drill room floor, adding considerable snap to routine assembly.

>Of course, pranksters weren't called hackers back then; only within the last thirty years has the term hack been synonymous with campus hijinks (see Hack, Hacker, Hacking). But it was in those formative years of hacking at MIT -- well before the term was coined -- that the spirit and traditions of the sport were established.

Here's another important bit from the back cover of the book:

>Before the term hacking became associated with computers, MIT undergraduates used it to describe any activity that took their minds off studying, suggested an unusual solution to a technical problem, or generally fostered nondestructive mischief. Hacks can be technical, physical, virtual, or verbal.