A SHORT HISTORY OF HACKING
A hacker is a person who writes programs in assembly language or in system-level languages, such as C. The term often refers to any programmer, but its true meaning is someone with a strong technical background who is ‘hacking away’ at the bits and bytes.
During the 1990s, the term ‘hacker’ became synonymous with ‘cracker,’ which is a person who performs some form of computer sabotage. The association is understandable. In order to be an effective cracker, you had to be a good hacker, thus the terms got intertwined, and hacker won out in the popular press.
However, sometimes, hackers are not even worthy of the original meaning of the term. Today, a lot of malicious acts are performed by people with limited knowledge who gain unauthorized entrance into computers to steal data or perform mischief.
http://www.neatorama.com/2006/08/28/a-short-history-of-hacking/