Definition of a Hacker

[Roger_Shields () notes pw com]

Originally a hacker was a poor golfer, someone who took too many stokes/hacks 
at the ball.  In the early days of computing when data I/O was time consuming 
(ie punchcards) a hacker was someone who took too many tries to get their code 
to work.  Eventually this came to mean anyone who spent a lot of time in front 
of a computer not just poor programmers.  Sometime later some misguided sole 
mistakenly associated hackers with "hacking into" computer systems, and the 
media misnomer was born.

Roger