1963 with reference to students who hacked into and disrupted the telephone network at Massachusetts Institute of Technology: Tech (Massachusetts Inst. of Tech.) 1 Nov. 20 Many telephone services have been curtailed because of so-called hackers... The hackers have accomplished such things as tying up all the tie-lines between Harvard and MIT, or making long-distance calls... One method involved connecting the PDP-1 computer to the phone system to search the lines until a dial tone, indicating an outside line, was found. "hacker, n.". OED Online. March 2022. Oxford University Press.