The modern understanding of computer science is a constantly mutating beast. The individuals who have been driving the Information Age's technological innovation are known as "hackers." Most people understand hacker to refer to someone who breaks into computers and commits data-theft, but this is a gross misconception that I intend to ebb and erode away, slowly, like waves over a rock.
Back in the 1990s, the word "Hacker" became a very scary word you would often find on the news in the United States. World governments, having only just begun to understand the implications of a unified world that was interconnected in the spiderweb of wires that was the internet, were struggling to keep up with the sharp minds of individuals who made it their life-mission to study, understand, manipulate, and master the art of computer science. In 1960, Massachusetts Institute of Technology students of computer science called those among them who could manipulate code and programs to do incredible, unfathomable things hackers. It meant they could read code like a children's book, understand it, create, modify, and manipulate it to do whatever they wanted or something for which it was not intended.
