[nocman]

"the common media use is more ancient than ours"

^ That is by no means a settled debate. Even in the comments section of the link you produce as evidence ( http://imranontech.com/2008/04/01/the-origin-of-hacker/ ) there is plenty of debate on the conclusions.

You should have just ended after suggesting that hte debate is pretty much unresolvable. :-D

And just to be up front about the whole thing -- I prefer the non-malicious use of the term. Hollywood has a pernicious tendency to stereotype anything and everything, and the fact that that culture is mostly responsible for promoting the malicious use of the term means that in my book they shouldn't get to determine its meaning.

Again, unresolvable. :D

[hackertux]

Around 1980, when the news media took notice of hackers, they fixated on one narrow aspect of real hacking: the security breaking which some hackers occasionally did. They ignored all the rest of hacking, and took the term to mean breaking security, no more and no less. The media have since spread that definition, disregarding our attempts to correct them. As a result, most people have a mistaken idea of what we hackers actually do and what we think.

http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/H/hacker.html