Having revealed the birth of the modern definition of hacker, we have to examine how the word moved from obscure model railroad jargon to mainstream American English. To do this, Professor Maurer suggested performing an experiment to trace the evolution of the word in a LEXIS/NEXIS search.
References for “hacker” were for cab drivers and golf until July 2, 1981 when the Canadian newspaper Globe and Mail reported on a San Francisco-based gang known as the System Hackers. The article[2] that: "The illicit activities of the gang, and other ‘phreaks’ and ‘hackers’ as they are known, have added a new item to North America's crowded police files: juvenile computer criminals.” This is obviously also the first mainstream reference for the black hat group of hackers according to LEXIS/NEXIS. The first news transcript that contained the word was on December 4, 1984 from Ted Koppel on ABC’s World News Tonight. He said, “There've been a lot of stories recently about computer hackers, high tech experts who use
their personal computers to break into big computer systems.”