:Hacking X for Y: /n./ [ITS] Ritual phrasing of part of the information which ITS made publicly available about each user. This information (the INQUIR record) was a sort of form in which the user could fill out various fields. On display, two of these fields were always combined into a project description of the form "Hacking X for Y" (e.g., `"Hacking perceptrons for Minsky"'). This form of description became traditional and has since been carried over to other systems with more general facilities for self-advertisement (such as Unix {plan file}s).
:Hackintosh: /n./ 1. An Apple Lisa that has been hacked into emulating a Macintosh (also called a `Mac XL'). 2. A Macintosh assembled from parts theoretically belonging to different models in the line.
:hackish: /hak'ish/ /adj./ (also {hackishness} n.) 1. Said of something that is or involves a hack. 2. Of or pertaining to hackers or the hacker subculture. See also {true-hacker}.
:hackishness: /n./ The quality of being or involving a hack.
This term is considered mildly silly. Syn. {hackitude}.
:hackitude: /n./ Syn. {hackishness}; this word is considered
sillier.
:hair: /n./ [back-formation from {hairy}] The complications that make something hairy. "Decoding {TECO} commands requires a certain amount of hair." Often seen in the phrase `infinite hair', which connotes extreme complexity. Also in `hairiferous' (tending to promote hair growth): "GNUMACS elisp encourages lusers to write complex editing modes." "Yeah, it's pretty hairiferous all right." (or just: "Hair squared!")
:hairball: /n./ [Fidonet] A large batch of messages that a store-and-forward network is failing to forward when it should. Often used in the phrase "Fido coughed up a hairball today", meaning that the stuck messages have just come unstuck, producing a flood of mail where there had previously been drought.
:hairy: /adj./ 1. Annoyingly complicated. "{DWIM} is incredibly hairy." 2. Incomprehensible. "{DWIM} is incredibly hairy." 3. Of people, high-powered, authoritative, rare, expert, and/or incomprehensible. Hard to explain except in context: "He knows this hairy lawyer who says there's nothing to worry about." See also {hirsute}.
A well-known result in topology called the Brouwer Fixed-Point Theorem states that any continuous transformation of a surface into itself has at least one fixed point. Mathematically literate hackers tend to associate the term `hairy' with the informal version of this theorem; "You can't comb a hairy ball smooth."
The adjective `long-haired' is well-attested to have been in slang use among scientists and engineers during the early 1950s; it was equivalent to modern `hairy' senses 1 and 2, and was very likely ancestral to the hackish use. In fact the noun `long-hair' was at the time used to describe a person satisfying sense 3. Both senses probably passed out of use when long hair was adopted as a signature trait by the 1960s counterculture, leaving hackish `hairy' as a sort of stunted mutant relic.