Comment by dang

Worry not! Your gravitation is well-founded.

The earliest documented use of 'hack' is from "AN ABRIDGED DICTIONARY of the TMRC LANGUAGE", written in 1959 by Peter Samson. (TMRC was the Tech Model Railroad Club of MIT.) The definition was itself a playful example of what it was defining:

  HACK: 1) something done without constructive end; 2) a project undertaken on bad self-advice; 3) an entropy booster; 4) to produce, or attempt to produce, a hack.

  HACKER: one who hacks, or makes them.

Samson (2005): "I saw this as a term for an unconventional or unorthodox application of technology, typically deprecated for engineering reasons. There was no specific suggestion of malicious intent (or of benevolence, either). Indeed, the era of this dictionary saw some 'good hacks': using a room-sized computer to play music, for instance; or, some would say, writing the dictionary itself."

https://imranontech.com/2008/04/01/the-origin-of-hacker/