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 files).