The history of hacker culture is not as simple as the "hacker" vs "cracker".

The hacker culture has two distinct branches: the academic insiders, and the social outliers, those two have significant different culture. Both of them can be described as the hacking culture, it was just than the access to computers were very limited at the time.

The insiders were those who was privileged to work inside institutions - they used Unix on PDP machines and talked on Usenet, this culture was already well established in MIT in the early 80s. Meanwhile, we also has the outsider who were social outliers, including highschool kids and independent hobbyists, they hacked on home computers (and later PCs), they talked on BBS (or free phone conference by cracking Bell's system), to wardial phone numbers, cracked programs, hacked 6502 assembly, participated in demoscene, etc. If you read the early releases of Phrack, you'll see that many things described in them is cracking, and didn't have much intellectual accomplishment. But remember those were highschool kids playing with their computers in the early 80s, writing a password bruteforce cracker and log into a mainframe was already a huge achievement, not too different from the MIT students who played lockpicking.

Yes, there were some people who did significant damages, they were noticed by the media, and the media started to use "hacker" to label all malicious attackers. So we had "Hacker" vs "Cracker", or "Black Hat" vs "White Hat" terminologies - yes, they are useful terms and I strongly recommend the use of them. Bun just be aware that the actual history is not black-and-white.

The establishment from the first group are biased toward the "real hacking culture" inside the academics, and like to label everyone from the second group as "crackers". For example,

> The problem with screen names or handles deserves some amplification. Concealing your identity behind a handle is a juvenile and silly behavior characteristic of crackers, warez d00dz, and other lower life forms. Hackers don't do this; they're proud of what they do and want it associated with their real names. So if you have a handle, drop it. In the hacker culture it will only mark you as a loser. - Eric S. Raymond, How to Become a Hacker

But it's not the full picture, many people from the second group clearly demonstrated The Hacker Ethics, such as accessing to computers, mistrusting authorities, free information, creating arts, etc. It was just that the circumstance was different. As time went forward, the outsider world was getting increasingly sophisticated as well, by the 90s, we already had world-class information security researchers, such as Aleph One or Solar Designer.

Throughout the 80s, the two groups of people mostly stayed inside their circles and didn't have much interactions (but check Homebrew Computer Club and People's Computer Company, which established the foundation of hackers in the home computer generation). Finally, in the late 90s, the rise of the Internet and universal access to computers eventually merged the two streams of hacking together, and formed the hacker culture as we know it on Hacker News. Linux was the most significant example.