It was developed by multiple people "hacking" on it over the "net", back when "the net" was far from being ubiquitous, and so using it for collaborative software development was still special.
Before "nethack", there was "hack", but I don't know much about that, except that it was a clone of "rogue", the original "rogue-like". There is some history here: https://nethackwiki.com/wiki/Hack
Sorry about that. I was much more sure about the "net" part than the "hack" part, but then the wiki kind of seemed to confirm my guess about why the original "Hack" was called as such: https://nethackwiki.com/wiki/Hack
But rereading it now, it just seems like someone looked up the word "hack" after the fact, and your explanation makes more sense.
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It was developed by multiple people "hacking" on it over the "net", back when "the net" was far from being ubiquitous, and so using it for collaborative software development was still special.
Before "nethack", there was "hack", but I don't know much about that, except that it was a clone of "rogue", the original "rogue-like". There is some history here: https://nethackwiki.com/wiki/Hack
Correction: it wasn't that people were hacking on it, the name 'hack' referred to hacking at monsters.
Sorry about that. I was much more sure about the "net" part than the "hack" part, but then the wiki kind of seemed to confirm my guess about why the original "Hack" was called as such: https://nethackwiki.com/wiki/Hack
But rereading it now, it just seems like someone looked up the word "hack" after the fact, and your explanation makes more sense.
Thank you!