Slashdot Mirror
Hackers Hall of Fame
An anonymous reader writes "tlc.discovery.com has a nice feature called Hackers Hall of Fame. They have included 15 bios of modern and not so modern hackers and crackers. " Definitely a few names that probably don't deserve to be on the list, but for the most part this is a good list.
Yeah, yeah, I know, I'll be lynched for saying that Bill "I am Satan" Gates should be on par with RMS, ESR and Linus, but think about this for a second.
Bill founded what is now the largest software company in the world, and wether or not you agree with him, he has made a important contribution to the computing industry: Microsoft brought desktop computing to the home user.
Now, be honest. How many of us had our first computer experience with MS-DOS or Windows 3.1? Do you think that if computers still consisted on thin-client-server models based on huge VAX mainframes, that Joe and Jane Smith would be able to dial-in to AOL and connect to thousands of people around the world? Would the Internet have blossomed into the vast information network it is today without the aid of easy-to-use software from Microsoft? How about Grandma who wants to set up a webcam so she can chat with her grandchildren? She doesn't want to have to sit and hack kernels for hours. She wants Plug-and-Play, baby.
Look, disagree all you like, but thanks to things like Windows, Office, and MSN, modern computing has been made easy and affordable to everyone, thanks to pioneers like Bill Gates.
I think one of the criteria may have been "worst photo"
They don't do the oft-maligned term "hacker" any justice by including convicted criminals in that list. They should have distinct lists, IE: a "Hackers Hall of Fame" and a "Crackers Hall of Shame" rather than lumping the two together. Mind you, these are the people that forgot the "L" in TLC stood for "Learning" and started filling the channel with home decorating shows.
Trolling is a art,
I'm not so sure about the validity of the list. Wouldn't the best hackers be the ones that pulled off a great hack that went unnoticed and the hacker didn't get caught? Just a thought...
The anti-salmon
no, you got it all wrong... it was the IRS dbase! no h4x0r points for you.
The mst deserving will NEVER be on a "list".
as they were smart enough to play the game right and didn't do the stupid thing that get's a "hacker" fame... bragging about it.
The absolute best hackers on this planet sit back and grin, but never say a word.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Shouldn't Bjarne Stroustrup be on the list next to Ritchie and Thomson?
Free XBox, PS2
"Definitely a few names that probably don't deserve to be on the list"
/pick one
Definitely probably?
Straight from the article:
Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson
[...]
An elegant, open operating system for minicomputers, UNIX helped users with general computing, word processing and networking, and soon became a standard language.
Ah well. At least they got 90% of that article right... *sigh*
The right to offend is far more important than the right not to be offended. (Rowan Atkinson)
Man, I still remember when he rooted my VCR and had it constantly play Space Quest 2 for hours!
Wearing pants should always be optional.
Is she in the hackers hall of fame? Perhaps Matthew Lillard as well? Where are AcidBurn and ZeroCool when you need 'em?
Who is this Linus Torvalds guy? ... yeahh
Must be one of those lunatics, who think they can write an entire OS and change the world
And one minor admonishment: just because home improvement isn't something that interests you does not mean it isn't learning. I got into home inprovement projects a couple years ago, and have learned a lot from those shows. Built my own deck and redid a bathroom all by my lonesome, and the results are beautiful. Even just home decorating is a pretty dense topic, with centuries of data and styles to consider.
--- Ban humanity.
check the wayback machine:
/ /t lc.discovery.com/convergence/hackers/bio/bio.html
http://web.archive.org/web/20010721134101/http:
July 2001. I've seen this page in about every other google search i've ever done on one of these guys.
Em Emalb
Handle: (door knob)
Claim to fame: A hacker of the old skool (fool), Em Emalb walked in off the street and got a job
at McDonald's Artificial Meat Lab in 1975. He was an undergraduate at Hardees at the time.
Disturbed that meat was murder, Em Emalb later founded the Free Meat Foundation.
First encountered a computer: In 1991, at the place known as his bedroom. He was 16 years old.
Unusual tools: In the 1980s Em Emalb left McDonald's payroll but continued to work from a register at McDonalds.
Here he created a new operating system called GFries -- short for GNU's Fries really irritate everyone, sucka.
Little-known fact: Recipient of minimum wage for several years.
Current status: Em Emalb has just finished reading a book, Penthouse Letters, a tribute to hot sweaty sex.
This book is available via Penthouse, Inc.
Sent from your iPad.
This is very true, but would you consider Bill Gates more of a hacker or more of a businessman? I agree that Bill Gates has changed the face of modern computing an awful lot, but as a businessman than as any form of system hacker
I don't think people like Richard Stallman, Ken Thompson, and Eric Raymond want to be put in the same category as Kevin Mitnick and Cap'n Crunch. Lumping them together seems to me like an opportunity for Darl McBride to go "Look! All the Linux people are really crooked hackers!"
I am officially gone from
I'm waiting to see the "repost" notice next.
Helevius
bill gates a hacker? now a job for real hackers: hack slashdot, fix it.
Not really. Bill's first pushes into computers were totally in the 'hack' world. He later graduated from that to business. Their BASIC interpreter was written totally by hand. They didn't have a computer. They took it to IBM and sweating bullets they put it in the computer and it ran. Can you imagine demo'ing a software product to the 900 pound IBM gorilla, but never actually getting a chance to run it first?
I can't stand Microsoft and Bill really irritates me. But the work they did at first was truly in the hacker's work. I mean 8.3 file names, tell me that isn't a hack?
(Ok, I defended Bill Gates, there goes my karma.)
Though I agree with your point it is redundant...
(Re-read the description of ESR...)
and this is news? i'm pretty sure this site has been online for like a year.
I agree with the parent post about Bill bringing computing to the masses even though my earliest computing experiences have nothing to do with wintel or even PCs for that matter. IMHO BillG's single greatest hack isn't technological; it's social/business.
C|N>K
Keven Mitnick will be interviewed for three hours tonight on Coast to Coast AM radio. Check the website for local station listings.
http://www.coasttocoastam.com
Ya ya ya, I know...off topic. But I had to...
Life is not for the lazy.
The most famous hacker in their original team was probably Paul Allen.
It clearly shows the direct connection between UNIX, Linux, the FSF, GNU, and C to criminal behavior around the world. The article shines new light on the subject by properly illuminating who the ring leaders of the worlds cybercriminals are.
At keast that seems like the logical conclusion to dumping the worlds greatest computer innovators in with the worlds greatest computer criminals and then calling them all equal.
Maybe I need to take another course in propositional calculus but I'm fairly certain that article is saying that creating UNIX or C was the technological and moral equivalent of robbing a bank.
Hacker hall of fame
Well at least they got John Draper in there.
I first realised this was old when reading Linus's entry. He has three daughters these days.
Ydco co
Windows, Office,
... MSN??
Microsoft has lee law and my hack won
I hacked the law and my hack won
I needed the money 'cause I had tons
I hacked the law and my hack won
I hacked the law and my hack won
gal guns
I hacked the law and my hack won
I hacked the law and my hack won
I needed the money 'cause I had tons
I hacked the law and my hack won
I hacked the law and my hack won
Robbin' people with a six gun
I hacked the law and my hack won
I hacked the law and my hack won
What the hell is Barlow doing on this list?
Which hacked code? And which preferred to hack away at victims' corpses instead?
Yep. If I remember back far enough it was posted at least once on slashdot too. Maybe twice.
How come they do not mention Cap'n Crunch running around all bug-eyed at raves in the Bay Area? Saw him going to them for up until I left the area in '96, came back in '03 and still raving. Sad thing is, few of my friends out there had ever heard of him :( Gives you perspective on our personal realities.
Life is everything but nothing.
What has John Perry Barlow done in terms of hacking? And Tsutomu Shimomura? One founded the EFF, the other was a sysadmin who detected his computers were being compromised by Kevin Mitnick. Those are a coupkle people who didn't seem to belong. Any others?
Cap'n Crunch provided just as valuable a public service as RMS: showing the falicy of the "exchange value" concept. No one is hurt by making free phone calls with the bluebox just as nobody is hurt by using GNU instead of SUN. software has a use value but should not have an exchange value, meaning it ought to be free, and i do mean also free of charge. I don't like to pay for things. That said, I am using MacOS X 10.3 on an iBook G4 I got at the end of October. But I didn't buy any other software for it. I got free or pirated stuff to fill out what didn't come with this thing.
Phone calls also should be free. ther is no reason why they should be paid for. The government should make people do the maintanance on the lines and money should be eliminated.
Microsoft has legal guns
I hacked the law and my hack won
I hacked the law and my hack won
I needed the money 'cause I had tons
I hacked the law and my hack won
I hacked the law and my hack won
Robbin' people with a six gun
I hacked the law and my hack won
I hacked the law and my hack won
The three words UNIX helped users of 23 are actually 13 percent and not 10.
Gates is not a hacker, he traded in his keyboard long ago for an empty suit and a few billion. He belongs nowhere near that list.
If I remember well, Robert Morris father (former NSA scientist if I remember well) also worked on Multics, the "ancestor" of UNIX.
;-)
One day, programmers saw Rober Morris Sr go to a Multics console. He called everyone in the room to him. Then, once he had everyone complete attention, he hit three keys at the same time on the console... and crashed Multics completely.
He then left the room without saying a word, leaving all the others scratching their heads...
I don't know if the story is true, or what were the three keys he pressed, but with a father like that, it's no wonder young Robert Morris Jr ended up a hacker!
The right to offend is far more important than the right not to be offended. (Rowan Atkinson)
What is a Hacker, the Timeline of hacker history, and the best book on hackers.
As well, he *hacked* the mouse away from IBM and *hacked* the GUI away from Apple.
When is this stupid argument going to die? It's now totally pointless to try to force the definition of hacker to be someone who writes code and cracker to be what the mass media calls a hacker. Languages are living things and just because Eric Raymond would like to define hacker as it was at one point in time is irrelevant to current usage. Even conferences like H2K are more about hacking in the cracking sense than hacking.
This is similar to trying to argue that the word gay is not associated with homosexual men now; it's time to get over the old definitions of words (particularly slang words) and move on.
Otherwise we'd all be walking around using the word ace to describe things that are currently considered phat.
John.
Did your mom poke you with a coat hanger a few times before you were born?
Didn't they do a Forthran compiler for the Altair first? And then they got pissed of when the hackers at homebrew computer club shared it with each other. I do think Mr. Gates has done a great deal in computing but I do not consider him a hacker simply because he do not obey the so called 'hacker ethic' - that is, hack and share your hacks with whomever wants them.
I could be wrong. I'm always wrong...
Article states Linus works for Transmeta...not anymore. He works for the Open Source Development Labs now.
I'm glad Gates, Jobs and Ballmer are not mentioned on the list. Hackers build things, cracker break them, and ransackers like Gates sell broken things.
Ruby on Rails Screencast
I read a book on the "masters of deception" many years ago. Phiber Optik became a major hero and roll model for me. I even got kind of good at using the aging telenet network to make free longdistance calls to Europe via global outdials. One of the characters mentioned in the book was also Robert T. Morris, refered to I believe just as 'rtm.' At about this time (i was 12) I started fiddling with FreeBSD, and eventually my uncle gave me a copy of RH Linux. I then started reading a lot of FSF propaganda. I started to confuse RTM and RMS. My fascination with RTM eventually turned itself into a fascination with RMS out of sheer stupidity on my part (hey, i was like 13. what the hell did i know). Then i started to think that RMS was full of it, went back to FreeBSD. Then i got turned on to communism by some fellow Irish Republicans, started to think RMS kickced ass, became as psycho HURD user, realised HURD was a piece of shit and bought a Macintosh. Now I get to be a hypocrit, especially since I am an ex phreak and [ex]decent programmer (i patched the vfat file system driver in the linux kernel once...that was about the height of my career), i've realised that i do infact hate the world wide web and now at the age of 20, after realising that computers are an instrument of fascism and that so-called "socialist" intellectuals and academics are all counter-revolutionary (Lenin, Mao, Chirac), I've quit school to become a carpenter so my fiance and i can move back to Ireland and have a nice country life and shoot loyalists. actually, this story kind of sucks....
Is this true? beacuse if it is, I DONT FUCKING CARE.
2 1337 4 u!
It was an interesting site, and I was pleased to find out that I started using computers two years before that first guy there! ;^)
"Can there be a Klein bottle that is an efficient and effective beer pitcher?"
Now, be honest. How many of us had our first computer experience with MS-DOS or Windows 3.1?
Probably less than you might think. While our parents were doing boring crap such as wordprocessing on their drab IBM PC, we were hacking away on our Sinclairs, Commodores, Ataris, Amigas, Dragons, Tandys, Amstrads, Acorns, etc. Those were what the young computer geeks were using in the 1980s.
Tubal-Cain smokes the white owl.
still works for Transmeta? That's news to me.
instead of 'supposedly', then that should be okay, too? I hope not.
Think about ask vs axe, height vs heighth, and the rampant use of 'they' to denote a single person, and tell me that language should be defined by usage. (Not flaming - this issue bothers me.) People who know better should strive to use the language properly.
A stupid/incorrect thing done by a million people is still a stupid/incorrect thing.
Slightly [more] off-topic, but I have learned quite a bit about gardening/landscaping from watching 'Ground Force' on BBC America. The other decorating shows (e.g. Changing Rooms) seem to end up with fairly cheap-looking results. I know all the decorators are on a budget, but the outdoor projects seem to look more elegant.
I want to drag this out as long as possible. Bring me my protractor.
Got my vote. Then again I don't really follow what they're listing.
I mean if we were listing hackers, there's a bunch of names that don't belong on there. If we were listing crackers, well, then the page has the wrong name (and has for some time).
And for those of you that think the fact that Gates is a business man now, and that MSN should disqualify him, I have only this to say:
Should we now start removing people from places like the baseball hall of fame after they retire?
The fact is that they did something at some point to be honored in the hall of fame, it doesn't matter if they proceeded to never get on base again in the rest of their career.
Whee signature.
Oh, how times have changed...
What happened, Bill?
--Stephen
Did you ever notice that *nix doesn't even cover Linux?
Not really. Bill's first pushes into computers were totally in the 'hack' world. He later graduated from that to business. Their BASIC interpreter was written totally by hand. They didn't have a computer. They took it to IBM and sweating bullets they put it in the computer and it ran. Can you imagine demo'ing a software product to the 900 pound IBM gorilla, but never actually getting a chance to run it first?
Sorry, you are inaccurate in few important points. First of all, their "hacking" deal was not with IBM, it was with MITS, a small company in Albuquerque, the first to manufacture a microchip-based personal computer, the Altair with the 8080 CPU. It was featured as a cover girl, oops, cover story of Popular Electronics in 1974. That's how Bill Gates and Paul Allen got into the PC business. And they actually have had a computer - they had a 8080 emulator working on their university DEC machine. They didn't have actual Altair, because no one had it those days - the cover photo was a mock, MITS was just testing the water with a vaporware announcement (things haven't improved that much since the good ole 1974!).
Nevertheless, squeezing a BASIC interpreter into the tiny 4K memory of the Altair was indeed a piece of fine hacking - even if the credit goes actually to Paul Allen rather than Bill himself.
Lets see. They list Richard M. Stallman. Good. Nice choice. Yea.
Then they claim he wrote and OPERATING SYSTEM called GNU.
Errr? GNU has a set of tools. Because of the lack of HURD progress and the adoption of the GNU toolset wholesale on top of a Linux kernel doesn't make GNU an operating system, nor does it make the GNU toolset "Linux".
You are so wrong about that. What Bill Gates (or at least Microsoft) did was to give computing to the masses. The PC revolution was completely Microsoft driven. They made stuff simple. They took away all the beauty of a real computer system, but they made it dead easy. They gave us:
CTRL-ALT-DEL... Abort, Retry or Fail?... OK, Cancel... Press any key to reboot...
That's all rubbish compared to proper error messages, but the upshot is that your Grandma can use a computer because Microsoft dumbed it all down enough and made it easy to work with PCs.
Sure, they gained a monopoly too, and such a position of power as to exclude others... but their time will come, and their contribution will rise from the ashes as being a real, tangible one. Even if it was copied from elsewhere! It certainly didn't "retard" anything. Dubious business practices maybe, but you don't get to the top without stepping on a few people.
Disclaimer: I prefer to run Linux, but I'm interested enough to work it all out, and fascinated by the intricacies. But it's not ready for your Grandmother yet.
Conversion Rate Optimisation French / English consultant
so what? it's not like unix was the first command-line driven OS.
I'm a little annoyed with people saying things like: "Well, since person A was the first to do X, we would not be doing X right now, if it wasn't for A.".
Without the Wright brothers, we still would have aeroplanes today. If Pythagoras died in infancy, someone else would have come up with A^2 + B^2 = C^2. If Bill Gates' mother did not have ties with IBM, someone else would have headed the company that provided IBM with an 'OS' for its PC.
Wenn ist das Nunstueck git und Slotermeyer? Ja! Beiherhund das Oder die Flipperwaldt gersput.
8.3 filenames came straight from CP/M, just like the file control blocks it used. In MS-DOS 2 they switched to file handles instead.
I'm actually kind of surprised.
...right?
I owned a TRS-80 as my first machine as well. Perhaps it's a pre-requisite to be a hacker.
With that said, WHY IN GOD'S NAME is John Perry Barlow on this list? My god, I'd rather see mafiab0y on here than him. You do need to know how to use a computer to be a hacker, right?
"Bill Gates has done more to retard the computer industry than any man alive !"
/. reader you are probably smart enough that you should know.
That's the most incorrect statement I've ever heard, and the worst part is as a
There is not any technology being developed today that isn't being built on technology that came before it. The real creator of the mouse driven graphical user interface didn't bring it to market, so Microsoft and Apple did. That was a good thing for everyone.
It's was obvious anyway, and would have been developed by someone soon enough. There were already trackballs, menus, and graphics. Xerox flipped the trackball over to control a pointer that interacted with graphical menus.
This seems like divine inspiration only if you don't know anything about computers of the era. All Xerox did was bring together existing technologies in a way that hadn't been done previously. The same thing that happens everyday around the world. You can think of them as genius if you like, but don't forget they didn't even think enough of their creation to keep it secret and try to develop something with it.
"irregardless" is a term used so often that it's found its way into the dictionary. But that doesn't keep those who use it from sounding uneducated.
I hereby nominate this site for the Most Annoying Interface of All Time Hall of Fame. Do I hear a second?
"We reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals." --The American President (20.1.2009)
In his "In The Beginning Was The Command Line" Neal Stephenson had this to say : "Microsoft refused to go into the hardware business, insisted on making its software run on hardware that anyone could build, and thereby created the market conditions that allowed hardware prices to plummet. In trying to understand the Linux phenomenon, then, we have to look to not a single innovator but to a sort of bizarre Trinity: Linus Torvalds, Richard Stallman, and Bill Gates. Take away any of these three and Linux would not exist."
He's right, y'know, though I'm not sure that should get Bill into the Hacker Hall of Fame.
OTOH if you took out RMS, Denny & Ken, esr, and Linus, then added Bill, that gallery would appear more homogeneous...
It's a lot more nerve racking to check that kind of list to see if you're on it.
Bill CO-wrote BASIC with Paul Allen. If the list is primarily for technical expertise, Paul belongs on there more than Bill.
"We obviously need a new moderation category: (-1, Woo-fucking-hoo)" --Mr. AC
Why isn't the inventor of the internet, Al Gore, on the list?
>> huge VAX mainframes
Bwaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhh!
How cute! He thinks a VAX was a "huge mainframe"!
Huge mainframes were usually IBM S/370 models in those days.
OK, Gates was influential in the PC revolution and his place in history is assured.
But, lets be honest, most of his best "innovations" have been either rip-offs or totally retrograde steps.
Opportunistic, as well as (sometimes) brilliant, I would say.
sig under development
They didn't have a computer. They took it to IBM and sweating bullets they put it in the computer and it ran. Can you imagine demo'ing a software product to the 900 pound IBM gorilla, but never actually getting a chance to run it first?
You what? You got an "Insightful" for getting it all wrong? Oh yeah, forgot this is Slashdot.
MITS released the Altair 8008. Gates & Allen wrote a BASIC interpreter for the i8080 using an 8080 emulator on a CDC 600 computer (If I remember correctly) that Allen wrote using an Intel manual.
Gates rang Roberts at MITS and told him they had a BASIC which was ready for him to run on his Altair and would he like to licence it from them? Roberts told them to bring it on down...but they hadn't finished it. They worked in it for two weeks until it sort-of worked and then Allen took the paper tape; which had never been tested on a real Altair; to MITS.
Half way to MITS Allen realised they hadn't written a loader for their BASIC. The emulator didn't need one. He hacked one up with a pencil and a legal pad and went to MITS.
He keyed in his (untested) loader. It worked, and he loaded the untested BASIC. It worked too.
MicroSoft got the contract from MITS and went onto become the number one supplier of BASIC for Micro Computers.
The rest is history. I suggest you try studying some of it.
'THEY" did not give us CTRL-ALT-DEL for that was the contribution of IBM as lately heralded in the press when he left IBM from RTP in N. Carolina.
Also the mouse they stole was IIRC from a Xerox Parc project. In IBM we were using graphic pads and wands with a button on the end to activate light sceen hot spots and such. We did have 'windows' before they were made public on the IBM3270PC (again IIRC-been a while). Gui's were all over the place. MSFT IMO can't claim credit for very much.
In reply:
APPLE gave us that 'grandma can use it' interface, not Bill Gates. Microsoft stole it.
Intel and IBM started the PC craze, not Bill.
Microsoft is everywhere because of anti-competitive (read: anti-American, anti-Capitalist) behavior in business, not due to innovation.
As for error message, you have to kidding right (or just baiting?) - windows is notorious for lousy errors and unexpected reboots.
Try again ?
p.s. Would I be right in guessing that you are under 25 years old... you don't actually remember this stuff, it's just what you think you know, right ?
"Whoever would overthrow the liberty of a nation must begin by subduing the freeness of speech."--Benjamin Franklin
Bill Joy deserves to be on this list.
Wow, I have much intuition, got 10/10
;)
"You could spot Hannibal Lecter in an open source conference in a matter of seconds"
Apple brought us the modern desktop. (Apple mac)
Bill gates founded a law firm, not a computer company.
Drinkin' beer in the hot sun
I fought the law and I won
I needed sex and I got mine
I fought the law and I won
The law don't mean shit if you've got the right friends
That's how the country's run
Twinkies are the best friend I've ever had
I fought the law
And I won
I blew george & harvey's brains out with my six-gun
I fought the law and I won
Gonna write my book and make a million
I fought the law and I won
I'm the new folk hero of the ku klux klan
My cop friends think that's fine
You can get away with murder if you've got a badge
I fought the law
And I won
I am the law
So I won
P.S.- Slashdot 5uxXhorZ!
Paul Allen may be more 'techie' but BASIC for the Altair, as well as their previous projects, like the Traf-O-Data stuff, were really, really, joint collaborations. It wasn't a Wozniak/Jobs relationship, where one guy did the tech stuff and the other guy did the marketing. They *both* did the tech stuff, but Bill was more comfortable doing the business stuff as well.
Check out the Tandy Model 100 -- it's a super elegant piece of early portable computing with a great (for the time) BASIC-enabled OS. Creating that system was Bill Gate's last project that he personally pulled off alone, and it is really a fantastic system.
You may be able to have issues with his later business practices, and I'd agree that he was never part of the hacker culture, as evidenced by his early concern for copyrights when others were sharing everything, but the guy could definitely pull his weight on the code side.
Dude, I think I can see my house from here.
most of the member of my freesoftware group actually don't claim ibm pc's. Something the surprised me aswell. I started on a commodore 128. I do know a lot of people in the CS program who's first experience was windows 95, but none of them are hackers. They have no love for computers. Just the money they can make them.
Disclaimer: This is roughly 90% OT.
This site is the top of the pile in the (not all that new) game of "let's see how tiny i can make the article space on the page!!!!" with its gargantuan, 120x600px ad on the right, the even larger navigator on the left, and the Java (WHY?!?) navigator on top for the article. Let's ignore for the moment that using Java for that is completely unecessary and wasteful, and focus on how the foolish thing rotates while you're reading. If you can't read each hacker's bio in 5 seconds, you're gonna have to click the arrows a few times just to find where you left off!
Are they trying to piss off these legends with their own abysmal "hacking" skills?
Handle: None (nothing to hide!)
but doesn't he use "rms"?
"Until you do what you believe in, how do you know whether you believe in it or not?" -- Leo Tolstoy
Is it me? Or did TLC accidentally mix up their photos from their Porn Hall of Fame?
There's an uncanny resemblence between Stallman and Jeremy. Was this a mixup?
But it seems that the page with the article crashes the new firefox .8
With 3 seconds of investigation it apears to have something to do with a Realplayer add.
I must test this elsewhere...
"When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson
You are so wrong about that. What Bill Gates (or at least Microsoft) did was to give computing to the masses. The PC revolution was completely Microsoft driven. They made stuff simple.
Sorry, but I doubt you can back it up with any real historical knowledge. Microsoft entered the PC revolution because IBM was seeking contact with Gary Kildall of the CP/M fame. IBM wanted to run CP/M on their computers and asked Bill Gates to arrange a meeting of the IBM representatives with Kildall. Instead, Gates offered them his own deal.
History of the PC would look quite similar without Bill Gates. We would have CP/M-86 instead of MS-DOS and GEM Desktop instead of MS Windows. There would be no actualy difference for anybodys Grandma.
He's married with two daughters.
He is married to his 2 daughters? That's sick dude!
Open Source Java Web Forum with LDAP authentication
Bill, I think, is a business man, and maybe a manager; call him a social engineer, and I'll buy it. But to put him in the same group with Dennis Ritchie and Linux Torvalds? I just don't buy it.
Thinking outside my Head
He sure had a big inpact on another side of computing, games
Well, it's a top 15, ther's no room for everyone
Intel and IBM shipped home PCs running which OS? Anyone? MS-DOS? What did the MS stand for?
I wasn't talking about BSOD errors, which don't mean anything (I have frequently said to clients that those error numbers don't mean anything, even to MS developers, I'm pretty sure it's an "in" joke where they put random memory register references converted to decimal). I was talking about stuff where disks and whatnot aren't readable. Try it in Linux, you'll get something complex like 'cannot mount /dev/fd0, unrecognized file system' which says more to me, but less to Grandma.
Oh, I am older than 25. I do remember my first PC. It was ~2MHz I think, a single 5.25" floppy, single density 360KiB formatted disks. MSDOS v5 or so, and 128KiB of RAM. Monochrome CGA display. Something along those lines, anyway, don't have exact spec. and I may be wrong about MSDOS version.
For every flippant point I make, there may be a counter argument. But the fact remains, love it or hate it, Microsoft can take some credit (even if that means admitting they were the schoolyard bully) for where computing is today.
Conversion Rate Optimisation French / English consultant
A mouse is a piece of hardware. I doubt they *hacked* it away from IBM. Xerox developed the GUI, Apple had nothing to do with it.
No, actually, a lot of us had cheap PC clones that we'd put together from parts. I was running a BBS on an 8088 machine with 640K, a 5 meg HD, and a 1200 baud modem. It had a member list in three digits and at it's height sponsored a bowling league (not just a bowling team). You guys with your cheap plastic-case computers were there, too, but you shouldn't discount the PC people as just doing 'boring crap.' Some of you were connecting to my board.
Of course, I was a grown-up (in my 20's) in the '80s, I guess if I'd been younger I would have been seriously involved in the toy computers, rather than just having a few around to fiddle with, while doing practical things with PC clones.
---
Probably less than you might think. While our parents were doing boring crap such as wordprocessing on their drab IBM PC, we were hacking away on our Sinclairs, Commodores, Ataris, Amigas, Dragons, Tandys, Amstrads, Acorns, etc.
;-)
Quick generation check: what will happen with the screen if I'll type POKE 53280, 0 on a commodore-64?
Don't forget the Adam/Colecovision, man!
TZ
I vote Kevin Mitnick as my number 1. As his resume not only includes real life hacking, but he also enjoys the irony of it all as he played a CIA hacker who installed a backdoor into the network of SD-6 on my favorite show Alias (Episode: Doppleganger).
Anyone else have any shows/movies he's made a sneak appearance in playing a role close to real life?
"Those were what the young computer geeks were using in the 1980s."
I was a young computer geek in the 1980's and I got my start on a Tandy 1000 running DOS 2.0 I think. That was about 18 years ago and too long for me to remember!
-- Jason
I am not sure if I am the only one, but the last time I tried to boot into gcc and the gcc utilities on my x86 processor, nothing happened. It wouldn't even boot. Weird... Said something about "no kernel found."
The neat thing is that I wrote a small C program the other day that organizes my contacts, it did the same thing when I tried to boot into it. I must have written an operating system, too!
Seriously, RMS has TLC drinking the koolaid, too...
Too many people don't care anymore these days.
From the article (enjoy):
...
...
"Vladimir Levin
Unusual tools: Along with a computer, computer games and disks, Russian police confiscated a camcorder, music speakers and a TV set from Levin's apartment."
Wow, a TV is indeed an unusual tool. Especially in communist Russia! (wait, it's no longer communist - someone tell Washington!) Was it a color TV? And "music speakers," you say? God damn, that's unusual! More unusual than the author's strange vocabulary.. Almost makes one think if he's a RUSSIAN SPY!
"Current status:
Citibank has since begun using the Dynamic Encryption Card, a security system so tight that no other financial institution in the world has it."
Why does this feel like I'm reading the New York Post? Or is it a comic book that I'm thinking of? Or is it Da Source? That shit's tight, cuz!
Another gem:
"Richard Stallman
Handle: None (nothing to hide!)"
Is this article written by the gov't? Jeez. A shame that this passes for journalism in this country.
I just stopped reading this junk after the first page and randomly-clicked Vladimir.
Must-not-watch TV!
Not quite. It was IBM's marketing force that accomplished this feat - it was the PC that mattered, MS-DOS just happened to be there. It got spred with no effort from Gates' part, aside from the initial trick of selling something he didn't have, to IBM. Windows then followed in MS-DOS' tracks, people took it by inertia (with a little help from MS's anticompetitive practices), not because there weren't better alternatives.
It makes me sick to hear ignorant people playing Gates' song, where he's the hero who put the PC and the internet in people's homes; to see it modded +5 Insightful on Slashdot is just too much!
Tuff that Smatters.
"Now, be honest. How many of us had our first computer experience with MS-DOS or Windows 3.1?"
Nope, first time I got to touch a computer it was the Commodore Pet, then the Colecovision Adam (not a 'real' computer, I know, but you were able to run programs on it using basic), Vic-20, Commodore 64c, Commodore Amiga500, THEN Windows.
Yeah, and he's married to two of them! *Shudder*.
Don't forget the TI 99/4A!
It's easy. Just look for glasses.
"Until you do what you believe in, how do you know whether you believe in it or not?" -- Leo Tolstoy
I was born in 1980. How many people got their first computer experience with Microsoft? I dunno, them young kids, most likely. Not me, I come from class.
This top X list reminds me of that funny game Programming Language Inventor or Serial Killer?. (warning: flash site).
Speak truth to power.
I think that's much more true in Europe, perhaps.
Most Americans I know, had their first experience on Apple II machines, and later, Macintosh.
My first experience of any computer at all, was a Tatung Einstein, which belonged to a neighbour of mine. About a year later, I began tinkering with a BBC Master at school. In 1990, I got an Amstrad CPC 464 and my school got a couple Acorn Archimedes A3000s. I still have my CPC (heavily upgraded) and a few others I've bought over the years.
It was amazing some of the stuff I created back then, as a child of about 10. I had the beginnings of my own assembler, some really cool GUI tools and even a platform game I started writing.
Now I work doing web R&D, accessibility and usability stuff, and I've just realised how much I miss the old days.
Join the Free Software Foundation
You could say that about anything. "History of Open Source would look quite similar without Linux Torvalds. We would have AthenaOS, or Minix, or widespread FreeBSD-adoption."
Seriously, you could do that to any historical figure. If Rosa Parks wasn't going to stand her ground on the bus, someone else would have eventually. But they didn't--she did.
Yes, you can argue that PC history would look similar without Bill Gates. But would your Grandma be using a multimedia machine today (and not tomorrow) without Microsoft's massive "marketing before secure, bug free computing" campaign?
Conversion Rate Optimisation French / English consultant
Why is it all so important that OUR grandmothers can use computers now!
Since when did they become the ultimate consumer market.
My grandmothers are dead for goodness sakes!!!
Microsoft was almost incidental, pushed through by the inertia of the x86 chip (and more by the cheap IBM clone).
Apple had all this ease of use years before Windows 3.0 (the first usable version of Windows). Microsoft didn't innovate this ease of use - they copied others. Microsoft rarely innovate - they merely popularise ideas that are already out there. It's the cheap IBM clone and good marketing that made Microsoft - not ease of use. Witness the popularity of MS-DOS in its day when there were much more user-friendly platforms out there.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
Ahh, the Tandy 1000. 8088 (I believe) with two 5 1/4" floppy drives, and 16 color graphics. By the time I finally got rid of mine, it was 5 or 6 years old, and had a hard drive (50 Megs) and a 3 1/2 floppy drive. I felt so proud.
That doesn't resume it all, a hacker definition I like is "someone that can extract the maximum of a computer resource" (NYC hackers) and that involves not just coding but also using already avaible software and hacking hardware.
And also there's the hackers who made the tcp/ip protocol (I think it was Richie) I don't think coding isn't a good definition to it either.
Amen to that.
::spit::... a far cry from the normal hacker.
He may be brilliant, but a brilliant business man - A man who knows how to work the system and make money, like most of coporate america
# fuser -v
#
Computer geeks of the 80s are outnumbered by all the young computer geeks of the 90s who got turned onto computers because of the old MS-DOS/Windows 3.1 combination. Hell, there are still QBASIC user groups out there online, living up the nostalgia and still making games.
Why are they not included?
Languages are living things, and languages are powerful things. Languages can control people, languages can liberate people. Gay people understand that, hackers would be wise to understand it to.
They gave us:
CTRL-ALT-DEL...
Um, I thought David Bradley of IBM gave us that...
Slackware
Dont you think?
NO SIG
i like the quote from the site about linus:
...
"He's married with two daughters."
if you're not natively speaking english
Sorry ... :)
IBM never released a 'home' machine,
they were targeted at small business
And they shipped it with PC-DOS
Back in those days MS-DOS was the cheap 'n nasty
clone
Bugger, I'm getting too old for this
Help! help!, the termites are eating my DRAM!!!
... that Linus is bigamist: "He's married with two daughters." :-)
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
Why isn't the inventor of the internet, Al Gore, on the list?
OMFG, I'm sofaking sick of this stupid joke. First of all, it isn't even true. Secondly, anyone that keeps repeating it sounds like a moron. MORON.
I'd use mod points to bring the parent post down but no doubt some meta-moderator will be cluesless and mark my moderation as 'Unfair'. Oh, the irony.
Speak truth to power.
They said his name was rtm, but as far as I recall that was just his username that people fingered when they tried to find out who had actually written it. I think he only started using it himself afterwards.
But I wasn't in computing at the time.
Exercise your right not to vote. thinkoutside.org
You could say that about anything.
Not really. There are genuine inventors, who manage to shape the technology - say, Henry Ford. Or Douglas Engelbart, inventor of the mouse and GUI. However, this is not the case of Bill Gates and the PC revolution. There was no actual difference for computer users between MS-DOS and CP/M. In fact, MS-DOS was purposedly designed to mock some CP/M's features, like the dreadful 8+3 filename convention. Then Bill Gates managed to copy the desktop paradigm from Apple and Xerox machines, but anyone could do it - and the company that created CP/M did it to, with GEM Desktop.
for me the sequence was:
:)
VIC-20 -> a brief stint with C64 and the first Mac -> Atari 520 ST (!) -> and I skipped the x86's until I got a 486/25 DX.
No real meaning to all this, I just thought I'd chime in.
# fuser -v
#
Yes, you can argue that PC history would look similar without Bill Gates. But would your Grandma be using a multimedia machine today (and not tomorrow) without Microsoft's massive "marketing before secure, bug free computing" campaign?
;-)
Can you say "Apple"?
Apple gave us the 'grandma can use it' interface but wanted to make sure only rich grandmas could afford it. They along with Lotus introduced the culture litigation and legal hassles to the market with their ill-fated 'look and feel' suit.
It seems like you might be one of those people trying to spread some of those historically revisionist myths:
IBM was cool, OS/2 and Microchannel Architecture was bigtime progress and not IBM's attempt to drag the world back into a proprietary box they owned.
Apple (post-Apple ][, which was neat, but the Apple corporate types killed it for the big-bucks Mac) made cool stuff that the geeks and nerds respected.
Yeah, we know you were around back then, but stop lying to the younger folks like you're the wise grandpa. IBM sucked, and tried to kill the clone market when they lost control of it. Apple did their best to make sure the market was securely controlled by marketing people and computers were expensive fashion accessories.
We (the rabble) were all rooting for Bill's vision of computers everywhere for cheap. Thank goodness IBM failed (though the Microchannel architecture had technical merit, it was poisoned by IBM's tight control on the 'standard.'). Thank goodness Apple lost the look-n-feel lawsuit, or the few of us who could afford computers would all be using terrible-quality pre-OSX Macs (they wouldn't have had any motivation to change, the old MacOS developers were arrogant and stubbornly clung to their ways for years and years and still would if they could).
Don't cop an attitude and tell stories that aren't the truth to the younger folks.
---
Don't forget, supposedly the last bit of code that Gates wrote largely by himself was the code that allowed the handheld Radio Shack TRS-80 to run - a massive thing so tough that you could skip it on concrete without it breaking, and that is STILL in use today in harsh industrial environments (oil rigs, etc) because A. it has an RS-232 port and B. the thing is TOUGH - and they use it to collect data from things and dump it into more powerful computers.
The guy wrote software for consumer-grade hardware that is still in use 20+ years later - he may be a putz, but he can hack.
-Steve
Excuse me, I'm sorry because it is written in Spanish, but you should read this.
If true, this article explains why Mr. Gates is, speaking about computers, but a lamer. It seems he did nothing about MSDOS but buying it from Seattle Computer (it was developed under the name QDOS after Quick and Dirty Operating System). And the article also explains how Gates did just half the job with the BASIC interpreter.
It's a real shame this article is not English, but I bet you can find tons of info just by googling...
Please note that I am calling him a lamer in the computing context only, he just happens to be among the best burglars, and he also proves as a good candidate to rule a tight dictatorship. In fact this task is actually one of its main occupations, and he's succeeding pretty well. But all this success is usually easy to reach, with poor or little skills, when provided with enough moneypower... You know!
No shit, I remember printing out those photos for a presentation I gave on hackers for high school speech tournaments. That must have been 3 years ago at least, and I recall the site was old back then, too. I also remember the site used to be ugly as hell and just basic HTML, though. At least it has some of the only photos I could find on guys like Mark Abene or that Russian guy.
I first encountered and played with computers in my childhood, so it looks like I have great potential.
"Until you do what you believe in, how do you know whether you believe in it or not?" -- Leo Tolstoy
Press any key to reboot...
Crap! I'm still looking for that damn 'any' key.
Now if only I can get someone to fix the cupholder on my computer...
-- The Genesis project? What's that?
"p.s. Would I be right in guessing that you are under 25 years old... you don't actually remember this stuff, it's just what you think you know, right ? " Funny you should say that, I know some under 25's that had pre XT computers (read less then 8 mhz). Think about it, yes they would have been around 8-10 yrs old, but so what? It really isn't rocket science to load using a boot disk, now is it??
Mod +5 Drunk
I think the issue at hand isn't whether Bill Gates WAS a hacker. Obviously, Bill and friends were at one point even if they aren't now. The point of contention is whether or not his hacking was actually significant enough to warrant putting him in a HOF, or if his significant contribution is actually in the realm of business and that's just getting confused with his hackish start.
I mean, is introducing a ground-up BASIC interpreter that most people don't know about as significant as Condor's "work"? Cool as it may be, I'll bet more people know about Mitnick's exploits than Bill's. Tough call, really.
Alito: A vote for Alito is a punch in the eye to put that bitch back in her place!
I'm mildy amused and peeved that for rms under "Handle" it says "none" and then on the next page it gives handles for Ritchie and Thompson (Their logins, just like rms!) there is rtm but not esr...
:) The article's author would never understand the subtlety. *sigh*
Bah!
Then as you peruse the other persons listed the author drops the whole classification scheme altogether. I think up against a deadline perhaps.
So, no more time for posing, time to crank out the (junk) article/feature. BAH!
I first started using UNIX systems by the courtesy of rms. His account on the *.ai.mit.edu cluster was unprotected by a password and his MOTD would welcome you and suggest you set up a profile and a DOTDIR variable to keep your rc's and other state within.
It was GREAT. Can you imagine such a thing? After some time he had to stop this and I'm sure it killed him to do it.
This author is (as usual for "journalists) treading in deep water and is lost. Why even try to be l337 and act like you know what or who a Hacker is or what a Cracker is contrasted to a Hacker and What Crackers were also Hackers, etc...
Since I'm in Virginia I suppose I'm a Cracker Hacker.
He was once a hacker, read "Hackers" by Steve Levy.
... we put together a software library"
They wrote it without having a machine, they had instruction set for the 8080 chip, and a Popular eletronics schematics, they had to make it fit in 4k of memory, and they had to make it less since the memory needed space to hold programs/data.
page 221. "but Gates in particular was a master at bumming code, and with a lot of squeezing and some innovative use of the elaborate 8080 instruct set, they thought they'd done it"
Gates speaking, "We rewrote the assembler, we rewrote the loader
so, in his early days, he was a hacker, more so than many slashdot people are in respect to things today.
------ Curiosity killed the cat. {satisfaction brought it back | it didn't die ignorant | lack of it is killing mankind
I never had, and never want to have, a C64... However, I believe it was the same as the BORDER command in better BASIC. It was definitely colour related. I remember seeing it in lots of Osborne type in books from the library.
Join the Free Software Foundation
The only two I think of as hackers on that list are Ian and Woz, but that's just my $0.02.
Neither Linus or RMS has done anything really technically splendid, one is a great project leader and the other a complete asshole; but that doesn't really make them hackers.
Even worse, why the hell is that fake fuck ESR on that list? He's even worse choice than Linus and RMS.
Ian on the other hand does some really technically cool stuff today.
I would really like to have seen Dave Hayne on that list, he's the king, and I'm not even an Amiga fan.
And obviously you know SO much posting as an AC... coward.
# fuser -v
#
can be found here
it's much more humorous. from the page on john draper: Formerly a Phone Phreak, now a dentally-challenged and odorous wreck...
Creationists are a lot like zombies. Slow, but powerful and numerous. And they all want to eat our brains.
Was the most interesting statement in the History section of the same site. This refers to the Matthew Broedrick 1983 movie War Games.
Especially since he didn't first discover it.
--Stephen
Did you ever notice that *nix doesn't even cover Linux?
"Hacker" has evolved into what it is. You will never "enlighten" the general public. You might as well try to hold back the tide.
--- Ban humanity.
Absolutely. My first 'computer' was my dads Sinclair programmable calculator in the mid 70's. Oh the joy of programming in moonlander, not much of a GUI though.
Then I graduated to the ZX-81, wow, a whole 1K to play with. Then expanded it to 16K, gosh, how am I ever going to write a program to fill that? Then onto IBM-XT, AT, with lots and lots of K, and lots of Hz.
But here I am, 30 years later writing code for microcontrollers with a few Kb of ROM and a couple of hundred bytes of RAM running at 10Mhz. Plus ca change.
Not only is this page extremely old.. I think I read about it from slashdot over a year ago.
Also not mentioned:
Zero cool
Acid Burn
Lord Nikon
From reading the first post, I honestly thought Gates *was* on this list. I kept pressing 'next' after John Perry Barlow, and the list would just bounce back to the start. I thought this looked like some sort of Gates protection mechanism in Opera, but no - after firing up IE (and typing in the URL), I can confirm he's just not on the list.
by his early concern for copyrights when others were sharing everything,
Actually, the 'others' who where 'sharing everything' were not the copyright holders. The user community of the time was widely sharing things that weren't theirs to share. Bill spoke up, but his company wasn't the only victim of said 'hackers.' There was plenty of other commercial software being spread around without paying for it.
And the 'hacker culture' comes from a different social set than the early 'home computer' enthusiasts anyway. The 'hacker culture' comes from the computer labs of Universities. The 'homebrew computer' culture was a seperate social set entirely.
---
In his early days Gates was a hacker, more so than a lot of self-described Slashdot 'hackers' whose only tools are a phillips screwdriver (because they're 'hardware experts') and Linux installation CDs (because they're 'software experts').
---
Why am I not on the list?
That's great info, unfortunately, I didn't say any of those things you attribute to me ! I agree that IBM was a monster back then, OS/2, as cool as it was, was just an attempt by IBM and Microsoft to own the OS (OS/2 became NT, which became XP...) And I couldn't stand Apple back then... they required you to buy the "Apple Printer" for the Mac I, at like 5 times the cost of a clone printer, which seem just unfair.
My point was that Bill Gates is not a hacker and Microsoft basically stole those ideas. That, my friend, is still the truth today. RTFC
"Whoever would overthrow the liberty of a nation must begin by subduing the freeness of speech."--Benjamin Franklin
...gave us what? Fetchmail?
Wow, help me take off my bra!
I guess OSDN is not a -real- job...
"/Dread"
Exploitation of trust and a forging of information does not a hacker make.
I'm not sure how addictive to computers I am, but I would say that i'm fairly addicted.
Turns the screen or the border black? I remember sys64738 resets the system, but I've forgotten most, maybe all, of the C64 stuff.
Quick generation check: what will happen with the screen if I'll type POKE 53280, 0 on a commodore-64? ;-)
:D
Who cares? Commies suck. Apples rule.
Keeping it real...80s style!
This is a fuzzy barely-remembered guess, but: it sets the background color (maybe the border) to black.
That was the beauty of micros prior to, well, the IBM PC: they were fully knowable by ordinary geeks. You could learn the entire 64KB address space of a C64, the functions of every processor, the workings of every common peripheral.
These days micros have gotten so complex, with so many variables, that all but the most brilliant have to specialise, and only learn certain parts, relying on others to do the kernel hacking or the printer-driver-writing or the protocol conversions, etc.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
Many hackers, including Woz, have delved into the dark side, if just to gain more understanding of it.
That is like saying you read playboy just for the articles.
-Sean
And Ponce de Leon discovered the Mississippi river. I think we would have stumbled across it eventually.
Actually the TRS-80 is what popularized desktop computing. A whopping 128x48 resolution, tape deck support, and that damn orange reset button is where it all started.
Did Gates really popularize desktop computing, or capitalize on it?
Microsoft brought desktop computing to the home user.
And if they hadn't, someone else would have. As many Slashdotters are fond of saying, MS doesn't so much innovate, as embrace and extend good ideas that others came up with.
Do you think that if computers still consisted on thin-client-server models based on huge VAX mainframes
I realize from your reference to starting on Windows 3.1 that you're probably younger than most of us, but are you familiar with the Apple II? The Commodore Vic-20? The TRS-80 Color Computer?
All of these were entirely self-contained microcomputers, and they were part of a home computer market that existed for years before Microsoft had any influence on the market.
thanks to things like Windows, Office, and MSN, modern computing has been made easy and affordable to everyone
God bless them! Without Microsoft, we'd all have to use MacOS, WordPerfect, Lotus 1-2-3, and CompuServe instead. And that would be downright nutty.
An interesting list...
I think many would wonder about Eric Raymond being included since he's more famous for his writings (and strange personality) than his hacking exploits.
John Carmack on the other hand is a brilliant programmer who epitomises the ideal of a hacker to me, a brilliant programmer who has really pushed the limits of the technology and doesn't have any chips on his shoulder or any half-baked ideology to push...
Never seen an early VAX, have you? While not Dinosaur-pen large, the things were pretty massive.
"You've got an invalid haircut" -Warren Zevon - Life'll Kill Ya
Heh, old CBM 8-bits had a Microsoft derived basic, so you're in the same boat as the PC crowd by that analogy.. :-)
:-)
Commodore did have an interesting license with MS - I don't think MS got one cent of royalties on machines after the PET, even though they did write the original basic interpreter for C=
-Jope
Rain.Forrest.Puppy was a great source of inspiration for me.
His hacks on NT ODBC and RDS made him a hero by the script kiddies
His views on hacking and the current scene are well worth the read.
Sanity is the trademark of a weak mind. -- Mark Harrold
dunno
but i do remember poke 65497,0 overclocks my old COCO3 =)
- LastCall_
I think you are confusing business acumen with technical knowledge.
-DOS was a repackaged program
-Apple had the interface that 'revolutionized' home computing.
C'mon, you know the roll call of 'inventions' that Microsoft has bought or copied, bullied and conned. Its great economics 101.
>but thanks to things like
>Windows, Office, and MSN
Again, you confuse innovative with well positioned. They did not invent the graphical interface, the word processor and suites, or instant messaging. Life would have been exactly the same in the computing world if Microsoft never released their Office suite.
The guy who invented the mouse, now that's another story.
Gates' first 6-8 years of career is a very interesting read.
Did Gates have good overal vision? Yes.
Probably better than most.
Its a success story but one that involves as
many con jobs as technical exploits.
You seem to be confusing both.
zeke
It's the cheap and powerful IBM clone.
There were plenty of 'easier to use' alternatives out there. They were either much more expensive (Macintosh) or limited-use cheap consumer devices.
It's fine to be nostalgic and enthusiastic about all those cheap 'whole machine in the keyboard' home computers of the olden days, but it's wrong to be biased about their practicality.
---
Karl Koch(aka hagbard celine) is definately missing in this list, as he is the inventor of the first trojan horse + has a whole movie about him ;-).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hagbard
You could have spared yourself this and used your mod point, since i never said that he wasnt a programmer or that he was a loosy one.
I just said that paul allen is more famous as a hacker. Which is basically what you said:
Paul Allen may be more 'techie'
Bill was more comfortable doing the business stuff
he was never part of the hacker culture
his early concern for copyrights when others were sharing everything
Yes, I, like you, put also sharing as a requisite in the hacker mindset.
Well, maybe the broken-down Apple after they were not able to maintain a monopoly on the GUI (which they tried to do: research the look-n-feel lawsuit). The rich arrogant Apple of the past has somewhat been humbled.
---
There are two people who should be included on this list, which we discussed several years ago.
Seymour Cray and Grace Hopper.
When asked what CAD tools he used to design his supercomputers, Cray replied, "Number three pencils and quadrille pads."
Grace Hopper used to pass out short pieces of wire to illustrate what was a nanosecond. The length of the wire was how far light would travel in a nanosecond.
Omitting Bill Joy over some of these characters was a mistake (Eric Raymond? Riighht) but overall it was a good list.
The mouse is more then hardware to the home user, its the primary interactive device with their PC (there aren't tons of dumb users being click happy for nothing).
I encourage you to research on your own or watch Pirates of Silicon Valley.
I also remember writing self-modifying code in BASIC by clearing the screen, PRINTing the desired line of new code, writing the keycodes for "up-arrow up-arrow return" into the 64's 10-character keyboard input buffer, and stopping execution. The keyboard reader would interpret those as having been typed manually and would move the cursor to the line in question and send a return, and the BASIC interpreter would insert that line into the already-loaded program. Follow the line of code with "RUN $LINENUM" and voila!, your program would have successfully altered itself and resumed execution.
Finally, I'll never forget the day my parents broke down and bought me the "C=64 Macro Assembler" and "Programmer's Reference Manual". I didn't know at the time that Assembler was supposed to be difficult to learn - I thought it was a super-simplified BASIC and treated it accordingly: "Hmmm, I need to set a variable. What command sets a memory location to a value? (Scanning the opcode list in the PRM...) Oh, this'll work! (Typing: LDA, 42; STA $C001)."
Heck, I learned binary math by working through the examples to calculate sprite bitmaps. Man, I loved that little machine.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
...not to be confused with the MIT IHTFP Hack Gallery, the REAL hack ;)
I took a Japanese course many years ago, night class several times a week. One of the stories I wrote for this class included mention of the northern CA town of Chico. I wrote it in Japanese as chi-ko, she said no, write a long o, chi-ko-u, because it is no longer a Spanish word, it is now an American name of an American town, and pronounced with a long o. The more I thought about it, the more I reckoned she was right. Words change when they are adopted from one language into another.
... what is the capital of France? Nope, not pair-us, it's pah-ree. What's the capital of Germany? Wrong, Berlin is the capital of Deutschland.
Japanese did an interesting job on the name of the country Mexico. The Mexican pronunciation of Mexico is May-hee-ko, which works beautifully just like that in Japanese. But they got the name of the country from Americans, so (at least 30 years ago), the Japanese word for that country is pronounced as May-kee-hee-ko.
I like an old joke, when someone gives you grief about pronouncing a city or country name wrongly
Language is what it is. People can quibble all day about whether words have been hijacked by idiots, but language is what it is, and if 99% of the population understands hacker to be evil, then the 1% had better be aware of it.
Infuriate left and right
That's a respectable list of dudez but few compare to Wargames.
-- Each tock of the Planck clock is a new world and here we are still life. --
You're doing the equivalent of describing a meeting between Elizabeth I, Ben Franklin, George Washington, and Abe Lincoln. You'd have to ratchet the speed up and downgrade that OS dramatically to have components that ever actually coexisted in a single working system. The earliest IBM-type PC ran at a snappy 4.77MHz, and MS-DOS 5.0 (which didn't come along until about 10 years later) wouldn't have run (let alone have room for any apps) in only 128KB of RAM.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
Languages ARE defined by usage. Dictionaries follow usage, they do not govern it. People don't learn to read dictionaries before they learn to read and speak.
Languages evolve. Words you use today had different meanings 50 years ago. Computer, for instance, meant people who do computations, by hand or with calculators. No doubt they were just as miffed at the new fangled meaning as you are by the new fangled meaning of hacker. Too bad!
Look up interesting phrases sometime, you would be amazed at how meanings have changed to the opposite of what they used to mean. Look up history of various words. The only languages which can be defined by a dictionary are dead languages like Latin and ancient Greek.
Infuriate left and right
What about those of us who grew up in the '90s ?
"Current status: Kevin Mitnick played himself in 2001's hacker documentary Freedom Downtime. He also appeared on ABC's Alias as a CIA computer whiz; to play the role, Mitnick was only allowed to use prop computers."
How disappointing. Where's all the HOT hacker chicks?
Wanted: witty unique signature. Must be willing to relocate.
Read his "dossier" written by people who know him best, complete with much official documentation.h arlatan/murphy/
http://www.attrition.org/errata/c
In the 70's the Ian Murphy was active in, and repeatedly arrested for: shoplifting, vandalism, and petty theft (mostly at Radio Shack), however; his parents position in the community allowed them to protect him from prosecution. In 1981 he was found guilty of felony fraud and theft. Simply put, he was having high school students steal computer equipment for him. He would them remove the serial numbers and "fence" or sell the stolen equipment. He was eventually caught, convicted, and spent considerable time in prison and/or on probation. Ian claims to have "been the first convicted hacker", and the "first hacker ever convicted of a crime" (which is of course blatantly false). His felony convictions had nothing to do with hacking, but instead felony theft and felony fraud. He has repeatedly tried to capitalize on his felony (and other) convictions. Since most people neglect to verify his claims they take him at face value and falsely believe him to be some kind of hacker or security expert.
Ian A. Murphy is nothing more than a middle aged convicted felon, con artist and petty thief with a long history of running scams. He has virtually no technical skills (which should be obvious), no formal education, no computer training, and no security training. He knows just enough computer lingo and jargon to baffle his audience (provided they lack a technical background). He claims to have been employed by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) as a member of a covert assassination team, and also claims to have been a Navy SEAL. Subject claims to have been taught information warfare by the National Security Agency (NSA). His tradecraft is very poor, and the official records indicate that his claims are totally false. Official government documents indicate that he was never an employee, nor a contractor. It should be mentioned that the subject has been committed to psychiatric facilities several times for "being delusional".
Official Navy documents indicate that the subject enlisted for duty on 6/27/74 in Philadelphia, PA. However, he never made it through boot camp at Great Lakes Naval Training Center. Ian was thrown out after several weeks, and listed as "unsuitable for military service". Officially since he never graduated from Boot Camp the Navy never offered him any type of job. He was given an General Discharge (which is bad news), and was never given any awards or decorations. The Navy confiscated all uniforms, clothes, and equipment from him and literally tossed him out with only the clothes on his back, and a one way bus ticket home. Navy records indicated the he was a high school drop out with no technical training. Despite what Ian has repeatedly claimed, he was never a Navy SEAL, never a Green Beret, Ranger, Spec Ops, etc.
Much, much more to read there.
Likewise it's completely moronic to claim that Gates just sat back and let IBM do all the work for them. (Especially because it ignores that MS completely outwitted IBM during the whole OS/2-Windows thing.)
Microsoft's stated goal was "A computer in every home, on every desk" -- that certainly was not IBM's attitude.
Me, Myself and I!
Those are the greatest hackers!
iirc his name correctly. He's the one that built ( and sold!) the Mac emulator for the Atari ST. Same processor ( Motorola 68000 ) ( and you had to get your own Apple ROMs) - but made the emulator run faster than the native MAC. His articles in an Atari magazine showed me that one could be technically adept as well as socially. I always wondered what happened to him..
Actually my first experience that I can remember is a Macintosh Plus around 86-87. It's rumored that we had an old Zeneth DOS machine back in the day, but I can't remember it. Anyway after that Mac Plus nothing else would do anyway....
"Personal ownership is a hallmark of conservative capitalism. And I don't believe I am entitled to anything that I did n
Someone once told me they stole it from Dartmouth Basic
There's the occasional old fart who still uses it in its previous form, but that's another word that's been pretty much changed to mean something else, and far more so that "hacker". I'm not saying it's a good or bad thing. It just is.
--- Ban humanity.
The key difference between Microsoft and IBM/Apple/Digital Research/Lotus/Everyone Else is that Microsoft priced stuff cheap and marketed their products for maximum adoption. Everyone else was trying to fatten their bottom line.
You could argue that others were willing to bring the PC Revolution to the masses, but Microsoft was certainly the most agressive and successful at doing so.
It's just like Henry Ford -- he wasn't the first to use assembly line and mass marketing techniques, but he was most successful at doing so, and thus his name is in the history books.
Whenever I hear the word 'Innovation', I reach for my pistol.
...cause we all know Pirates of Silicon valley is totally accurate ;) I mean comon they had a freaken Apple IIc in a scene that was suppposed to be several years before it came out! (for those intrested it's in the background in one of those scenes at apple during Mac development) Also I coulda sworn that I saw a green c:\ reflection on bill gates glasses during the scene when he is "programming" dos....double plus nerd huh?
"Personal ownership is a hallmark of conservative capitalism. And I don't believe I am entitled to anything that I did n
My first experience with an OS was on my father's home-brewed OS called 'NetDOS,' or whatever it was supposed to be named. He wrote it in the early 80's, and it had network functionality (with my dad's own protocols.) Some guy was supposed to sell it, but he never followed through. My dad could have been... oh well, nevermind.
I'm a second-generation computer nerd, but my nerd-dom goes all the way back to Newton. :-P
You need to restart your computer. Hold down the Power button for several seconds or press the Restart button.
Bill Gates would still be stuck flogging DOS licenses to IBM customers if it hadn't been for Compaq. Remember that MS-DOS only ran on IBM machines, and it was only when Compaq successfully cloned the IBM-PC with a masterful stroke of reverse engineering that the IBM-PC Compatible became cheap enough to achieve the market dominance it enjoys today.
Gates got lucky because of Compaq. He himself did nothing to bring easy to use cheap PC's to the desktop.
The ways of gods are mysteriously indistinguishable from chance.
I thought microsoft brought desktop computing to the home user... Then microsoft copied it poorly. I do remember Win3.1, and 2.0, and 1.0. It was quite awhile before MS ever got "desktop" close to right. MacHeads had it for awhile, first.
Couldn't you perhaps say that BG hacked the business system?
After colleagues at the San Diego Supercomputing Center informed Shimomura that someone had stolen hundreds of software programs and files from his work station,
Yeah - he sounds like a REAL expert - having to be told that his workstation had been compromised...? Not to mention left vulnerable in the first place.
Some Radio Shack branded machine at my uncle's place, it had BASCI in which I programmed a few games.
The in the Uni we had a Burroughs multiuser system.
Around this time I worked equally in the Burroughs and the first PCs in Mexico City.
My first job was in a UNISYS A-12.
My second job was with Sun (SunOS 3.x, funnily enough our secretaries used Macs).
So there, you are pressuming too much.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
What about Kibo? Probably the most cultish figure on the internet, a hacker with quite a bit of legend wrapped around him, and yet he isn't on the list. They forsake Kibo and Kibology!
In the bio for Vladimir Levin:
"...a security system so tight that no other financial institution in the world has it."
As I'm sure Bruce Schneir would fall all over himself to point out, this association actually decreases the likelyhood that the system is actually secure.
My other
I "met" Mr. Venema at a trade show. He is definitely on par with these guys: wrote TCP Wrappers and Postfix, and knows more about security than anyone I can think of. He's also just as charismatic as Linus, as far as I can tell.
Ah, reading this list brings back memories. It's disheartening to see Phiber Optik on this list but no one from LoD. Phiber was a major ahole, along with most of MoD. It's also interested that he was part of a failed security company while everyone else went off to bigger and better things. Ah, sweet justice.
Hacker is a nominative use to recognize the technical skills of a computer enthusiast.
Was Bill Gates a hacker? Yes, surely, he obviously could program his way out of trouble.
Now, were his technical skills up to scratch? That is more debatable.
Bill Gates certainly changed the computer world, if the changes have been goo it is left to personal interpretation, but Bill Gates will be remembered as a ruthless businessman (and here give ruthless whatever slant you want, I mean it negatively), not a technical person (how could he, he almost missed the Internet and his companies most successful products have been based on ideas developped elsewhere).
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
# Bill Gates - Altair BASIC, Apple II BASIC, founded Microsoft
but see.. how many of those hall of famers stated on a trs-80 or other system running the basic written by gates and allen? and we're not talking basic as a programming language so much as basic as an OS, you turned em on, and boom you were in basic, using basic commands to access your entire system.
i dont know about his being hailed as a hacker of fame (dont get me started on a few others on that list too) but he definately had a huge impact the computer community AND the hacker community.
(im not worried, flames keep me warm in the winter)
Oracle CEO.
The guy who "invented" ctrl-alt-del.
Professor Shamir, for his general contribution to mankind.
RMS, for starting Hurd.
Trinity (for another post)
Oliver's twist person.
Doctor Who.
The guy who invented Microsoft Excel.
MacOS-X developers.
Al Gore.
Michael Jordan.
Bijin Ahandi (famous egyptian programmer)
John Lakos (invented #ifdef inclusion safety guard for C and C++)
Natalie Portmann.
Adolf Hitler (he would be a BAD hax0r if alive)
Bob.
MS-DOS? Windows 3.1? My first computer experience was OS/8 on a PDP-8 microcomputer.
MS-DOG on a IBM 5150 couldn't hold the bits of CP/M running on any of IBM's competitors in 1980. It's amazing that the weaker OS on substandard hardware on a processor with a totally fucked ISA became the standard computer architecture of today.
Abort, Retry or Fail? I never did work out the difference between Abort and Fail.
That's very perceptive of you Mr Stapleton and rather unexpected in a G Major
Damn skippy! And unlike some on the list (ESR comes to mind), Kibo at least DID something. Hell, he rewrote network history.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
OK, I'll disagree.
First of all, Bill Gates got started as a programmer. From most accounts, probably a fairly good programmer.
Then he went to the business world, and became really good at that. Frighteningly good.
BUT, there's nothing either hack-ish or particularly innovative for that matter, in his behaviour. Actually, there was one thing he did: Copyright, patent, and charge through the nose for the basic software needed for a machine to work.
Desktop computing was well on its way before he started to make things user friendly. Atari and Commodore had their 16-bit machines out with plug-and-play hardware, a mouse, and a GUI, when Microsoft was still pushing DOS. Of course, the Mac predated them both, and was VERY popular.
Bill Gates happened to be the right guy at the right time in the right place to capitalise on this stuff. Without him, the market would be different but no less advanced than it is now.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
John Walker, founder of Autodesk, creates and gives away a lot of great stuff, including astronomy, math, and science programs. His web site is great: fourmilab.net
Steve Gibson, author of the SpinRite utilities that date back to MS-DOS days at least, is also a prolific creator of lean, mean, free stuff. His web site, grc.com, has a catalog of cool little Windows utilities for changing settings, detecting spyware, closing security holes, etc., for Windows. In true hacker style, he prefers to do his coding in assembly language, and his stuff is consistently high-quality and useful. For example, try out wizmo, a little program that can be used to trigger the screen saver and to change other settings, plus has a built-in graphical gravitational simulator, and all in about 37K of code!
Have you read my blog lately?
I call that a pretty good trade. Where exactly can I find a deal like that - I've got a couple of old keyboards up in the loft.
That's very perceptive of you Mr Stapleton and rather unexpected in a G Major
check the wayback machine:
/ /t lc.discovery.com/convergence/hackers/bio/bio.html
http://web.archive.org/web/20010721134101/http:
July 2001. I've seen this page in about every other google search i've ever done on one of these guys.
Yeah, I remember checking out this Hacker List like 2 years ago, after watching some special they had on TLC. I'm glad I don't pay for access to these "new" articles.
Liar.
Do daemons dream of electric sleep()?
And for those of you that think the fact that Gates is a business man now, and that MSN should disqualify him, I have only this to say: Should we now start removing people from places like the baseball hall of fame after they retire?
Should we start ADDING people to the baseball hall of fame that play tennis?
Perhaps you could buy yourself a valid argument with some logic.
http://jesus.everdense.com/
Well, I agree that some of the folks on that list leave a lot to be desired. I don't know about the anonymous remailer "hacker" for one or the EFF founder for another. However, people like ESR and RMS - while, perhaps, out of place around the likes of Condor, Cap'n Crunch, and Phiber Optik - definitely exemplify the "good guy" hacker persona as much as the others exemplify the "dark side" of the art.
I don't think I'm convinced ol' Billy Boy belongs on there though. Of course, look at it this way. Without guys like Woz they might not have had trash 80s with BASIC anyway, so maybe if Woz belongs, Bill does too.... I dunno... I still think Bill has been and always will be a marketeer at heart. Maybe he should go on for Soc Eng skills?
Alito: A vote for Alito is a punch in the eye to put that bitch back in her place!
Interestingly, GEM is now freely available as OpenGEM available under the GPL license.
That's very perceptive of you Mr Stapleton and rather unexpected in a G Major
So, the Homebrew Computing Club were just using slide rules, then? Or are you saying that the HCC was a myth, fabricated by the Military Industrial Complex?
[original AC posting...]
Yes, CrazyFinn, I have seen many early VAX machines!
They were usually tucked in around the odd corners of the machine room, next the the air-con and power conditioning gear while the IBM processer and DASD boxes took up most of the floorspace.
There are as many definitions of the word Hacker as there are geeks who post to slashdot (and more).
The definitions all overlap --- slightly.
Woz will be the first to tell you that Wozniak/Jobs wasn't the "Wozniak/Jobs relationship" that a lot of people think it was, either.
Get Fscked you MS Karma wh0re!
Outnumbered, but not outclassed. If you never made a telnet connection via the receiver of a rotary-dial phone, never ran an aplication directly off a magnetic tape (or punch card!), never heard of Sperry or VAX, never set through a Pascal or FORTRAN class taught by a High School Math teacher who knew less about the school's computers than you did, and don't recall those horrible IBM commercials with the Charlie Chaplin look-alike pimping "business" software, then 70s and 80s hackers will probably forever view you as a "New Kid."
Like I said in another post, the word "quiz" was originally used to describe an odd or unusual person. Then it began to be used for unusual toys, and only after a long while did it get applied to a form of test.
Things just happen faster today, so a word goes from being coined to bastardized in, like, days.
--- Ban humanity.
Actually, Bill G. really did just manage to be in the right place at the right time to get himself inserted into the loop. The PC revolution would have done just fine (probably better) without him.
First of all, had there been no Microsoft, IBM would have just licenced CP/M instead. The first several versions of DOS bore a REMARKABLE resemblance to CP/M anyway, right down to loading com programs at offset 0x100.
At the point where windows was still a crash ridden bugfest (even moreso than after 3.1) that was shipped as a runtime with individual applications (since nobody in their right mind would have run it as a standalone), there were a few Unix choices for the PC.
CP/M or Unix, either way, the thin client connected to a vax would have been replaced by the PC. Most likely, IBM would have done OS/2 anyway, after all, it WAS a better Windows than Windows (but not as well marketed).
The Word Processor of the day was Word Perfect. Had Office never come into existance, I suppose it still would be. Unlike Office, it was fairly easy to get complete documentation of the EP file formats and an SDK to go with it.
The internet happpened IN SPITE of Microsoft, not because of it. People were usiong Trumpet winsock on win3.1 for dialup internet while Bill G. claimed it was a passing fad.
The browser of choice was Netscape.
Linux would most probably still have wanted Unix for his '386, so he still would have done what he did. RMS would still have written GNU.
As a hacker, Bill G. was the anti-hacker. While the hackers traded code for the love of coding, Bill G. started charging for binaries and witholding the source.
His first proprietary app was a BASIC interpreter for the Altair. It was prepaid by a number of people. It was over a year late and still shot through with bugs. Someone managed to get hold of one of his paper tapes and copy it. The tape was distributed amongst hobbiests, most of whom HAD paid for it, but didn't actually get a copy in any form (much less working) until the tape was copied. It wasn't 'piracy', it was a consumer action that probably hurt him a lot less than being taken to court over and over again.
Gates and MS certainly did have an effect on modern computing. I believe that the effect was to set it back 5-10 years while making a pile of money. He was NOT a hacker.
Theres a good book out there for all of you interested in the early hacker/cracker movement written by Bruce Sterling.Its called the Hacker Crackdown and is available here in the electronic format.
Very well researched and written.Gives you a good insight intothe days of LoD,MoD and others.A lot of the guys on this list feature in the book.
Lord of the Binges.
Bill Gates is a great business man, I give that to him.. but one of the greatest hackers of all time? Nope. I respect Microsoft for everything they have done... or stolen and made better... or bought... but No. I don't agree that he's a hacker.
"Instant gratification takes too long." - Carrie Fisher
"UNIX helped users with general computing, word processing and networking, and soon became a standard language."
Also note: Unix should be lowercase - it's not an acronym, it's just that at the same time it was created, so too was the print formatter's (troff?) smallcaps function. They got all excited and started using smallcaps for the word "unix" wherever it was found.
I mod down anyone who says "I will be modded down for this", regardless of the rest of their comment
You're wrong. Bill Gates did not bring us desktop computing. Now, he did do something else. He was a major part of computing turning to commodity hardware. And that was no small step in computing history. Bill deserves some credit there. But not for the laundry list you've provided.
Others have already pointed out that Apple should get credit where you've been attributing it to Microsoft (although no mention of the Apple Lisa). However, they miss a couple important points (that happen before the Mac).
The Apple II had a major impact to microcomputing. First, it was the first real consumer "home computer". It was the first system that came complete with a keyboard in a custom, stylish plastic case. Secondly, it ran the first business killer app - VisiCalc. The advent of the spreadsheet made microcomputers a must-have for business and extended them beyond the realms of hobbiests and scientists. And it generated a market that had taken IBM by such suprise that they had to rush to market with a "personal computer" using off-the-shelf components (and thus providing another key piece to the formation of a commodity hardware market). Also keep in mind that the expanding business market also expanded the home computer market as consumers mirrored their work environment at home.
Microsoft missed the Internet boat. Consumer Internet access was gaining popularity well before Microsoft did their historical turn-on-a-dime. It was smart of Microsoft to make that change and make their systems easier to use with Internet technology. But it was something that would have happened with or without them. Not because of them.
Grandma should have a Mac. Back when Microsoft's supported efforts were called "plug-and-pray", Apple's offering Just Worked.
Don't get me wrong. Its a good goal. And Microsoft has improved vastly since those early days. Heck - even various Linux distros put forth a rather good effort.
But if "ease of use" was such an important factor, Microsoft would not be so dominant today.
I can understand being ignorant of history - especially if you start your own memory of computing at DOS and Win3.1x. But you'll need to get a better historical perspective if you want your commentary on "pioneers" to have any weight.
One interesting side note - MSN was a major issue when it surfaced. It was going to take on AOL. And AOL's grumblings over MSN sounded much like the whole IE issue. But then, something happened. The Internet. It transformed both AOL (who first offered Internet access as a feature, then became an ISP). And it completely changed what MSN was to be even before it was. All of this was a reaction to events rather than being a pioneer.
who?
BTW has anyone done any serious work on the GEM source that was released a while back? That is, has anything modern-world useful come of it?
I first met GEM under Ventura Publisher. I've got the entire commercial GEM package in a box around here somewhere (courtesy of DAK's going-out-of-business sale).
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
I found a copy of Windows 1.0 on a BBS years ago. (I have no idea if it was authentic.) It looked a lot like dosshell, as I recall.
Bullshit! Bill Gates is a robber baron. He has done exactly 0 to advance computing. He has done a lot to line his pocket book, but nothing else. The internet came before Billy, was thriving before Billy, occastionally gets pulled down because of Billy's crap software, but that's it. He didn't even want the internet standard -TCP/IP- he wanted his own winsock protocol for a while. The GUI came before Billy (thanks Xerox PARC/Alan Kay, Doug Englebart, et al). The modern GUI first appeared on Xerox machines, then apples, then amigas and much later PC's (several years later). Bill's company did for a while put 'reboot' buttons on the front of PC's (gee, thanks Bill). Bill Gates can be listed along beside P.T. Barnum and W. Raldolph Hurst, and OPEC circa 1973. Bill's technical skills are on par with those of your typical end-user who has successfully read 'computers for dummies'. He is good at getting people to buy though. (See above reference to P.T. Barnum, etc.) Otherwise, he's an idiot with a bowl cut. Pioneer? NO. Johnny-come-lately? Oh Yeah.
It's just nerd semantics. Only on Slashdot is there suddenly some sort of big issue between the usage of "hacker" and "cracker." The entire rest of the world uses "hacker."
It's like a recent post I wrote (check my history). It was a tongue-in-cheek list of the reasons nerds don't get laid--it was originally +5, then suddenly plummeted to 1 when someone pointed out I confused "geek" and "nerd."
It was insane--one of the points I had written was that geeks get overly concerned about pointless definitions and facts that nobody else even acknowledges. And here was someone who completely missed that and actually replied to criticize a joke post, thereby proving it true.
It's stupid to expect everyone to accept our little definition of "hacker" and "cracker" and get all bent out of shape when 90% of the world continues to use the definition they all already agreed on. Actually, it's a bit self-absorbed.
If Rosa Parks wasn't going to stand her ground on the bus
If Rosa Parks was a hacker, Bill Gates was the gladhanding polititian who didn't really like black people but figured he could get elected if he co-opted the image of Rosa Parks.
He took credit for "taking the initiative in inventing the Internet."
Guess what, he did. He helped sign in the legislative funding for the project. He was referring to himself as having invented it--merely signing the initial legislation that created it.
He claimed he was tired when he said it. I can understand. After having done a ton of interviews and things, and talking about technology to one particular interviewer and thinking back on signing into law the legislation, I'd probably also say, "yeah, I helped take the initiative in creating the Internet" without realizing how out-of-context it would suddenly be taken.
It freezes over the depths of hell, but it warms my heart that /.ers can finally accept that although his parctices are sometimes out of place, Bill Gates has contributed alot to modern personal computing.
If we don't make light of everything, we are just stumbling in the dark - Blank
The Lisa interface was stolen from the Xerox Altair. Bill stole from the same source. But he did give the guy who designed a lot of the GUI a bag of gold for his trouble.
Apple then went out and tried to sue competitors into the ground. The GEM interface on the Atari was miles better than the crappy Mac effort of the day. Apple bullied the GEM O/S out of the market. Microsoft had the guts to stand up to the bullies at apple.
Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
"Would the Internet have blossomed into the vast information network it is today without the aid of easy-to-use software from Microsoft?"
Arrrgh. For those of us who remember 1995, the answer is yes, despite MS. Back in 1994, when I was running Chicago (Win95 beta's), MS were pushing MSN which was a proprietry alternative to the internet. You had to buy 'Blackbird' SDK's to create content.
And yes, MSN was basically a big pile of boxes in Redmond that was fully centralised (like CompuServe at the time). MS didn't even have a webbrowser when I started using WWW with Netscape Navigator 1.0.
It was only when MS woke up and figured out that TCP/IP and the WWW was bigger than them, that that went out and brought IE and supported the internet. MS Mail lingered on for a while before it to died and was replaced with SMTP/POP.
Of course those companies who had already created content for the MSN network got burned. MS re-used the MSN name as cover for the cock-up and turned it into a ISP/web site/AOL competitor.
I didn't know at the time that Assembler was supposed to be difficult to learn - I thought it was a super-simplified BASIC and treated it accordingly: "Hmmm, I need to set a variable. What command sets a memory location to a value? (Scanning the opcode list in the PRM...) Oh, this'll work! (Typing: LDA, 42; STA $C001)."
Ah... C001. Right at the beginning of the tape buffer. I'm currently taking a required class in 80x86 Assembley, and I'll be damned if I don't keep thinking, "Where are JSR and LDA in here?"
Yeah, yeah, I know, I'll be lynched for saying that Bill "I am Satan" Gates should be on par with RMS, ESR and Linus, but think about this for a second.
He made market changing contributions, but I would not put him up with Ken and Dennis. How long did it take Microsoft to deliver a relatively stable OS with memory protection in the kernel (NT)? They had to base it on another OS which was not written by themselves. Is that innovation? They finally glued the upside down MacOS-like GUI on top of it, is that innovation? Was it innovation when they threatened OEM's that they would be left out in the cold if they did not forcibly bundle MS shit on their hardware? Is purchasing smaller companies who look competitive in a very small area or using their ideas and then defeating them in court with MS endless financial might innovation?
With the extraordinary financial power of Microsoft and the huge talented teams of programmers which they can afford, why can't they make a kernel as secure as OpenBSD's or even Apple's Mac OSX? Surely with all that money they can provide security and functionality! But no, they concentrate on innovative marketing campains which seek to convince the general public that they need Microsofts latest "innovations".
Bill founded what is now the largest software company in the world, and wether or not you agree with him, he has made a important contribution to the computing industry: Microsoft brought desktop computing to the home user.
No, I believe that Apple brought desktop computing to the home user. To add insult to injury, MacOS was very stable considering that they only recently got memory protection with OSX.
Microsoft now dominates that market through knife-in-the-back tactics. I don't know what would be worse, being a friend of Microsoft or being a foe. I would not put Bill Gates up on a pedestal because he managed desktop dominance. Look at how he achieved it.
They have not innovated as much as they have simply lifted from elsewhere.
Now, be honest. How many of us had our first computer experience with MS-DOS or Windows 3.1?
Commodore 64 actually. Yes, I was using Mircrosoft BASIC. But I was more interested in 6502 assembler.
Do you think that if computers still consisted on thin-client-server models based on huge VAX mainframes, that Joe and Jane Smith would be able to dial-in to AOL and connect to thousands of people around the world?
Yes. I'm known to surf the net on a DEC VT220 at times.
Would the Internet have blossomed into the vast information network it is today without the aid of easy-to-use software from Microsoft?
It is a vast information network? I think the quality of the information on the internet was much better back in 1991 (when I got on) than it is now. It has become a great big stinking sewer of mostly misinformation because every moron with a computer now gets on with his Wintel PC and AOL account.
How about Grandma who wants to set up a webcam so she can chat with her grandchildren? She doesn't want to have to sit and hack kernels for hours. She wants Plug-and-Play, baby.
If she bought an Apple Mac way back when they delivered desktop computing and upgraded as she liked along the Apple path, she'd be using a web cam if that is what she wanted. She might even be showing off her wrinkley old bits to the World for $4.95 per month.
Look, disagree all you like, but thanks to things like Windows, Office, and MSN, modern computing has been made easy and affordable to everyone, thanks to pioneers like Bill Gates.
Affordable? When the latest full version of MS Office is released in Australia, it typically costs around one thousand Australian dollars. The OS' are expensive too. Unless of course, I get them cheap with my next PC and MS succeeds in dominating one more desktop.
--
A Commodore, an assembler tape, and one bored kid
War crimes, torture, lies, illegal spying... Would someone give Bush a blowjob, already, so he can be impeached?
Those were minicomputers, dude.
And Charles Babbage. The first hackers.
If Wozniak is (correctly) on the list instead of Jobs, then Paul Allen should be on it instead of Bill Gates. Gates isn't really a tech guy, more of a business type.
It's news for nerds, and thus news to nerds.
Although there are quite a few comments about how poorly the terminoligy is used, they do have a page on "lingo" as the link says. To my (more than likely) limited knowledge, these definitions are correct, however poorly used in the bios' section.s ary/glossary.html
http://tlc.discovery.com/convergence/hackers/glos
A rather well done page, but a poorly designed website I think...
I agree, he certainly popularized the trend of exchanging money for goods and services.
Enough posting for today, I'm going to go hack my bicycle to the theater and hack a movie.
Look Bill Gates did not even own a copy of DOS when IBM went looking for one. He just intercepted the request from IBM, offered his own copy (vapourware) and when the verbal was approved he went out and bought QDOS - renamed it MS-DOS and the rest his history...is that fraud?
Now I was pretty young at the time, so I don't remember exact specs. Quoted from the web page above
My particular version did not have a hard disk, but 10MiB sounds about right for a more expensive model that shipped with hard drive the time. The next PC we had was an Amstrad 1512 and that got retrofitted with a 30MiB hard drive.
I said I was probably wrong about the DOS version. The clock speed was a total guess.
Conversion Rate Optimisation French / English consultant
The Altair on the cover of PE was an empty case. MITS had shipped the very first Altair to them but it was lost in transit. They didn't have time to wire & test a new machine in time for the PE article so they slapped the switches through the front panel, put the lid on and photographed it.
Homebrew had only been around for a couple of months before the PE Altair article and were mostly building TV Typewriters or a handful of very very simple 4004 based machines. MITS started shipping Altair 8008 kits within a couple of months of the PE article, and the first one assembled was by Steve Dompier, a Homebrew attendee.
I once knew a guy how said he met Bill Gates once. He (Gates) was handing out free Windows 1.0 disks at Comdex. Apparently it was just a single 1.4" disk, but I guess it existed.
If you open your mind too wide, people will throw trash in it.
The first computer I owned was a VIC-20, followed by an Amiga 1000, then Amiga 2000 (which I still own). I didn't get another machine until 1998, when I built myself a Linux box. The first computer I ever used was a TRS-80 Model I, which I used to teach myself BASIC. Ah, those were the days...
wants to be the first monkey to touch the monolith
True, but this more like adding Micheal Jordan to the baseball hall of fame because he is really famous and was also a pro baseball player. Bill Gates was never famous for being a good hacker - while he was a definately good hacker, he is not in the top 10. What he is famous for is being a shrewd businessman.