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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.
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.
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.
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.
No way. This list consists of people driving their stakes in the lawless frontier. Stroustrup was a cultural innovator: the first person who took seriously the proposition of hybridizing conceptual elegance with grungy reality. Whereas Perl was biased more toward grunge, and Ruby was biased more toward elegance, C++ gives them both an equally bad treatment.
Stroustrup might belong on a list of cultural forefathers of the computing era, a list which would also include Thompson and Richie. Note that I would not include Grace Hopper, Ken Iverson, or John Backus on this list because none of these languages were driven by cultural effects, although one could make a case for Grace Hopper.
Larry Wall would be included on my list, and Edsgar Dijkstra, because they both had strong opinions about the cultural effects of programming practice. Knuth took a stab at it with literate programming, but he doesn't make my cut, it was too much shaped around his own unique mind. The internet protocol and the www were inherently cultural, so there would be nominations from both camps.
I have one acid test I use to determine whether a language was strongly driven by culture, or whether culture was grafted on as an afterthought.
Does the language allow constructs to get you out of places where you never should have arrived in the first place? The real world is full of those situations, usually because of a mishmash of influences from different sources. The anti-cultural languages are the ones which create proscriptions on the grounds that "no sane program would ever require that construct". The cultural languages are the ones that allow a feature on the basis that "if you get yourself into a mess of this nature, this construct might be your bridge of salvation while you survive to fight another day". Good cultural languages provide plenty of affordances to mitigate the unspeakable. Bad cultural languages slap you on the wrist "you should never have wound up here in the first place".
Which is where I think the majority of languages conceived in university settings have failed. In universities, they seem to lack a deep unstanding of just how big a mess the real world can dump on your lap, where everyone involved was trying to make the best of a bad situation, and plenty of people involved were well aware of what should and shouldn't be done, but they wound up in bad place regardless.
One could argue that Visual Basic was a cultural language, but granting an award for VB would be like adding the first person who ever sent a spam to the hackers hall of fame.
Lest we forget: spam was a stellar hack. It exploited technical and cultural weaknesses within a system and its establishment to turn the system against itself. Hackers have a curious trait of not being too impressed by getting a dose of their own medicine, or admitting that it happened either.
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.