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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.
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.
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
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
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.
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 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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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)
Bill Joy deserves to be on this list.
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.
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.
---
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.
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.
A perfectly accurate gender neutral pronoun exists ... "it".
However, people see it as somehow implying "non-person". Rubbish.
Reason why there is hope for the future generation #364:
"I wish my grass was emo so it could cut itself."
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
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.
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.
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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...
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.
Couldn't you perhaps say that BG hacked the business system?
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
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.
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