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Hackers Hall of Fame

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the did-they-pick-the-right-ones dept.

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.

6 of 445 comments (clear)

  1. I dunno by fjordboy · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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...

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    The anti-salmon
  2. But isn't language defined by usage? by HarveyBirdman · · Score: 5, Insightful
    If 99% of the world uses "hacker" in a negative context, I think the real hackers had better find a new term, because language is driven by those that use it. I feel your pain, but I think it's a losing battle. There's many cases of word meaning evolving from one thing to another.

    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.

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  3. Re:Bill Gates, Hall of Fame Hacker? (P.S. First Po by Aneurysm · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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

  4. Good publicity / Bad publicity by dkleinsc · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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!"

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    I am officially gone from /. Long live http://www.soylentnews.com/
  5. Re:Bill Gates, Hall of Fame Hacker? (P.S. First Po by inode_buddha · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

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  6. Re:Bill Gates, Hall of Fame Hacker? (P.S. First Po by Endive4Ever · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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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