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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.
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.
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)
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...
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
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.
The mst deserving will NEVER be on a "list...
That is true! I feel Alan Turing and some of his colleagues deserved mention for breaking the Nazi's Enigma code. I suppose building a pioneering computer and helping to save the world from Fascism is way less important than the exploits of
Kevin Mitnick.
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
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
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.
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?