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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.
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
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 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.
Which hacked code? And which preferred to hack away at victims' corpses instead?
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)
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.
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....
2 1337 4 u!
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.
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.
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.
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 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...
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?
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.
Bill Joy deserves to be on this list.
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.
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.
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
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
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?
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.
This top X list reminds me of that funny game Programming Language Inventor or Serial Killer?. (warning: flash site).
Speak truth to power.
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.
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
... 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.
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."
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
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?
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
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.
Especially since he didn't first discover it.
--Stephen
Did you ever notice that *nix doesn't even cover Linux?
Yes. Languages evolve. If that word evolves that way, then so be it.
My favorite theoretical case is in Larry Niven novels where "bleep" and "censored" become actual swear words that will get you shocked looks in certain company.
--- Ban humanity.
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').
---
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
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...
dunno
but i do remember poke 65497,0 overclocks my old COCO3 =)
- LastCall_
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?
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.
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.
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
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)
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?
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.
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