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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.
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
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)
Is she in the hackers hall of fame? Perhaps Matthew Lillard as well? Where are AcidBurn and ZeroCool when you need 'em?
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.
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)
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....
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.
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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
Especially since he didn't first discover it.
--Stephen
Did you ever notice that *nix doesn't even cover Linux?
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').
---
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?