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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"
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
"Definitely a few names that probably don't deserve to be on the list"
/pick one
Definitely probably?
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.
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.
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)
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.
No way. This list consists of people driving their stakes in the lawless frontier. Stroustrup was a cultural innovator: the first person who took seriously the proposition of hybridizing conceptual elegance with grungy reality. Whereas Perl was biased more toward grunge, and Ruby was biased more toward elegance, C++ gives them both an equally bad treatment.
Stroustrup might belong on a list of cultural forefathers of the computing era, a list which would also include Thompson and Richie. Note that I would not include Grace Hopper, Ken Iverson, or John Backus on this list because none of these languages were driven by cultural effects, although one could make a case for Grace Hopper.
Larry Wall would be included on my list, and Edsgar Dijkstra, because they both had strong opinions about the cultural effects of programming practice. Knuth took a stab at it with literate programming, but he doesn't make my cut, it was too much shaped around his own unique mind. The internet protocol and the www were inherently cultural, so there would be nominations from both camps.
I have one acid test I use to determine whether a language was strongly driven by culture, or whether culture was grafted on as an afterthought.
Does the language allow constructs to get you out of places where you never should have arrived in the first place? The real world is full of those situations, usually because of a mishmash of influences from different sources. The anti-cultural languages are the ones which create proscriptions on the grounds that "no sane program would ever require that construct". The cultural languages are the ones that allow a feature on the basis that "if you get yourself into a mess of this nature, this construct might be your bridge of salvation while you survive to fight another day". Good cultural languages provide plenty of affordances to mitigate the unspeakable. Bad cultural languages slap you on the wrist "you should never have wound up here in the first place".
Which is where I think the majority of languages conceived in university settings have failed. In universities, they seem to lack a deep unstanding of just how big a mess the real world can dump on your lap, where everyone involved was trying to make the best of a bad situation, and plenty of people involved were well aware of what should and shouldn't be done, but they wound up in bad place regardless.
One could argue that Visual Basic was a cultural language, but granting an award for VB would be like adding the first person who ever sent a spam to the hackers hall of fame.
Lest we forget: spam was a stellar hack. It exploited technical and cultural weaknesses within a system and its establishment to turn the system against itself. Hackers have a curious trait of not being too impressed by getting a dose of their own medicine, or admitting that it happened either.
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.
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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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').
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