According to online users, anything and everything qualifies as a hack these days. Some believe typing on a keyboard is a hack.

I own the book "Hackers" (Heroes Of The Computer Revolution) by Steven Levy.

There are enough online posts or online articles that ask what "Hacker" means to them or what their personal definition means and I owned my first Commodore 64 in 1983 so I was around a little longer than the new generation was; I'm assuming this generation online are mostly kids. I was given the book "Hackers" for Christmas and the gift giver said it was where the term "Hacker" originated from. I'm just a little tired of the definitions I see today qualifying as Hacks. Read about some of the real Hackers. This book is probably the only book that shows where the term "Hacker" came from. I only read the book once but the term "Hacker" seems to have originated with the railroad so if you read the book, please tell me if you have a better idea.

You can find the book on Amazon. The electronic version is cheaper. This book is copyrighted 1984.

http://tmrc.mit.edu/hackers-ref.html


http://catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/H/hacker.html

When I think of a hacker, I'm remembering a 1983 movie called 'Wargames'. Classic movie there. So this book is not about electronic 'hacking'?

There is the old version of the book and the new 25 year anniversary edition:




http://www.amazon.com/Hackers-Computer- ... pd_sim_b_1

I have Levy's book too!

Somewhere along the way hackers become the bad guys in the view of the public. How come the term cracker is unfamiliar to lots of people this days, and when was it first used?

Cracking is a subclass of Hacking, so it's still technically correct though obviously overreaching into the problem you point out.

I do like the very broad definition of hacking as "Making something do what it was never intended to do", which applies to both the physical world and computing.

I always thought of hacking as figuring out something, more code than hardware, starting with inadequate information/documentation, whether because the supplier has been out of business for a long time, or no longer supports the product and maybe there aren't even any people at the company anymore who even know what the product is, or, in the illegal case, because you don't have a right to it, etc.. I think of the illegal part as only a small branch of it.

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http://WilsonMinesCo.com/ lots of 6502 resources

etymology online says (amongst other things):

Great book. did get to spend the night at one of the legend's apartment mentioned int he book. was hoping to talk tech galore. Nothing of the sort, sadly. Sigh.

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"My biggest dream in life? Building black plywood Habitrails"

I used to think the term was used for programmers who hit the keyboard before designing what they were about to write, and thus ended up with nasty, buggy, spaghetti code. A sort of byword for the non software engineers.

Is that to say you still start your programs with pencil & paper? I start on the keyboard, but more and more, it's very structured, even if in assembly. A nice thing about using the DOS/ANSI character set is that you can put diagrams right in the comments, with smooth lines. My programmer's text editor takes advantage of a high-res monitor (unlike the old 80x32 people usually think of DOS having) and also lets these things be drawn nearly as easily as in CAD. I haven't seen anything as nice written for a GUI.

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http://WilsonMinesCo.com/ lots of 6502 resources

There's the quick hack, and then there's a hacker like Guy Steele, who is a better programmer than most, but happy to apply the label to himself.
Cheers
Ed

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x86? We ain't got no x86. We don't need no stinking x86!