Hackers Hall of Fame 445
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.
news? this is over three years old. (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Obvious mistakes... (Score:2, Informative)
Re:But isn't language defined by usage? (Score:3, Informative)
That's what I say
It confuses people, but they usually ask what you mean. And yes, I have bought the t-shirt!
Re:Bill Gates, Hall of Fame Hacker? (P.S. First Po (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:Bill Gates, Hall of Fame Hacker? (P.S. First Po (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Bjarne Stroustrup (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:Bjarne Stroustrup (Score:4, Informative)
So the two people really missing are Nygaard an Dahl.
Re:Bill Gates, Hall of Fame Hacker? (P.S. First Po (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:Hacker vs. Cracker (Score:2, Informative)
Computing is, in some ways, a subculture, and as any other subculture, we can have our own sayings, traditions, and so on. If I talk with my dad, a hacker is a bad thing. When I talk with my CS fellow students, a hacker is something to be in admiration of.
There is room for both.
Re:Stealing the Mona Lisa... (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Re:Bill Gates, Hall of Fame Hacker? (P.S. First Po (Score:3, Informative)
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!
Re:Stealing the Mona Lisa... (Score:3, Informative)
CTRL-ALT-DEL...
Um, I thought David Bradley of IBM gave us that...
Re:Bill Gates, Hall of Fame Hacker? (P.S. First Po (Score:5, Informative)
Especially since he didn't first discover it. [ualr.edu]
--Stephen
karl koch (Score:1, Informative)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hagbard
Hacker Crackdown (Score:2, Informative)
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.
Re:UNIX: The language (Score:1, Informative)
"The UNIX Operating System started as a result of the MULTICS porject. MULTICS was a joint venture between General Electric, AT&T Bell Labs, and MIT to create an operating system on the GE 645 computer. MULTICS stood for "MULTiplexed Information and Computing System." It contributed greatly to research and understanding of the operating system concept of capabilities, but in practice it was slow and very expensive to use.
Some of the people from the MULTICS project at Bell Labs created UNIX. Ken Thompson, in his desire to test a new file-system design, implemented his design on a little used DEC PDP-7. An operating system and command interpreter (shell) was created for this file-system. Dennis Ritchie and Rudd Canady helped create this system named UNICS for "UNiplexed Information and Computing System." This name was later changed to UNIX. The PDP-7 version of UNIX was later enhanced to allow two users at the same time."
Berkeley UNIX-A Simple and Comprehensive Guide
Robert Wilson 1991