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.
Bill Gates, Hall of Fame Hacker? (P.S. First Post) (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Mass Media Idiocy strikes again (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
I dunno (Score:5, Insightful)
wont see their names... (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Bjarne Stroustrup (Score:5, Insightful)
But isn't language defined by usage? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:I dunno (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Bill Gates, Hall of Fame Hacker? (P.S. First Po (Score:5, Insightful)
Good publicity / Bad publicity (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Bjarne Stroustrup (Score:4, Insightful)
Now, if you thought the guys who developed Smalltalk should be on the list you might be closer to the mark.
I'd nominate Doug Engelbert perhaps, but then he was doing more human interaction and psycology work than he was hacking..
Re:I dunno (Score:4, Insightful)
You crack for information, you hack for recognition.
Cracking is illegal.
Hacking is very legal.
Re:Bjarne Stroustrup (Score:2, Insightful)
I personally missed Chuck [colorforth.com].
He is the most impressive of them all.
Re:Bill Gates, Hall of Fame Hacker? (P.S. First Po (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Bill Gates, Hall of Fame Hacker? (P.S. First Po (Score:5, Insightful)
This is a really great article. (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
Hacker vs. Cracker (Score:5, Insightful)
This is similar to trying to argue that the word gay [reference.com] 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 [reference.com] to describe things that are currently considered phat [reference.com].
John.
Re:I dunno (Score:3, Insightful)
The problem with this is that it's pretty difficult to prove the intent. I would bet that ALL of the named people were seeking recognition - be it widespread attention, approval, or disdain. Such a criterion would exclude people who should be on the list despite their shameless self-promotion... like Shimomura. There's a self serving, egomaniacal prick who is totally devoted to the craft and quite good at it.
I think the list is pretty "fair and balanced." If anything, they are missing some people - Bill Gates is an obvious one, as previously mentioned.
Re:I dunno (Score:2, Insightful)
You hack for fun ( or else you are a dumbass ).
Re:Bill Gates, Hall of Fame Hacker? (P.S. First Po (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Bill Gates, Hall of Fame Hacker? (P.S. First Po (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:Stealing the Mona Lisa... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Bill Gates, Hall of Fame Hacker? (P.S. First Po (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Nomination (Score:5, Insightful)
Add Bill Joy (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Stealing the Mona Lisa... (Score:4, Insightful)
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 [seanet.com] instead of MS-DOS and GEM Desktop [geocities.com] instead of MS Windows. There would be no actualy difference for anybodys Grandma.
Re:Good publicity / Bad publicity (Score:5, Insightful)
Many hackers, including Woz, have delved into the dark side, if just to gain more understanding of it. But because of poor laws and public perception many good computer professionals get lumped in with criminals. Look at it this way, could Dennis Ritchie break into your computer and steal your credit card information? The answer is yes, he's a smart guy and if he put his mind to it he could likely figure out a way to do it. Most people would freak out and say he is an 'evul hacker' but just because someone has knowledge of how something works doesn't mean they will use it for criminal purposes. Would Dennis Ritchie actually do that? Certainly not, but not because he lacks the knowledge.
To many people computer professionals are wizards. Casting archaic spells that create something from nothing on the screen in front of them. They don't understand it and they fear it. Just like in my last job as a network admin, the owner of the company found out I had access to all the accounting info. He wanted to limit my access to it and I had to explain to him the power I held over his network. I don't think it was comforting to him, but he did finally realize I had access to everything and why I had that access.
So yeah, putting Stallman, Thompson, Ritchie and other non-lawbreaking profressionals into a list with with criminals and publicity seekers like Mitnick and Levin doesn't help the public image of computer folk in general. But it's hardly a fine line of good or bad. I do wonder though, if it were the 'Engineers Hall of Fame' would Said Bahaji be on the list?
Re:But isn't language defined by usage? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Bill Gates, Hall of Fame Hacker? (P.S. First Po (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
Not that simple. (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
WRONG! think for yourself (was Re:Al Gore!) (Score:5, Insightful)
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 [snopes.com]. 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.
Re:So if 99% of people say 'supposably'... (Score:2, Insightful)
However, people see it as somehow implying "non-person". Rubbish.
Re:Bill Gates, Hall of Fame Hacker? (P.S. First Po (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Hmm (Score:2, Insightful)
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 [thule.no] on that list, he's the king, and I'm not even an Amiga fan.
Re:Bill Gates, Hall of Fame Hacker? (P.S. First Po (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
John Carmack (Score:2, Insightful)
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...
Re:Bill Gates, Hall of Fame Hacker? (P.S. First Po (Score:1, Insightful)
Microsoft's stated goal was "A computer in every home, on every desk" -- that certainly was not IBM's attitude.
Re:Bill Gates, Hall of Fame Hacker? (P.S. First Po (Score:3, Insightful)
Another pet peeve. (Score:2, Insightful)
"...a security system so tight that no other financial institution in the world has it."
As I'm sure Bruce Schneir [counterpane.com] would fall all over himself to point out, this association actually decreases the likelyhood that the system is actually secure.
Re:WRONG! think for yourself (was Re:Al Gore!) (Score:3, Insightful)
Unfortunately, in a little place called reality, he did. He said, and this is a direct quote from the page you link to, "I took the initiative in creating the Internet." Hell, the Snopes page, even though it marks it false, concludes with:
Despite the fact that it may not quite be "invented" he still took credit for something he didn't really do! I'm a little confused as to why this is marked outright "false" and not the more accurate "sort of" mark that Snopes sometimes uses. Gore took credit for something he really had no part in. Yeah, the exact phrase "invented the Internet" is probably incorrect but even the "correct" phrase is an outright lie.And in any case, lighten up. It was a joke. Gore isn't in any political arena right now, and it doesn't hurt anyone to make fun of one of the many boneheaded things Gore said that lost him the 2000 election.
Re:Bill Gates, Hall of Fame Hacker? (P.S. First Po (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Sorry, he still didn't claim to invent it (Score:2, Insightful)
Guess what, he did. He helped sign in the legislative funding for the project. He was referring to himself as having invented it--merely signing the initial legislation that created it.
He claimed he was tired when he said it. I can understand. After having done a ton of interviews and things, and talking about technology to one particular interviewer and thinking back on signing into law the legislation, I'd probably also say, "yeah, I helped take the initiative in creating the Internet" without realizing how out-of-context it would suddenly be taken.
Re:Bill Gates, Hall of Fame Hacker? (P.S. First Po (Score:2, Insightful)