dee@cca.UUCP (Donald Eastlake) (12/24/84)
Many of the typos in the book "HACKERS: Heros of the Computer
Revolution" are of a phonetic nature. I think Steven Levy recorded most
of his interviews and then later transcribed from the records. Thus
TICO instead if TECO (Text Editor and Corrector). However the overall
pictures painted in the book are correct. (The Index is also a bit
lacking. My name appears on page 83 (not listed in the Index) as well
as on page 118 which is listed in the index.) There is hope of some
of these problems being fixed in the paperback edition.
--
+ Donald E. Eastlake, III
ARPA: dee@CCA-UNIX usenet: {decvax,linus}!cca!deejack@vu44.UUCP (Jack Jansen) (12/26/84)
It seems that the net is divided into two camps, one which says:
"A hacker is someone without any sense of responsibility who
breaks other peoples security systems for fun", and the others saying:
"A hacker is a friendly, though slightly weird, person, who will solve
*any* conceivable computer problem in no time, although the procedures
he follows are unintellegible, and usually irreproducible".
I think that these describe *the same persons*, only at a different
stage in life. Is there *any* unix-wizard out there who didn't start
his computer-life with writing password decrypters, acquiring
super-user permission, breaking system-account database, etc etc etc etc?
By doing all these kind of things, you get to know, for instance, the
unix kernel so well (since you have to let it do things it wasn't
meant to do) that you can usually trace a problem to it's source,
and this is exactly what a hacker in the second sense of the word
does.
--
Jack Jansen, {seismo|philabs|decvax}!mcvax!vu44!jack
or ...!vu44!htsa!jack
If *this* is my opinion, I wasn't sober at the time.