cavrak@uvm-gen.UUCP (Steve Cavrak,Waterman 113,656-1483,) (11/12/89)
All of you dirty commie hippie pinko beatnik hacker freaks listen up ! (Or maybe loosen up?) Words change and the meaning of words change. They are not the property of the person who discovers them, the referent object, or some the publishers of dictionaries. They're at best tags that let people know what's going on in other peoples minds. The first use of the word hacker I recall was in a context that was definitely not complimentary -- it definitely was applied to a bull headed slash and burn programming style that generally broke more code than it generated. That was in the mid to late 60's time frame, when the PDP-9, PDP-10, and PDP-15 days. In our environment, the hackers came from MiT, stayed up late, and left grease (from pizza) all over the teletype and pop tobacco over the digitzer. Sometime later, in the early and mid-70's, the hacker decided to adopt the designation and wore it as a badge of honor. Fine. Some of us just took that as a typical hacker trait -- accept the bug and call it a feature. But social phenomenon has a way of migrating from the adult subculture to the teen subculture to the subteen culture. And each step down changes the meaning of the phenomenon. So when teeny-boopers call themselves hackers, I certainly wonder how much substance there is in it. Somewhere along the line, the press grabs onto the term and gives it it modern meaning. Maybe they got the word from the campus bar and grill. Maybe they got the work from their teenaged kids. Who knows. Sure, it's ok for a subculture to say "I'm a hacker and proud of it." But don't expect the rest of the society to accept your meaning. There's really not that much cachet in it. Hackers will never be as fashionable as hippies and punks. At least not until IBM adopts it as an official job classification. Steve _______ || | Stephen J. Cavrak, Jr. BITNET: sjc@uvmvm |* | CSNET : cavrak@uvm | / Academic Computing Services USENET: cavrak@uvm-gen