JOHNSON@NUHUB.ACS.NORTHEASTERN.EDU ("I am only an egg.") (07/23/87)
On the other hand, maybe the hacker debate should be here. Hackers
are the people who can not only make system calls work but can debug the
wonderfully human engineered DEC manual when necessary (or even the
system call itself).
As has been said, the word hacker has been given bad press. The
original meaning was a positive one. Back before what we now call
operating systems, hackers were the people who programmed what passed
for operating systems. Many of the ideas that came from those days are
still in use which is more than can be said for much of the hardware.
I'm all for blitzing the media for giving the word hacker a bad
meaning. All the hackers I know have pretty tight ethics. While some
poor deluded people may consider breaking security systems 'fun',
hackers try very hard to keep crackers out. True hackers were probably
the first computer people to understand that information is just as
much property as a car or a house. Further, when your disk structure
breaks, a hacker can fix it thus restoring your vital information. This
is not the kind of thing someone would do if they didn't give a dam
about the information regardless of how much they got paid because it's
a REAL pain. I can say that because I've done it.
Hackers are also the people who can determin why the
hardware/software REALLY doesn't work when DEC can't or won't. Hackers
are the people that don't let DEC get away with anything. This leads
one to the conclusion that hackers aren't necessarily programmers or
engineers. A hacker is just someone who wants to REALLY understand a
system in order to make it work and get the most out of it for
everybody, not just him/her self.
True hackers are the good guys and gals, not the nasties.
USnail:
Chris Johnson
Academic Computer Services
Northeastern University 39RI
360 Huntington Ave.
Boston, MA. U.S.A. 02115
AT&T: (617) 437-2335
CSNET: johnson@nuhub.acs.northeastern.edu
ARPANET: johnson%nuhub.acs.northeastern.edu@relay.cs.net
BITNET: johnson%nuhub.acs.northeastern.edu@csnet-relay
(Always vote. There may not be anything you want to vote for, but
there might be something you want to vote against.)