First Recorded Usage of "Hacker"

http://duartes.org/gustavo/blog/post/first-recorded-usage-of-hacker

by aaco • 18 years ago

42 12 18 years ago

henning• 18 years ago

Wardialing is over 40 years old? Learn something new every day.

_b8r0• 18 years ago

Wierd, I thought war dialing (at least by hand) came about around the time of the Strowger Switch? I read somewhere (sorry, no link) that as telephones became popular people would ring numbers sequentially to see who was at the other end.

gustavo_duarte3• 18 years ago

It's unclear to me exactly what's going on, but

"'brute force techniques' - mass dialing until something 'interesting' is found"

Sounds an awful lot like war dialing. Not sure what was on the other side though and what got done.

IsaacSchlueter• 18 years ago

"Hacker" is a bit like the term "witch" in the Wizard of Oz.

"Are you a good hacker, or a bad hacker?"

The techniques and thinking styles are the same, either way.

brlewis• 18 years ago

Decades ago to crack into a computer you needed to be a hacker, since computers were all different. Today we have "script kiddies" who most definitely aren't hackers, but are crackers.

I don't think there's a script-kiddie equivalent for phone systems.

byrneseyeview• 18 years ago

I thought the original hackers were almost exclusively using AT&T's system.

Herring• 18 years ago

It's like a disease endemic to us nerds. Honestly who looks at the word "hack" and thinks hey i'm gonna make a white hat form of this? An OS called GNU?? Linus was lucky he had a buddy in marketing to help him name the kernel otherwise we'd have something like the clusterfuck in gnome & kde packages.

gustavo_duarte3• 18 years ago

hahahah.

Exactly. Specifically, Linus' name for Linux was "Freax"

bootload• 18 years ago

"... Linus' name for Linux was "Freax" ..."

By himself he referred to it as "Linux" but thought it was lame. Only after the name being suggested by others did he agree. I got this "first-hand" from Revolution OS ~ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolution_OS You can watch it here ~ http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=7707585592627775409

boredguy8• 18 years ago

Also: First usage of a masculine pronoun when discussing hacking! Gotta protect 'the boys'.

First Recorded Usage of "Hacker"

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