I agree with your and the parents comments about hacker culture being counterculture. I don't agree that it still is. The countercultural aspect largely disappeared as computers (and software) became cheap and information widely available. I cringe a bit when see modern hackers using their $3k laptops to have fun coding C in a terminal by themselves. Nothing wrong with that of course, but not necessarily something I would say is a good modern representation of the hacker spirit.

^This.

I broke into my first mainframe in 1977 because I had to if I wanted to play Colossal Cave Adventure. :)

I learned to blue box because I had to if I wanted to talk to my friends around the world and couldn't afford the phone bill.

I tell people now that if you want to pen test, cool, grab some VMs and go nuts. You might even get a bug bounty or two...

Unless they are hacking on shaders, CUDA or deeplearning (which admittedly isn't C most of the time). Although, I admit that a web server is probably more handy if it's not shaders.

I still like terminals; even on my 3k laptop (which is largely for gaming).