First Recorded Usage of "Hacker"

Herring · on Aug 28, 2008

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_duarte · on Aug 28, 2008

hahahah.

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

bootload · on Aug 29, 2008

"... 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

gustavo_duarte · on Aug 30, 2008

thanks!

IsaacSchlueter · on Aug 28, 2008

"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 · on Aug 28, 2008

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 · on Aug 28, 2008

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

blogimus · on Aug 28, 2008

Considering that Ma Bell was a monopoly until 1984, I'd agree.

To paraphrase John Draper (aka Captain Crunch), "A system is a system, whether a phone network or a computer."

henning · on Aug 28, 2008

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

_b8r0 · on Aug 28, 2008

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_duarte · on Aug 28, 2008

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.

boredguy8 · on Aug 28, 2008

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