Newsgroups: alt.hackers
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From: trier@shasta.scl.cwru.edu (Stephen Trier)
Subject: Re: Re: PORTRAIT OF A HACKER (forwarded)
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Message-ID: <1990May27.040431.19208@usenet.ins.cwru.edu>
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Reply-To: trier@SCL.CWRU.Edu (Stephen Trier)
Organization: Smith Undergrad Lab, CWRU, Cleve. OH
References: <3065.9005251149@sund.cc.ic.ac.uk> <GRAY.90May25172450@ghiggins.hpl.hp.com>
Date: Sun, 27 May 90 04:04:31 GMT
Approved: trier@shasta.scl.cwru.edu
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In article <GRAY.90May25172450@ghiggins.hpl.hp.com> gray@HPLB.HPL.HP.COM (Graham Higgins) writes:
>Indeed, the term "hacker" has come in for a bit of distortion recently, I'd
>agree that "cracker" would probably be a good description of the type of
>computer user who tries to gain unauthorised access to computer systems.

Bravo!  Back in the old days :-), or at least, about ten years ago, "hacker"
was a pretty honorable title to bestow on someone.  Saying that someone was
a hacker meant that he had that slightly bizarre love of computers--The kind
of love for computers that made him or her collect Byte magazines and read
them cover to cover, then write a Forth interpreter for their modified
MEK6800D2 based on that magazine.  I knew someone who did exactly this.

Anyway, I did get a kick out of that "Portrait of a hacker".  It seems to
describe the old-style hacker quite well, except that I think that Greek
cuisine needs to get added to the foods list.

Obligatory hack report:
    If you take a 64K Color Computer 1 or a Color Computer 3 and load the
ROMs into RAM, you can change the values in the drive-enable bitmask table
to enable two drives at once.  Why would anyone want this?  For some reason,
Tandy built the CoCo drives to use the normal side select line as drive 3
select.  Because of this, changing one byte took me from two logical drives
to three, with the third logical drive being side two of drive one.  (From
my upcoming book, Reminiscences of a CoCo Hacker, Volume 1.  :-) )

            <=> Stephen Trier    sct%seldon@skybridge.SCL.CWRU.Edu
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