
What sparked your inner hacker? - nextmovetwo
I was wondering what first interested you all in programming.<p>For me?  My cousin showed me how to use AOL Press back in the day and I started making random fan/rom/emulator websites.  It was on from there and I haven't closed notepad since. =P<p>How about you?
======
Zak
Shortly after my parents bought a new Macintosh, I found a program on it
called Hypercard. It was a RAD tool that included a scripting language with
flexible, English-like (verbose!) syntax. I starting digging around in the
source code of the demo apps, and it kind of snowballed from there.

I took quite a while off after being taught that "real programming" meant C or
C++ ,and later Java. The thought of trying to write interesting applications
in those languages was unappealing. I discovered PHP when I needed server-side
processing on a web page, but didn't find it very satisfying.

A few years ago, I heard that some guy had created a spam filter that actually
worked. I read some other articles on his site, and he kept talking about a
programming language called Lisp. I had heard of it, but thought it was dead.
I decided to give it a try, and I haven't turned back since.

------
mynameishere
I object to the overuse of the word "hacker". You're all like a bunch of
freshman coeds in English class talking about the day they became poets.

~~~
christefano
How would you define it? My definition of a hacker is someone who creatively
and safely overcomes or circumvents limitations and enjoys the challenge.

~~~
bct
Why qualify it with "safely"?

~~~
rms
to disqualify malicious hackers, probably

------
christefano
A big influence on me was the hacker culture on AOL. This was around the time
AOL 2.6 or 2.7 was current, and there were many ways to modify the AOL
software to do very cool things.

After AOL released version 3 of the AOL client (which closed a lot of the
hooks for illegal addons), I wrote what might be the world's first searchbox
for web browsers. This was when I was a teenager and AltaVista was still the
largest search engine. The program I wrote was a small AppleScript application
that registered an "av" protocol with Netscape Navigator and Internet Explorer
so you could type "av:knitting patterns" in the Location bar and have that
string sent to the AppleScript applet. The script received the string, looked
for what came after the "av:" and computed a full URL to send it back to the
web browser. The whole process was invisible to the user, as long as the
AppleScript applet was running in the background.

It was a very simple script and I released it as shareware. I later built a
search plugin architecture so users could add their favorite search engines,
and the whole experience was a huge lesson in programming, testing,
documentation, distribution, customer support and marketing, and I was
suddenly buried in work.

Then Apple developed a plugin architecture for Sherlock and I started getting
fewer and fewer shareware registrations. That's what essentially killed my
shareware product, but the entire experience was very exciting. I was hooked
and have been hacking ever since.

~~~
boomshine
It's interesting that the style of searching you're talking about has
remanifested 12 years later in the form of Firefox 3's smart bookmarks.
<http://ptaff.ca/smart/>

What was the name of your program? Does it still work?

------
matth
I was six years old and sitting in my father's lap reading while my mother
video-taped. At some point I playfully smacked my dad, he playfully smacked
back and I began to cry. Afterwards, my mom said something about editing the
video. In my mind, I understood her to mean she could somehow alter the
video... you know, change my crying into smiles, laughs and lollipops. I still
can't get over how much influence that single misconception has had on my
life.

 _Cut to three years later._

A good family friend gave me an old Apple IIe in 1994 (I was 9). I would break
it, and then watch him fix it. It was fascinating, and I finally had my chance
to figure out how to make machines do what I wanted.

------
DaniFong
I started on computers since before my earliest memory -- my parents got me
SimCity and I played it every chance that I could. My inner hacker spawned in
stages, though, I'm not sure there was a specific event. There were more
general things, like loving to read, but there were also situations where I
had to figure out how to let the library let me have an adult card. It's these
that make the better anecdotes.

Here are some examples. I used the computer so much as a kid that my parents
used to try to stop me. First they put a password on the boot-up. I read
everything I could until I learned to flash the BIOS. Next they installed this
enuff computer time restricting system, which I spent a ton of time breaking.
Over a period of two or so years, my actions provided the first line of bug
testing for the Enuff programmers. Boy were they furious. Eventually I built a
keystroke recorder, and that stopped that for a while. They couldn't keep me
out.

Other hackerly things I liked to do included turning the scripting languages
in games into other games. I wrote a really cool RPG in Starcraft, for
example. I also learned how to automate tasks in 3DSMax, which was really fun.

At some point I hacked college entry, and I was in there way earlier than
authorities thought that I should have been. By this point a 'hacker' identity
was already written for me, but most of the interests started way, way
earlier.

------
nailer
It's Bill Gates' fault.

I had an Atari ST. It had a simple, elegant GUI desktop and there was no
reason for me to ever stop playing Uninvited or drawing in DeluxePaint. I
would have been about 9. I'd save up my pocket money and buy $20 imported ST
Format magazines with headlines like 'ATARI VS AMIGA: WHO WILL INHERIT THE
FUTURE OF COMPUTING', and read about MIDI and DTP.

Everything worked so I had nothing to fix.

Alas the ST broke. And it turned out neither Atari nor Amiga inherited the
future of computing - nobody made games for Atari ST anymore. I got a 286 12
running DOS 3 from my mum, and was plunged into boot disk hell trying to free
that precious 640K of RAM for my games. I started editing batch files and
using 'errorlevel' to make little menus so I could use less floppies (they
were expensive). Then I had a 386 where the video card slipped out all the
time. So I opened the case and slipped it back in. I eventually got a feel for
hardware.

The computer teachers at high school were terrible. I didn't like logo, as I
couldn't see anything practical. We learnt Pascal later, but the teacher was
always away, so we learnt from the internet and another kid who showed us.

I read a lot of computer magazines. I wanted to write for computer magazines.

I finished high school and did a certificate in business management the same
year. I did an MCSE at 17, got into tweaking a lot, then found Linux, the
tweakers dream. Tweaking lead to scripting, scripting leads to hacking.

I'm actually really glad I got into Linux then, and I'm glad I stuck with it.
At that time, everybody was talking about Win32 and Visual Studio. It seemed
like you had to have an MSDN subscription to make software that was considered
desirable by the masses. Now the internet is considered the biggest part of
computing, and more often or not it's based on OSS toolsets and languages.

PS. Atari rocks all over Amiga. :^P

------
dfranke
When I was two years old my dad bought an 8086 and installed ChessBase on it.
I loved pushing the arrows keys and watching the pieces move. Then the summer
after kindergarten my mom bought me a QBASIC book. I had only recently learned
to read so it had to be read aloud to me at first, but I understood it. I
pretty much didn't get up from my terminal all summer. By the time I started
first grade I was comfortable with nested loops. I still have a friend whom I
met in fourth grade who started programming as early as I did, but in REXX. I
don't put much stock in Piaget :-)

It wasn't until around 1999, though, that I was really able to start becoming
a hacker. That was when I finally got my own computer rather than sharing one
with the family, and immediately put Linux on it.

------
palish
I wanted to make video games.

~~~
stillmotion
I remember in my 4th grade class trying to convince my teacher that I would be
able to deliver a shooting game by the end of the week for an oral
presentation on how to construct things. Though I had no idea what to do, I
did it.

~~~
rms
That's a great challenge. I'm curious how you implemented this.

The Zapper (or Famicon Light Gun):
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NES_Zapper#Technical_overview>

------
jkush
When I was a kid I loved playing Dark Castle. It was a game for the Mac
written by Jonathan Gay (I still vividly remember the splash screen). A friend
of the family noticed my growing interest in computers and showed me how to
decompile the game. After giving me a few glimpses of the source code he
recompiled the game and then left the room.

I think he was fully aware how fascinated I was and anticipated what I'd do
next. It was probably what every kid would have done in my shoes: I decompiled
the game, made a few changes, recompiled it and was exremely pleased to see
"Dark Castle - programmed by: John K" on the splash screen.

------
Shooter
I took some computer classes in junior high school (BASIC with numbered lines,
flow charts, etc.), but it never really grabbed me. My teacher's dream job was
to be a mainframe programmer for IBM. Imagine a fat guy that sounded like Ben
Stein (and wore an actual pocket protector!) dreaming of IBM mainframes...we
called him Mr. Excitement. I just didn't see the attraction. The teacher told
me programs were like executable math, which turned me off even more. I hated
math.

Then I became somewhat of a science geek...Westinghouse, ISEF, etc. At the
science competitions, there was a large number of stereotypical nerds
(socially awkward, overly interested in grades, suck-ups, etc.) and a small
group of people that were into 'hacks.' The smaller group tried to outdo each
other with 'applied science pranks.' They always had informal competitions and
awards programs that ran alongside the actual competition events. I wanted to
compete, so I started learning how to program and how to do some chemistry-
oriented pranks. I was goal-oriented.

My first year at one of the international competitions, I won my event at the
real awards program, and then I won the 'hacker' competition. (I programed all
the hallway, elevator, and atrium lights in our hotel and convention center to
strobe. It was the largest hotel in the city, so it was...noticeable. It made
the evening news on all the local channels, and one of their national channels
had a human interest piece about "What happens when you put a couple hundred
science geeks in a single hotel.") I was hooked.

------
hga
Thinking about it, I may not be a hacker in any sense of the word, except
obsessive focus on solving a problem; computing for computing's sake was
burned out of me within a year of my starting, but what got me going was:

The mystique of this computer programming stuff done by other high school
scientists in a NSF Summer Science Training Program (SSTP) in the summer of
1977.

Coming back home to a high school computer programming course (punched card
"FORTRAN IV" on an IBM 1130 (numeric IFs, but, hey, it fit in 8KB and didn't
require a disk)) taught by ... a coach.

A coach who gave us a not in the book no notes that I remember blackboard
lecture on two's complement representation and arithmetic that I now realize
was _invaluable_ , even though I've never written a line of assembler in my
life (useful for debugging (especially before dbx :-), but the wrong level of
abstraction for me).

And the above by then a decade obsolete computing environment sending me
straight to the library stacks to e.g. learn about Structured Programming,
which was all the rage then.

What truly set the hook was Harvard Summer School in 1978: a PDP-11/70 running
a very well hacked up V6 (command name and argument completion and hinting!)
which was a rich environment with the good Peter Langston games of the time
(except Empire) and of course Adventure.

Buying a DECTAPE then because it was cool. Learning "rm -rf" and being very
glad I had bought it ^_^ (to this day I'm a fanatic about backups).

And then getting introduced to MULTICS, ITS (including Zork) and Lisp Machines
---and wondering whey UNIX was winning and MULTICS was all but dead, leading
to a life long study the determinants of success in the area discussed by The
Rise of Worse Is Better. Even as a serious scientist (chemist) who can't play
games any more due to mild RSI, this stuff is just too damned fun to ignore.

~~~
endlessvoid94
extra points for nested parentheses in english sentences.

ONLY a coder would do such a thing ^-^

------
Upstairs
I wanted to resolve the 'Einstein' or 'Cabins' puzzle so I got an Aim65. I
went through Pet, CPM, bubble memory, Forth, Dr Jobs, Turbo C, Smalltalk and
was very near to a solution with microProlog (it came as an 8"floppy). Then
Winston and Mellish ruined it for me. It's done even better now with amb and
monads but life has never been quite the same.

------
a13x
Acorn BBC Micro and Sinclair Spectrum. BASIC. Various Usbourne books. I wrote
a text editor on my Spectrum in BASIC. It was too slow at keeping up with your
typing, so I figured out enough about Z80 assembly to write a little routine
to speed up the slow bit. Later I made a sort of GUI front-end for my
Spectrum, inspired by the Macs at school.

------
comatose_kid
I thought programming was a way to understand how these neat machines worked,
so like many other 10 year olds, I tried programming BASIC on an 8 bit (Atari
600XL with the awe-inspiring (not) GTIA chip).

But my first real taste of hacking came in grade 7: understanding and
implementing a 1-99 counter using seven segment LED displays, a 555, and some
7447 BCD->7 segment LED driver was lots of fun.

And then in high school, it was all about understanding the Amiga.

Looking over the Amiga schematics in the Hardware Reference Manual and
figuring out how the low pass filter circuitry worked was fun.

Writing my first 68k asm program to do sine waves and programming the Amiga's
coprocessor chip to do on the fly scanline colour changes was really cool too.

PS - for all you Atari ST lovers, here's 25 cents - buy yourself a real os :)

------
jsjenkins168
I was playing with my dads IBM 5150 PC back in 1988 when I was 6 yrs old, I
remember that. I was too young to do much though, mainly just play a spelling
game.

My introduction to hacking was in 1992 when my dad purchased a 486DX2 PC. I
was writing batch file menus in DOS to load files, etc. It didn't take very
long before I started trying to overclock it and stuff.

Looking back on it, I'm very surprised my dad trusted me to mess around with
his computers like that, given how much they cost back then... Honestly, I
dont think he had a clue as to what I was doing. But I'm grateful at the same
time as I learned a lot. I think kids need that freedom to experiment when it
comes to hacking.

------
sox_fan
Discovering how Phish tapes were being shared through the internet was my
first hacker experience. I was 15 when I got into this scene thanks to an AOL
account my parents had. This was pre-napster and it was the only way to get a
copy of live music that was not available in the record store. Learning about
the whole process of taping a show and distributing it with trees of people
who made copies of the show for people underneath. A lot of it was social
networking since the tapes were sent through the mail, but it was all
coordinated over a newsgroup and email.

------
cperciva
I wanted to draw the Mandelbrot set -- as fast as possible. This led to an
interest in code optimization, which led to an interest in numerical
algorithms, which led to an interest in parallel computing, which led to an
interest in computer security, which led to an interest in string matching and
data compression algorithms.

I haven't done much in the way of code optimization lately -- I pretty much
gave up once the P6 core came along and started aggressively pessimizing my
code by executing instructions out-of-order -- but I'm still quite interested
in all of the rest.

------
tlrobinson
Legos.

~~~
chmike
Funny! Me too. Build what I want with limited types of tiles. Assembly was the
most fun and the closest to playing lego. I built a 2x1.5m city in legos.

------
jamesbritt
I always liked taking things apart, putting things together, and putting
things together to make them do things they weren't originally intended to do.
I liked to draw, paint, make stuff.

When I discovered programming, I saw it as the much the same thing, only
better; being digital, you have fewer arbitrary constraints than the Real
World. Imagination was the only real limit.

Software is opinionated reality, the ultimate playground and toy chest. I'm
still surprised that more people don't find it intrinsically fascinating. Go
figure. :)

------
joe
Being given a Sharp PC-1500 pocket computer at age 6, and messing with it
enough to learn BASIC via "brute force". A few months later being given a
manual that filled in some of the blanks.

------
mrtron
Initially? Learning Basic from a really motivated teacher who said in 20 years
that everyone would need to know at least basic programming since everyone
would be working on a computer for their job. He wasn't that far off.

What crushed my inner hacker? University computer science where everything was
very strict and restraining, or perhaps it was my focus.

What re-sparked it? Lisp briefly for inspiring me to code in a better way.
Then Python :)

------
olavk
I read a lot of science-fiction as a kid. For me and my brother computers were
just as fascinating (and unattainable) as space travel and aliens. When it
actually became possible for ordinary people to buy a computer (the ZX81!), of
course we saved up for it. When we got the computer, of course we had to learn
how to program it, since it didn't have any software.

------
nextmoveone
I always thought about hacking as breaking into other peoples computers.

It had to be one of these two:

the AOL Homepage maker(the wysiwyg) or

the homestead pages(ex:whateveryouwant.homestead.com).

I made a homestead page about the origin of mankind for my History class in
the 7th grade. This made me think that almost anything could be done on the
web, and it has become a reality since then.

------
henning
I wanted to break security. I never wound up learning much about it because I
got too interested in other things.

------
davidw
Commodore PET and Commodore 64. I don't remember exactly why I wanted to
program them... just that it was fun.

------
intellectronica
Having access to a computer (a DEC Rainbow). It's strange, but as a kid it's
quite difficult _not_ to be drawn to hacking if you've got the environment and
tools for experimenting. By the time I was 15 I've already done some Logo,
Prolog, Basic and Pascal .. from there it was impossible to stop.

------
shawndrost
Writing calculator games on a ti83 during freshman math courses. I still
remember that my programs all used single letter variable names -- I think
there was a technical reason, but maybe I was just incompetent -- and I had a
piece of paper for each program that tracked which meant what :)

------
iamelgringo
Wow, do I feel old.

Using the DOS command line with my Dad's Compaq luggable with _dual_ 5-1/4"
floppies, baby!

The first true coding that I did was making a graphics program in basic. I
thought it looked like Star Wars hyperspace scene. No one else agreed with me,
though.

------
rvirding
When the physics department got their own computer, a DEC VAX/VMS. I was a
post-graduate with more-or-less unlimited access. It was love at first sight.

------
gcheong
Seeing a little text based graphic game called "lunar landar" running on a
commodore PET that a teacher had brought in when I was in middle school.

------
jamongkad
Geocities...God rest their souls...

------
german
I have to thank my HP 48GX calculator.

I just love RPL! ;)

