

First Recorded Usage of "Hacker" - aaco
http://duartes.org/gustavo/blog/post/first-recorded-usage-of-hacker

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Herring
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.

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gustavo_duarte
hahahah.

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

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bootload
_"... 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>

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gustavo_duarte
thanks!

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IsaacSchlueter
"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.

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brlewis
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.

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

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blogimus
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."

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

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iuguy
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.

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boredguy8
Also: First usage of a masculine pronoun when discussing hacking! Gotta
protect 'the boys'.

