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From: jack@vu44.UUCP (Jack Jansen)
Newsgroups: net.followup,net.books
Subject: Re: Definitions of 'Hacker'
Message-ID: <535@vu44.UUCP>
Date: Wed, 26-Dec-84 09:19:35 EST
Article-I.D.: vu44.535
Posted: Wed Dec 26 09:19:35 1984
Date-Received: Sat, 29-Dec-84 02:52:26 EST
References: <521@ut-sally.UUCP> <1188@cca.UUCP>
Organization: The Retarded Programmers Home, VU, Amsterdam
Lines: 21

It seems that the net is divided into two camps, one which says:
"A hacker is someone without any sense of responsibility who
breaks other peoples security systems for fun", and the others saying:
"A hacker is a friendly, though slightly weird, person, who will solve
*any* conceivable computer problem in no time, although the procedures
he follows are unintellegible, and usually irreproducible".

I think that these describe *the same persons*, only at a different
stage in life. Is there *any* unix-wizard out there who didn't start
his computer-life with writing password decrypters, acquiring
super-user permission, breaking system-account database, etc etc etc etc?

By doing all these kind of things, you get to know, for instance, the
unix kernel so well (since you have to let it do things it wasn't
meant to do) that you can usually trace a problem to it's source,
and this is exactly what a hacker in the second sense of the word
does.
-- 
	Jack Jansen, {seismo|philabs|decvax}!mcvax!vu44!jack
	or				       ...!vu44!htsa!jack
If *this* is my opinion, I wasn't sober at the time.