MAREYAHH’S Weblog

According to this chapter… There were no REAL PROGRAMMERS in the beginning.. At first I was so puzzled.. Why? How? So? And why was no one considered as real programmers then? Because programmers during 1845 onwards treated programming FOR FUN…But it wasn’t long enough that ‘REAL PROGRAMMERS’ was coined after 1980… The Real Programmers typically came out of engineering or physics backgrounds.. From what I have read.. They looked like GEEKS (most of them) They were often amateur-radio hobbyists. They wore white socks and polyester shirts and ties and thick glasses and coded in machine language and assembler and FORTRAN and half a dozen ancient languages now forgotten. SEE? LOL Their works gave rise to NETWORKS, COMPUTERS, INTERACTIVE COMPUTING, UNIVERSITIES…

Well WHO ADOPTED THE TERM hackers FIRST? MIT’s computer culture seems to have been the first to adopt the term `hacker’. The beginnings of the hacker culture as we know it today can be conveniently dated to 1961, the year MIT acquired the first PDP-1. A hacker in the name of Dennis Ritchie invented a new language called `C’ for use under Thompson’s embryonic Unix. Like Unix, C was designed to be pleasant, unconstraining, and flexible.. I have never used C because we are already using C#.. Maybe that could be it roots…

Well almost ALL THE FIRSTSSSS happened in ARPAnet (sort of like the Internet we have today) where the first intentional artifacts of the hacker culture—the first slang lists, the first satires, the first self-conscious discussions of the hacker ethic propagated.. So from those FIRSTSSS came this JARGON FILES which lead to this slang dictionary that eventually became one of the culture’s defining documents. It was eventually published as “The Hacker’s Dictionary” in 1983; that first version is out of print, but a revised and expanded version is New Hacker’s Dictionary…

THIS In 1982, a group of Unix hackers from Stanford and Berkeley founded Sun Microsystems on the belief that Unix running on relatively inexpensive 68000-based hardware would prove a winning combination for a wide variety of applications. They were right, and their vision set the pattern for an entire industry. While still priced out of reach of most individuals, workstations were cheap for corporations and universities; networks of them (one to a user) rapidly replaced the older VAXes and other time-sharing systems very much caught my attention… WHY? BECAUSE it’s great to know that UNIX hackers were actually the FOUNDERS of SUN MICROSYSTEMS no wonder why our PROGAPP teacher is so ino unix app…:)

I have NOTICED ONE THING.. UNIX was like the main OS in the past unlike today where MICOSOFT or MAC are the leading OS… I just never heard of UNIX before not until I stepped into my junior years in college..The mainstream of hackerdom, (dis)organized around the Internet and by now largely identified with the Unix technical culture, didn’t care about the commercial services. These hackers wanted better tools and more Internet, and cheap 32-bit PCs promised to put both in everyone’s reach. Because of this CAME THE FREE SOFTWARES where a Helsinki University student named Linus Torvalds invented LINUX. In 1991 he began developing a free Unix kernel for 386 machines using the Free Software Foundation’s toolkit. His initial, rapid success attracted many Internet hackers to help him develop Linux, a full-featured Unix with entirely free and re-distributable sources. Linux evolved in a completely different way. From nearly the beginning, it was rather casually hacked on by huge numbers of volunteers coordinating only through the Internet. Quality was maintained not by rigid standards or autocracy but by the naively simple strategy of releasing every week and getting feedback from hundreds of users within days, creating a sort of rapid Darwinian selection on the mutations introduced by developers. To the amazement of almost everyone, this worked quite well. So basically MOST OF THE THINGS THAT added to its foundation were mostly hacked by OF COURSE the hackers…

So with the growth of LINUX gave rise to the Internet.. The early 1990s also saw the beginnings of a flourishing Internet-provider industry, selling connectivity to the public for a few dollars a month. Following the invention of the World Wide Web, the Internet’s already rapid growth accelerated to a breakneck pace. he World Wide Web has at last made the Internet into a mass medium, and many of the hackers of the 1980s and early 1990s launched Internet Service Providers selling or giving access to the masses.

CONCLUSION: Based from what I have read and heard in the past, we see hackers now (like most of us – NOT ALL) as people who do things illegally and that is really unethical but from my observation MOST OF THE PEOPLE INVOLVED IN THE DEVELOPMENT AND RISE OF THE KINDS OF TECHNOLOGY WE HVE TODAY IT IS HARD TO ERASE THE FACT THAT MOST OF THOSE WHO HAD CONTRIBUTED TO ITS FOUNDATION WERE HACKERS… RIGHT?