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What sparked your inner hacker?

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Re: What sparked your inner hacker?

#31

Post by 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.

Re: What sparked your inner hacker?

#32

Post by 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.

Re: What sparked your inner hacker?

#34

Post by 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.

Re: What sparked your inner hacker?

#35

Post by stillmotion »

palish wrote: post #2

I wanted to make video games.

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.

Re: What sparked your inner hacker?

#36

Post by rms »

stillmotion wrote: post #35
palish wrote: post #2

I wanted to make video games.

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.

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

Re: What sparked your inner hacker?

#39

Post by 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.

Re: What sparked your inner hacker?

#40

Post by 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.

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