Is true hacking dead? What we lost

The number of students who could write code in my high school of 2000 was perhaps 35. Those 35 were amazing because they had to work to get access to a computer, so we had already eliminated everyone who was just "oh that's too hard". Of the 35 perhaps a dozen kept at it beyond one class in BASIC.

In my daughter's similarly sized highschool 400 to 500 of the students had some proficiency in writing code, and perhaps 200 had the motivation to keep at it on a serious level after graduation. Of those, perhaps a dozen were people who I would equate to the 'hackers' that we had at my high school.

This led me to conclude that its a small fraction of the population that has what I think of as the 'compulsive puzzle' gene. That is they find themselves driven to solve puzzles which they understand must have a solution.

There are ways to identify them. If you have the ability to give puzzles, leave some around to be found. Watch for the ones who solve them.

In the world where 'everyone is a coder' though it is super easy to not see them.

In the beginning it was a word only people heavily into computers used. Then around the time of War Games it became a more commonly-known word, and connotated breaking in. Over the last couple decades more people became aware that hacking sometimes refers to building technical projects. But it still has a heavy connotation of breaking into a system or program.

Hacking became cool once hackers started getting rich and gaining prominence in society. My son is 8, and many of his friends think they're hackers when they use a cheat code on a game. Most of them know they're not writing code and really changing the game, but they all want to think of themselves as hackers so they say they're hacking their games. Very few of them even really know what a line of code looks like yet.

Any notion of "true" hacking is bound to be about putting walls up to say who's in and who's out. In reality, there are always people building new things, and there are always people trying to break into systems and programs.

I don't think its died. Its more likely morphed into something you don't recognise because its always been dynamic and now you're attempting to apply a static definition. Then you get frustrated or lament "its not the same as in the good old days". But the reality is that people are tinkering right now with the new tech or the new thing in ways you don't even know about.

This is definitely the case with cars, computers, electronics, gardening, clothes, food etc etc. Gardening, clothes? Why did I include those?! "Thats not hacking!" People are tinkering with these things. Making them better. Making them their own.

Hacking was never just bits and bytes. Learn how this puzzle works. Change it. Make your own. That hasn't stopped.

Some people lament the fact that it simply ended up with a plain, general purpose Unix-like, rather than something more low level and immediately direct (as in, drop you to a BASIC, not necessarily assembler), ala Commodore 64.

The peculiarities of the author aside, a live TempleOS was able to have its running code modified on the fly, and allowed direct low level access to what was under the hood in perhaps a more interesting hacker-ish way than your typical Unix clone/descendant.