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What sparked your inner hacker?

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Re: What sparked your inner hacker?

#41

Post by ptn »

mynameishere wrote: post #12

I object to the overuse of the word "hacker". You're all like a bunch of freshman coeds in English class talking about the day they became poets.

Agree. You guys seem to be mistaking a hacker with the technical guy behind a start up. They are not necessarily the same.

Re: What sparked your inner hacker?

#42

Post by sox_fan »

Discovering how Phish tapes were being shared through the internet was my first hacker experience. I was 15 when I got into this scene thanks to an AOL account my parents had. This was pre-napster and it was the only way to get a copy of live music that was not available in the record store. Learning about the whole process of taping a show and distributing it with trees of people who made copies of the show for people underneath. A lot of it was social networking since the tapes were sent through the mail, but it was all coordinated over a newsgroup and email.

Re: What sparked your inner hacker?

#43

Post by endlessvoid94 »

hga wrote: post #39

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…

extra points for nested parentheses in english sentences.

ONLY a coder would do such a thing ^-^

Re: What sparked your inner hacker?

#44

Post by comatose_kid »

I thought programming was a way to understand how these neat machines worked, so like many other 10 year olds, I tried programming BASIC on an 8 bit (Atari 600XL with the awe-inspiring (not) GTIA chip).

But my first real taste of hacking came in grade 7: understanding and implementing a 1-99 counter using seven segment LED displays, a 555, and some 7447 BCD->7 segment LED driver was lots of fun.

And then in high school, it was all about understanding the Amiga.

Looking over the Amiga schematics in the Hardware Reference Manual and figuring out how the low pass filter circuitry worked was fun.

Writing my first 68k asm program to do sine waves and programming the Amiga's coprocessor chip to do on the fly scanline colour changes was really cool too.

PS - for all you Atari ST lovers, here's 25 cents - buy yourself a real os :)

Re: What sparked your inner hacker?

#46

Post by rms »

tlrobinson wrote: post #30

Legos.

Having done relatively well in a robotics competition that used Lego Technic, I got really annoyed using Legos to build something mechanically complex because of what I dubbed the "Lego Design Flaw." Legos have a 5:4 ratio of width to height (or height to width?) which makes it much more difficult than it should be to build in the full 3 dimensions.

Re: What sparked your inner hacker?

#48

Post by boomshine »

christefano wrote: post #6

A big influence on me was the hacker culture on AOL. This was around the time AOL 2.6 or 2.7 was current, and there were many ways to modify the AOL software to do very cool things. After AOL released version 3 of the AOL client (which closed a lot of the hooks for illegal addons), I wrote what might be the world's first searchbox for web browsers. This was when I was a teenager and AltaVista was still the largest se…

It's interesting that the style of searching you're talking about has remanifested 12 years later in the form of Firefox 3's smart bookmarks. http://ptaff.ca/smart/

What was the name of your program? Does it still work?

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