I was rummaging through my old docs and found a sales brochure for the MicroBee computer originally released in kit form by Applied Technology. The model PC85 is advertised as "putting advanced computer technology in the hands of Hackers, Hobbyists and Horticulturalists ...".
Obviously the word "hacker" had a different, benevolent meaning in those days. Nowadays "cracker" and "hacker" are used interchangeably.
- Franc Zabkar
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Great little micro . still have the one I bought around 1980 I believe , its here running some stuff for the packet station
As past Secretary of MUGWA (Microbee Users Group of WA) I have a
50 or so Microbees of various models in my shed mostly working (many rescued from people who were giving them away or going to send to the tip). The hacker term was originally applied to those of us who cut code but it was apparently derived from a MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) term for a clever trick (see Stephen Levy's book "Hackers - Heroes of the Computer Revolution" for more on this and the early days of home computing etc).I can remember feeling very insulted when some person on a ABC radio programme promoting their new start up anti- piracy computer security firm on the basis that MUGWA openly promoted itself as a club for hackers and claiming it was promoting software piracy. He didn't know the original meaning of the term and the way the club was using it. We should have taken him for libel or slander. In fact I met several commercial programmers through MUGWA and accordingly have always been vigorously anti software piracy and can say I have never knowingly had any pirated software in my house.
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In high school we had a networked lab of Microbees running off a
5MB(?) hard drive (Ooo!) MS Word was nowhere to be seen, we used WordStar and I put the school's student records into a DBase database I wrote. Got an A for it too. There was also this cool platform game where you had to avoid the monsters, all in glorious green and black.____________________________________________________ "I like to be organised. A place for everything. And everything all over the place."
Yes, a great read. Hacking isn't just about computers, every true hacker is adept at other skills such as lock picking and phone phreaking, and they supposedly follow the "Hacker Ethic". The famous MIT guide to lockpicking came about from those early hacker days.
One of Levy's other books, "Insanely Great" about the Mac is also a great read.
The Woz and Steve Jobs (of Apple fame) used to be phone phreakers, and sold the infamous Blue Boxes on the MIT grounds IIRC. Probably the most (in)famous hacker of all time, John Draper (a.k.a Capt'n Crunch) was a good buddy of Woz & Jobs, and used to "hang out" at Apple. I love it how Drapers word processor (EasyWriter) was officially sold with the first IBM PC!
Dave :)
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