Am I a Hacker?

by Thumos

Am I a hacker?

By the definition most people think of, no.  I've never gotten root on a computer I didn't own.  Never had - or even knew - somebody with a Red Box.  I'm not a pen-tester or a network security expert.  I don't write code, spend my days poring over logs, or even work with computers/phones/electronics for a living.

And yet.  I remember spending time as a teenager in the 1980s manually wardialing numbers just to see who (or what) picked up the phone, occasionally getting an earful of fax machine.

My first computer was a gift from mom and dad: a Sinclair the size of a hardback book which had a tiny membrane keyboard hooked up to the TV and which used a tape recorder for storage.  I remember being so happy that they had also sprung for the 16k expanded memory module.  I spent hours in the basement, learning BASIC and then saving my programs onto a blank cassette tape.  (And if I was lucky, the program would reload back onto the Sinclair in less than three tries the next day.)

It was there I wrote my first game, which shot "missiles" in a parabola which depended on the angle and speed input from the keyboard.  It even had a Pong-like, square pixel that moved across the screen.

When I got to college, it was one of my two roommates (an engineer, naturally) who had the first desktop computer I'd ever seen.  Many weekends were wasted playing the first version of Flight Simulator, swapping 5-1/4 inch floppies as needed to load the entire program.  And the "water detected in the floppy drive" joke program was always good for a laugh.

The bit of BASIC I knew helped me talk my way into a student job at the linguistics department's computer lab.  I remember then having to run out to buy a book on Turbo Pascal so that I could write the software needed for my new boss' experiments.  Hours and hours spent outside of class writing my first serious if-then-elseif functions and while loops to process raw data.

Changing Bernoulli cartridges of digitized sound files mid-experiment and hoping the program wouldn't crash and make me have to go in and explain to the test subject that we needed to start over from the beginning.

And then there were the hours outside the hours I worked in the lab, writing programs just for myself, often until well past midnight.  Programs written just for fun.  And when I needed to learn a bit of 8086 assembly language to write the next set of programs my boss wanted, I just bought another book and began working through the examples inside.

The first laptop I bought in the early 1990s was the size of a small pizza box and weighed a ton, but it had a modem.  And I spent many hours on a dial-up connection reading Gopher pages and staring at early web browsers while waiting for thumbnail images - literally the size of my thumbnail - to appear.  A ten second MIDI file might take half an hour to download if the connection was bad.  But I had a collection of them, which I proudly used to personalize my error messages.

I started learning HTML and created my first web page in the era of banner ads on the never-to-be-forgotten GeoCities site.  The code for that page is lost to the mists of time (thankfully), but I remember text flowing around images that floated in a sea of bright red and lemon-yellow.

Am I a hacker?

I remember hours spent on USENET, downloading images and music in chunks that had to be stitched together and then uudecoded.  If you were lucky, the whole gluey mess turned into a full, glitchless picture of a cat or a short song.  The GNU Wget program became my favorite go-to for downloading websites overnight, since the phone line was tied up for as long as you went on the Internet.  (You just crossed your fingers and hoped there was no midnight emergency.)

Sometimes I'd drink a glass of water just before bed, knowing I'd be up in the middle of the night - and while I was at it, I could check to see if that download had finally finished and maybe free up the phone line before the sun came up.

I remember holding my breath when I first set up Ubuntu (NattyNarwhal, I believe) to dual-boot on one of my later laptops.  I remember really holding my breath when I took the full plunge and scraped the hard drive to go all-Linux all-the-time.  And again when I switched over from Ubuntu to Debian, realizing that the hand-holding, GNOME experience of the one distribution was being replaced by the figure-it-out-yourself, you're-on-your-own-big-boy experience of the other.

Even with all this, maybe I'm not a hacker.  But what does it mean to be a hacker?

Hacking isn't entirely about computers or phones or even anything electronic.  It's about being curious and not put off that you don't know something - in fact, your ignorance inspires you to learn.  It means you are willing to poke into the corners of places you think you already know well, just to find something you actually don't.  Spending hours reading man pages for the programs you use every day or hanging out on IRC to pick up a couple of tips or thinking about how you'd solve the problem someone just posted on Reddit.  It means being O.K. with never having all the answers because, for one, that's impossible and two, things always change just when you know you've seen it all.

Being a hacker is also about having fun.  Playing with hardware and software to see how they work and how they interact - and sometimes how they break.  It's about feeling that moment of happiness that comes when your knowledge and skills expand and something that was impossible earlier now seems so simple.  There's some pride of accomplishment in there too, I'll admit.  That moment when the script you wrote works just the way you wanted it to or the computer reboots or you finally put the tools down on your scratch-built project.

And being a hacker is also about being part of a community.  Learning from those who know more and sharing your experience with those who know less.  Or thanking someone for the tip and, if you're lucky, being thanked by someone else when you offer your own tip.  It's about typing up a patient explanation when the easiest thing would be just tell the person to RTFM, and having the respect for others to thoroughly look for an already-existing answer before asking your question.

So am I a hacker?  Maybe.  Maybe not.  To be honest, I don't care what you call me.  I've been learning and having fun and learning more and having more fun and sharing when and where I can for almost 40 years now.  And as far as I'm concerned, that's all I need to know.

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