Word: hackers
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...hacker, MacLachlan is a member of an intense, reclusive subculture of the computer age that has cropped up at the nation's top universities. The term hacker derives from "hack," meaning a subtle, sometimes elegant fix for a flaw in a computer program. Hackers spend hours typing commands on terminal keyboards to learn as much as possible about the strengths and weaknesses of a particular program or network. They tinker for the sheer fun of it, delving deeper and deeper into the mysteries of software...
Indeed, a good deal of pop psychology has been written about the tendency of hackers to sublimate personal or academic problems in the immediate thrill of answering a question posed on a terminal screen. In Psychology Today, Stanford Professor Philip Zimbardo summed up the hacker's dilemma: "Fascination with the computer becomes an addiction, and as with most addictions, the 'substance' that gets abused is human relationships...
...hacker stereotype is a pudgy male with a fish-belly-white complexion who swills soft drinks, lives on candy bars and spends most of his waking hours in front of a terminal, playing games or trying to penetrate Defense Department networks. (So far as is known, no one has succeeded in breaching a classified Pentagon system.) Dress ranges from the clean-cut, Ken-and-Barbie look to the torn jeans and tie-dyed couture of the Woodstock generation. Beards and glasses are popular hacker accessories...
Like all enthusiasts, hackers have developed their own argot, handed down from the first computer zealots of the early 1970s. To "gronk out," for example, means to go to sleep; to "frobnicate" or "frob" means to fiddle with the controls of a computer. Hackerese changes along with computer technology; even the term hacker is under revisionist pressure. At Carnegie-Mellon, some hackers contend that "wizard" is a more appropriate moniker for those adept at programming...
Like rock stars, hackers have their groupies. Angela Gugliotta is not a hacker, but she prefers the company of hackers. Says she: "When I started meeting hackers I said to myself, 'Gee, here are people who are interested in something.' I was unhappy here until I started hanging around hackers." Hangers-on are tolerated if they know their place; poseurs who spout hacker phrases but know nothing about computers are regarded with contempt. Says Wholey: "You learn to avoid those people. They have nothing...