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Funny Story... For a good 20 some years, there was a wonderful conference dedicated to hacking on the Macintosh called 'MacHack' that was traditionally held in Dearborn, Michigan (well, it started on U of M's campus in Ann Arbor, and was on the west coast once) but eventually it found its home just outside of Detroit in a quaint little Holiday Inn. It hosted many a wonderful keynote speaker including Woz himself, and most of the original Macintosh engineering team, amongst others (Ken Arnold, Eric Raymond, David Pogue, Andy Ihnatko, to name a few...) We'd descend on the place every summer. In the old days, we'd have a massive machine room full of macs provided by sponsors. Biggest LAN some of us yoots had ever seen, and boy did we play some Marathon on it. In later years, we took over the lobby of this place. The Holiday Inn staff loved us. We were courteous and kept after ourselves well. Well, they liked us so much and thought we were so upstanding, they extended welcome to other "hacker" conferences that didn't go so well (think FBI making arrests in the lobby, vandalism, general hoodlum-ry). In light of this, they approached us and eventually the conference heads folded and renamed it the ADHOC conference (Advanced Hands-On Developers Conference). There were other circumstances, but the public perception of the concept of "Hacker" is what really did the deed. It died a sad, sad death shortly afterward. sigh ...a rose by any other name... RIP, MacHack. sob :) |