| 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 programming course (punched card "FORTRAN IV" on an IBM 1130 (numeric IFs, but, hey, it fit in 8KB and didn't require a disk)) taught by ... a coach. A coach who gave us a not in the book no notes that I remember blackboard lecture on two's complement representation and arithmetic that I now realize was invaluable, even though I've never written a line of assembler in my life (useful for debugging (especially before dbx :-), but the wrong level of abstraction for me). And the above by then a decade obsolete computing environment sending me straight to the library stacks to e.g. learn about Structured Programming, which was all the rage then. What truly set the hook was Harvard Summer School in 1978: a PDP-11/70 running a very well hacked up V6 (command name and argument completion and hinting!) which was a rich environment with the good Peter Langston games of the time (except Empire) and of course Adventure. Buying a DECTAPE then because it was cool. Learning "rm -rf" and being very glad I had bought it ^_^ (to this day I'm a fanatic about backups). And then getting introduced to MULTICS, ITS (including Zork) and Lisp Machines---and wondering whey UNIX was winning and MULTICS was all but dead, leading to a life long study the determinants of success in the area discussed by The Rise of Worse Is Better. Even as a serious scientist (chemist) who can't play games any more due to mild RSI, this stuff is just too damned fun to ignore.
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ONLY a coder would do such a thing ^-^