"A Brief History of Hackerdom" - After you let ZDNET brainwash you with articles about A Brief History of Hackerdom"
6a60b9299e40f8bfc42c7f6e56d47aa100b68b2ed9806d830992bdd7103f17d3<!doctype HTML public "-//W3O//DTD W3 HTML 3.2//EN">
<HTML>
<HEAD>
<TITLE>A Brief History of Hackerdom</TITLE>
<link rev=made href=mailto:esr@snark.thyrsus.com>
<meta name="description" content="How the hacker culture evolved.">
</HEAD>
<BODY>
<table width="100%" cellpadding=0><tr>
<td width="30%">Back to <a
href="http:/~esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html">Hacker How-To</a>
<td width="30%" align=center>Up to <a href="http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/sitemap.html">Site Map</a>
<td width="30%" align=right>$Date: 1999/03/10 13:44:16 $
</table>
<HR>
<H5>
Translations:
<a href="http://linux.voshod.com/articles/hacker.htm">Russian</a>
</H5>
<H1 ALIGN=CENTER>A Brief History of Hackerdom</H1>
<H1>Prologue: The Real Programmers</H1>
In the beginning, there were Real Programmers. <p>
That's not what they called themselves. They didn't call themselves
`hackers', either, or anything in particular; the sobriquet `Real
Programmer' wasn't coined until after 1980. But from 1945 onward, the
technology of computing attracted many of the world's brightest and
most creative minds. From Eckert & Mauchly's ENIAC onward there was a
more or less continuous and self-conscious technical culture of
enthusiast programmers, people who built and played with software for
fun. <p>
The Real Programmers typically came out of engineering or physics
backgrounds. They wore white socks and polyester shirts and ties and
thick glasses and coded in machine language and assembler and FORTRAN
and half a dozen ancient languages now forgotten. These were the
hacker culture's precursors, the largely unsung protagonists of its
prehistory. <p>
From the end of World War Two to the early 1970s, in the great days of
batch computing and the ``big iron'' mainframes, the Real Programmers
were the dominant technical culture in computing. A few pieces of
revered hacker folklore date from this era, including the well-known
story of Mel (included in the Jargon File), various lists of Murphy's
Laws, and the mock-German ``Blinkenlights'' poster that still graces
many computer rooms. <p>
Some people who grew up in the `Real Programmer' culture remained
active into the 1990s. Seymour Cray, designer of the Cray line of
supercomputers, is said once to have toggled an entire operating
system of his own design into a computer of his own design. In octal.
Without an error. And it worked. Real Programmer macho supremo. <p>
On a lighter note, Stan Kelly-Bootle, author of <cite>The Devil's DP
Dictionary</cite> (McGraw-Hill, 1981, ISBN 0-07-034022-6) and folklorist
extraordinaire, programmed on the Manchester Mark I, the first
fully-operational stored-program digital computer, in 1948. Nowadays
he writes technical humor columns for computing magazines which often
take the form of a vigorous and knowing dialogue with today's hacker
culture. <p>
Others, such as David E. Lundstrom, have written anecdotal histories
of those early years (<cite>A few Good Men From UNIVAC</cite>, 1987,
ISBN-0-262-62075-8). <p>
The `Real Programmer' culture, though, was heavily associated with
batch (and especially batch scientific) computing. It was eventually
eclipsed by the rise of interactive computing, the universities, and
the networks. These gave birth to another continuous engineering
tradition that, eventually, would evolve into today's open-source
hacker culture.<p>
<H1>The Early Hackers</H1>
The beginnings of the hacker culture as we know it today can be
conveniently dated to 1961, the year MIT acquired the first PDP-1.
The Signals and Power committee of MIT's Tech Model Railroad Club
adopted the machine as their favorite tech-toy and invented
programming tools, slang, and an entire surrounding culture that is
still recognizably with us today. These early years have been
examined in the first part of Steven Levy's book <cite>Hackers</cite>
(Anchor/Doubleday 1984, ISBN 0-385-19195-2). <p>
MIT's computer culture seems to have been the first to adopt the term
`hacker'. The TMRC's hackers became the nucleus of MIT's Artificial
Intelligence Laboratory, the world's leading center of AI research
into the early 1980s. And their influence was spread far wider after
1969, the first year of the ARPANET. <p>
The ARPANET was the first transcontinental, high-speed computer
network. It was built by the Defense Department as an experiment in
digital communications, but grew to link together hundreds of
universities and defense contractors and research laboratories. It
enabled researchers everywhere to exchange information with
unprecedented speed and flexibility, giving a huge boost to
collaborative work and tremendously increasing both the pace and
intensity of technological advance. <p>
But the ARPANET did something else as well. Its electronic highways
brought together hackers all over the U.S. in a critical mass; instead
of remaining in isolated small groups each developing their own
ephemeral local cultures, they discovered (or re-invented) themselves
as a networked tribe. <p>
The first intentional artifacts of hackerdom --- the first slang
lists, the first satires, the first self-conscious discussions of the
hacker ethic --- all propagated on the ARPANET in its early years.
(The first version of the Jargon File, as a major example, dated from 1973.)
Hackerdom grew up at the universities connected to the net, especially
(though not exclusively) in their computer science departments. <p>
Culturally, MIT's AI Lab was first among equals from the late 1960s.
But Stanford University's Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and
(later) Carnegie-Mellon University became nearly as important. All
were thriving centers of computer science and AI research. All
attracted bright people who contributed great things to hackerdom, on
both the technical and folkloric levels. <p>
To understand what came later, though, we need to take another look at
the computers themselves; because the Lab's rise and its eventual fall
were both driven by waves of change in computing technology. <p>
Since the days of the PDP-1, hackerdom's fortunes had been woven
together with Digital Equipment Corporation's PDP series of
minicomputers. DEC pioneered commercial interactive computing and
time-sharing operating systems. Because their machines were flexible,
powerful, and relatively cheap for the era, lots of universities
bought them. <p>
Cheap timesharing was the medium the hacker culture grew in, and for
most of its lifespan the ARPANET was primarily a network of DEC
machines. The most important of these was the PDP-10, first released
in 1967. The 10 remained hackerdom's favorite machine for almost
fifteen years; TOPS-10 (DEC's operating system for the machine) and
MACRO-10 (its assembler) are still remembered with nostalgic fondness
in a great deal of slang and folklore. <p>
MIT, though it used the same PDP-10s as everyone else, took a slightly
different path; they rejected DEC's software for the PDP-10 entirely
and built their own operating system, the fabled ITS. <p>
ITS stood for `Incompatible Timesharing System' which gives one a
pretty good fix on their attitude. They wanted it <em>their</em> way.
Fortunately for all, MIT's people had the intelligence to match their
arrogance. ITS, quirky and eccentric and occasionally buggy though it
always was, hosted a brilliant series of technical innovations and
still arguably holds the record for time-sharing system in longest
continuous use. <p>
ITS itself was written in assembler, but many ITS projects were
written in the AI language LISP. LISP was far more powerful and
flexible than any other language of its day; in fact, it is still a
better design than most languages of <em>today</em>, twenty-five years
later. LISP freed ITS's hackers to think in unusual and creative
ways. It was a major factor in their successes, and remains one of
hackerdom's favorite languages. <p>
Many of the ITS culture's technical creations are still alive today;
the EMACS program editor is perhaps the best-known. And much of ITS's
folklore is still `live' to hackers, as one can see in the <A
HREF="http://www.tuxedo.org/jargon">Jargon File</A>. <p>
SAIL and CMU weren't asleep, either. Many of the cadre of hackers that grew
up around SAIL's PDP-10 later became key figures in the development of
the personal computer and today's window/icon/mouse software
interfaces. And hackers at CMU were doing the work that would lead
to the first practical large-scale applications of expert systems and
industrial robotics. <p>
Another important node of the culture was XEROX PARC, the famed Palo
Alto Research Center. For more than a decade, from the early 1970s
into the mid-1980s, PARC yielded an astonishing volume of
groundbreaking hardware and software innovations. The modern mice,
windows, and icons style of software interface was invented there. So
was the laser printer, and the local-area network; and PARC's series of D
machines anticipated the powerful personal computers of the 1980s by a
decade. Sadly, these prophets were without honor in their own
company; so much so that it became a standard joke to describe PARC as
a place characterized by developing brilliant ideas for everyone else.
Their influence on hackerdom was pervasive. <p>
The ARPANET and the PDP-10 cultures grew in strength and variety
throughout the 1970s. The facilities for electronic mailing
lists that had been used to foster cooperation among continent-wide
special-interest groups were increasingly also used for more social
and recreational purposes. DARPA deliberately turned a blind eye to all
the technically `unauthorized' activity; it understood that the extra
overhead was a small price to pay for attracting an entire generation
of bright young people into the computing field. <p>
Perhaps the best-known of the `social' ARPANET mailing lists was the
SF-LOVERS list for science-fiction fans; it is still very much alive
today, in fact, on the larger `Internet' that ARPANET evolved into.
But there were many others, pioneering a style of communication that
would later be commercialized by for-profit time-sharing services like
CompuServe, GEnie and Prodigy. <p>
<H1>The Rise of Unix</H1>
Meanwhile, however, off in the wilds of New Jersey, something else had
been going on since 1969 that would eventually overshadow the PDP-10
tradition. The year of ARPANET's birth was also the year that a Bell
Labs hacker named Ken Thompson invented Unix. <p>
Thompson had been involved with the development work on a time-sharing
OS called Multics, which shared common ancestry with ITS. Multics was
a test-bed for some important ideas about how the complexity of an
operating system could be hidden inside it, invisible to the user, and
even to most programmers. The idea was to make using Multics from the
outside (and programming for it!) much simpler, so that more real work
could get done. <p>
Bell Labs pulled out of the project when Multics displayed signs of
bloating into an unusable white elephant (the system was later
marketed commercially by Honeywell but never became a success). Ken
Thompson missed the Multics environment, and began to play at
implementing a mixture of its ideas and some of his own on a scavenged
DEC PDP-7. <p>
Another hacker named Dennis Ritchie invented a new language called `C'
for use under Thompson's embryonic Unix. Like Unix, C was designed to
be pleasant, unconstraining, and flexible. Interest in these tools
spread at Bell Labs, and they got a boost in 1971 when Thompson &
Ritchie won a bid to produce what we'd now call an office-automation
system for internal use there. But Thompson & Ritchie had their
eye on a bigger prize. <p>
Traditionally, operating systems had been written in tight assembler
to extract the absolute highest efficiency possible out of their host
machines. Thompson and Ritchie were among the first to realize that
hardware and compiler technology had become good enough that an entire
operating system could be written in C, and by 1974 the whole
environment had been successfully ported to several machines of
different types. <p>
This had never been done before, and the implications were enormous.
If Unix could present the same face, the same capabilities, on
machines of many different types, it could serve as a common software
environment for all of them. No longer would users have to pay for
complete new designs of software every time a machine went obsolete.
Hackers could carry around software toolkits between different
machines, rather than having to re-invent the equivalents of fire and
the wheel every time. <p>
Besides portability, Unix and C had some other important strengths.
Both were constructed from a ``Keep It Simple, Stupid'' philosophy. A
programmer could easily hold the entire logical structure of C in his
head (unlike most other languages before or since) rather than needing
to refer constantly to manuals; and Unix was structured as a flexible
toolkit of simple programs designed to combine with each other in
useful ways. <p>
The combination proved to be adaptable to a very wide range of
computing tasks, including many completely unanticipated by the
designers. It spread very rapidly within AT&T, in spite of the lack
of any formal support program for it. By 1980 it had spread to a
large number of university and research computing sites, and thousands
of hackers considered it home. <p>
The workhorse machines of the early Unix culture were the PDP-11 and
its descendant, the VAX. But because of Unix's portability, it ran
essentially unaltered on a wider range of machines than one could find
on the entire ARPANET. And nobody used assembler; C programs were
readily portable among all these machines. <p>
Unix even had its own networking, of sorts --- UUCP: low-speed and
unreliable, but cheap. Any two Unix machines could exchange
point-to-point electronic mail over ordinary phone lines; this
capability was built into the system, not an optional extra. Unix
sites began to form a network nation of their own, and a hacker
culture to go with it. In 1980 the first USENET sites began
exchanging broadcast news, forming a gigantic distributed bulletin
board that would quickly grow bigger than ARPANET. <p>
A few Unix sites were on the ARPANET themselves. The PDP-10 and Unix
cultures began to meet and mingle at the edges, but they didn't mix
very well at first. The PDP-10 hackers tended to consider the Unix
crowd a bunch of upstarts, using tools that looked ridiculously
primitive when set against the baroque, lovely complexities of LISP
and ITS. ``Stone knives and bearskins!'' they muttered. <p>
And there was yet a third current flowing. The first personal
computer had been marketed in 1975; Apple was founded in 1977, and
advances came with almost unbelievable rapidity in the years that
followed. The potential of microcomputers was clear, and attracted
yet another generation of bright young hackers. <em>Their</em> language
was BASIC, so primitive that PDP-10 partisans and Unix aficionados
both considered it beneath contempt. <p>
<H1>The End of Elder Days</H1>
So matters stood in 1980; three cultures, overlapping at the edges but
organized around very different technologies. The ARPANET/PDP-10
culture, wedded to LISP and MACRO and TOPS-10 and ITS. The Unix and C
crowd with their PDP-11s and VAXen and pokey telephone connections.
And an anarchic horde of early microcomputer enthusiasts bent on taking
computer power to the people. <p>
Among these, the ITS culture could still claim pride of place. But
stormclouds were gathering over the Lab. The PDP-10 technology ITS
depended on was aging, and the Lab itself was split into factions by
the first attempts to commercialize AI technology. Some of the Lab's
(and SAIL's and CMU's) best were lured away to high-paying jobs at
startup companies. <p>
The death blow came in 1983, when DEC cancelled its followon to the
PDP-10 in order to concentrate on the PDP-11 and VAX lines. ITS no
longer had a future. Because it wasn't portable, it was more effort
than anyone could afford to move ITS to new hardware. The Berkeley
variant of Unix running on a VAX became the hacking system <it>par
excellence</it>, and anyone with an eye on the future could see that
microcomputers were growing in power so rapidly that they were likely
to sweep all before them. <p>
It's around this time that Levy wrote <cite>Hackers</cite>. One of his
prime informants was Richard M. Stallman (inventor of EMACS), a
leading figure at the Lab and its most fanatical holdout against the
commercialization of Lab technology. <p>
Stallman (who is usually known by his initials and login name, RMS)
went on to form the Free Software Foundation and dedicate himself to
producing high-quality free software. Levy eulogized him as ``the
last true hacker'', a description which happily proved incorrect. <p>
Stallman's grandest scheme neatly epitomized the transition hackerdom
underwent in the early eighties --- in 1982 he began the construction of an
entire clone of Unix, written in C and available for free. Thus, the
spirit and tradition of ITS was preserved as an important part of the
newer, Unix and VAX-centered hacker culture. <p>
It was also around this time that microchip and local-area network
technology began to have a serious impact on hackerdom. Ethernet and
the Motorola 68000 microchip made a potentially potent combination,
and several different startups had been formed to build the first
generation of what we now call workstations. <p>
In 1982, a group of Unix hackers from Stanford and Berkeley founded
Sun Microsystems on the belief that Unix running on relatively
inexpensive 68000-based hardware would prove a winning combination for
a wide variety of applications. They were right, and their vision set
the pattern for an entire industry. While still priced out of reach
of most individuals, workstations were cheap for corporations and
universities; networks of them (one to a user) rapidly replaced the
older VAXes and other timesharing systems. <p>
<H1>The Proprietary-Unix Era</H1>
By 1984, when Ma Bell divested and Unix became a supported AT&T
product for the first time, the most important fault line in hackerdom
was between a relatively cohesive ``network nation'' centered around
the Internet and USENET (and mostly using minicomputer- or
workstation-class machines running Unix), and a vast disconnected
hinterland of microcomputer enthusiasts. <p>
The workstation-class machines built by Sun and others opened up new
worlds for hackers. They were built to do high-performance graphics
and pass around shared data over a network. During the 1980s
hackerdom was preoccupied by the software and tool-building challenges
of getting the most use out of these features. Berkeley Unix
developed built-in support for the ARPANET protocols which offered a
solution to the networking problem and encouraged further growth of
the Internet. <p>
There were several attempts to tame workstation graphics. The one that
prevailed was the X window system. A critical factor in its success
was that the X developers were willing to give the sources away for
free in accordance with the hacker ethic, and able to distribute them
over the Internet. X's victory over proprietary graphics systems
(including one offered by Sun itself) was an important harbinger
of changes which, a few years later, would profoundly affect Unix
itself. <p>
There was a bit of factional spleen still vented occasionally in the
ITS/Unix rivalry (mostly from the ex-ITSers' side). But the last ITS
machine shut down for good in 1990; the zealots no longer had a place
to stand and mostly assimilated to the Unix culture with various
degrees of grumbling. <p>
Within networked hackerdom itself, the big rivalry of the 1980s was
between fans of Berkeley Unix and the AT&T versions. Occasionally you
can still find copies of a poster from that period, showing a cartoony
X-wing fighter out of the ``Star Wars'' movies streaking away from an
exploding Death Star patterned on the AT&T logo. Berkeley hackers
liked to see themselves as rebels against soulless corporate empires.
AT&T Unix never caught up with BSD/Sun in the marketplace, but it won the
standards wars. By 1990 AT&T and BSD versions were becoming harder
to tell apart, having adopted many of each others' innovations. <p>
As the 1990s opened, the workstation technology of the previous decade
was beginning to look distinctly threatened by newer, low-cost and
high-performance personal computers based on the Intel 386 chip and
its descendants. For the first time, individual hackers could afford
to have home machines comparable in power and storage capacity to the
minicomputers of ten years earlier -- Unix engines capable of
supporting a full development environment and talking to the Internet. <p>
The MS-DOS world remained blissfully ignorant of all this. Though
those early microcomputer enthusiasts quickly expanded to a population
of DOS and Mac hackers orders of magnitude greater than that of the
``network nation'' culture, they never become a self-aware culture
themselves. The pace of change was so fast that fifty different
technical cultures grew and died as rapidly as mayflies, never
achieving quite the stability necessary to develop a common tradition
of jargon, folklore and mythic history. The absence of a really
pervasive network comparable to UUCP or Internet prevented them
from becoming a network nation themselves.
Widespread access to commercial on-line services like CompuServe and
GEnie was beginning to take hold, but the fact that non-Unix
operating systems don't come bundled with development tools meant
that very little source was passed over them. Thus, no tradition of
collaborative hacking developed. <p>
The mainstream of hackerdom, (dis)organized around the Internet and by
now largely identified with the Unix technical culture, didn't care
about the commercial services. They wanted better tools and more
Internet, and cheap 32-bit PCs promised to put both in everyone's
reach. <p>
But where was the software? Commercial Unixes remained expensive, in
the multiple-kilobuck range. In the early 1990s several companies
made a go at selling AT&T or BSD Unix ports for PC-class machines.
Success was elusive, prices didn't come down much, and (worst of all)
you didn't get modifiable and redistributable sources with your
operating system. The traditional software-business model wasn't
giving hackers what they wanted. <p>
Neither was the Free Software Foundation. The development of HURD,
RMS's long-promised free Unix kernel for hackers, got stalled for
years and failed to produce anything like a usable kernel until 1996
(though by 1990 FSF supplied almost all the other difficult parts of a
Unix-like operating system). <p>
Worse, by the early 1990s it was becoming clear that ten years of
effort to commercialize proprietary Unix was ending in failure.
Unix's promise of cross-platform portability got lost in bickering
among half a dozen proprietary Unix versions. The proprietary-Unix
players proved so ponderous, so blind, and so inept at marketing that
Microsoft was able to grab away a large part of their market with the
shockingly inferior technology of its Windows OS. <p>
In early 1993, a hostile observer might have had grounds for thinking that
the Unix story was almost played out, and with it the fortunes of the
hacker tribe. And there was no shortage of hostile observers in the
computer trade press, many of whom hads been ritually predicting the
imminent death of Unix at six-month intervals ever since the late 1970s.<p>
In those days it was conventional wisdom that the era of individual
techno-heroism was over, that the software industry and the nascent Internet
would increasingly be dominated by colossi like Microsoft. The first
generation of Unix hackers seemed to be getting old and tired
(Berkeley's Computer Science Research group ran out of steam and would
lose its funding in 1994). It was a depressing time.<P>
Fortunately, there had been things going on out of sight of the trade
press, and out of sight even of most hackers, that would produce
startlingly positive developments in later 1993 and 1994. Eventually,
these would take the culture in a whole new direction and to
undreamed-of successes.<p>
<H1>The Early Free Unixes</H1>
Into the gap left by the HURD's failure had stepped a Helsinki University
student named Linus Torvalds. In 1991 he began developing a free Unix
kernel for 386 machines using the Free Software Foundation's toolkit.
His initial, rapid success attracted many Internet hackers to help him
develop Linux, a full-featured Unix with entirely free and
re-distributable sources. <p>
Linux was not without competitors. In 1991, contemporaneously with
Linus Torvalds's early experiments, William and Lynne Jolitz were
experimentally porting the BSD Unix sources to the 386. Most observers
comparing BSD technology with Linus's crude early efforts expected
that BSD ports would become the most important free Unixes on the PC.<p>
The most important feature of Linux, however, was not technical but
sociological. Until the Linux development, everyone believed that any
software as complex as an operating system had to be developed in a carefully
coordinated way by a relatively small, tightly-knit group of people. This
model was and still is typical of both commercial software and the great
freeware cathedrals built by the Free Software Foundation in the
1980s; also of the freeBSD/netBSD/OpenBSD projects that spun off
from the Jolitzes' original 386BSD port. <p>
Linux evolved in a completely different way. From nearly the
beginning, it was rather casually hacked on by huge numbers of
volunteers coordinating only through the Internet. Quality was
maintained not by rigid standards or autocracy but by the naively
simple strategy of releasing every week and getting feedback from
hundreds of users within days, creating a sort of rapid Darwinian
selection on the mutations introduced by developers. To the amazement
of almost everyone, this worked quite well. <p>
By late 1993 Linux could compete on stability and reliability with
many commercial Unixes, and hosted vastly more software. It was even
beginning to attract ports of commercial applications software. One
indirect effect of this development was to kill off most of the
smaller proprietary Unix vendors -- without developers and hackers to
sell to, they folded. One of the few survivors, BSDI (Berkeley
Systems Design, Incorporated), flourished by offering full sources
with its BSD-based Unix and cultivating close ties with the hacker
community. <p>
These developments were not much remarked on at the time even within
the hacker culture, and not at all outside it. The hacker culture,
defying repeated predictions of its demise, was just beginning to
remake the commercial-software world in its own image. It would be
five more years, however, before this trend became obvious. <p>
<H1>The Great Web Explosion</H1>
The early growth of Linux synergized with another phenomenon: the public
discovery of the Internet. The early 1990s also saw the beginnings
of a flourishing Internet-provider industry, selling connectivity to
the public for a few dollars a month. Following the invention of the
World-Wide Web, the Internet's already-rapid growth accelerated to a
breakneck pace. <p>
By 1994, the year Berkeley's Unix development group formally shut down,
several different free Unix versions (Linux and the descendants of
386BSD) served as the major focal points of hacking activity. Linux
was being distributed commercially on CD-ROM and selling like hotcakes.
By the end of 1995, major computer companies were beginning to take out
glossy advertisements celebrating the Internet-friendliness of their
software and hardware! <p>
In the late 1990s the central activities of hackerdom became Linux
development and the mainstreaming of the Internet. The World Wide Web
has at last made the Internet into a mass medium, and many of the hackers
of the 1980s and early 1990s launched Internet Service Providers selling
or giving access to the masses. <p>
The mainstreaming of the Internet has even brought the hacker culture
the beginnings of mainstream respectability and political clout.
In 1994 and 1995 hacker activism scuppered the Clipper proposal which
would have put strong encryption under government control. In 1996 hackers
mobilized a broad coalition to defeat the misnamed ``Communications
Decency Act'' and prevent censorship of the Internet. <P>
With the CDA victory, we pass out of history into current events. We
also pass into a period in which your historian (rather to his own
surprise) became an actor rather than just an observer. This
narrative will continue in `Revenge of the Hackers'.<P>
<H2>Related resources:</H2>
A Japanese translation of an earlier version of this page is available at
<a href="http://epsenewsc.gee.kyoto-u.ac.jp/JF/JF-ftp/euc/history.euc">
http://epsenewsc.gee.kyoto-u.ac.jp/JF/JF-ftp/euc/history.euc</a>.
A <a
href="http://www.linux-france.com/article/these/hackers_history/fr-a_brief_history_of_hackerdom.html">French
translation</a> of the 1999/02/02 version is also available.<p>
<HR>
<table width="100%" cellpadding=0><tr>
<td width="30%">Back to <a
href="http:/~esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html">Hacker How-To</a>
<td width="30%" align=center>Up to <a href="http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/sitemap.html">Site Map</a>
<td width="30%" align=right>$Date: 1999/03/10 13:44:16 $
</table>
<P><ADDRESS>Eric S. Raymond <A HREF="mailto:esr@thyrsus.com"><esr@snark.thyrsus.com></A></ADDRESS>
</BODY>
</HTML>
© 2022 Packet Storm. All rights reserved.
%7Cutmcsr%3D(direct)%7Cutmcmd%3D(none)){kind=small}
Follow us on Twitter
Follow us on Facebook
Subscribe to an RSS Feed