'80s Computer Hacking: A Supercut

From: http://boingboing.net/2014/07/25/video-computer-hacking-in-198.html

www.youtube.com/v/rUGQHdYUIEo


Ah man!!

 

the 80's was the golden age .. i wish i was a little older maybe so i could have experienced being a geek back then

i like where he changed his days absent .. when i was in high school me and a friend came up with this plan to change our grades in the computer grade book program by spoofing a memo email, well that was part of it

 

Oh, hacking in the 80's was a blast. Everything was new and exciting, I was a young teen. Software was mostly un-encrypted and uncompressed. In fact, the First compressions I've seen were by hackers. The software and media were small, peeking and poking in 32Kb of memory or a 170kb floppy. Software now is just an insanely encrypted bloated beast.

Simply owning a computer in the 80's made you part of an elite group. Even through the 90's when home PC's really took off, I was like the "go-to" guy; burning CD's of all sorts, building PC's, windows installations, windows troubleshooting, windows, windows, fucking windows... I almost feel kind of used about it. Sniveling mainstream jump-on-boards, "I gotta have the latest and greatest everything. Update me, install this, install that, I want two video cards...". These idiots kind of turned me off of computing, I started dropping 2-5 years behind hardware and software. I still use XP.

The hackers and pirates don't get the credit they deserve. In the late 80's early 90's it was these elite groups of hackers that spent the money on hardware, spent millions, invested millions, drove the industry to develop faster chips, larger memory... They literally funded and built the internet outside of science institutions and universities. The first internet service to our small town was not the cable or phone company, it was from the leader of a Commodore user group and local BBS owner (For all intents and purposes, the Commodore user group was just a piracy organisation). He wen't broke giving us internet and later was bought out by the phone company I believe.

 

yes .. every piece of software we use was built by hackers. hackers are the reason all this shit works.

its a common misconception that hackers only try to break software, when ur software is broken, a hacker is the only one that's gonna be able to fix it

i really think the media drives this misconception .. THEY don't like us because we to them we know too much, and that knowledge is just TOO powerful for the common person to possess! i think also they would rather only see programmers working for the man, to develop enterprise software that sells for big bucks .. they are against all this open source stuff and they don't wanna see us coming up with our own ideas, because then we don't have to buy it!