Hackers of the Renaissance

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Well, I honestly think hackerdom is far older than that. If we want to go there, Archimedes was most definitely a hacker (and maybe the inventor of one of the worldā€™s first mechanical computers). And what about the creators of the cave paintings a Lascaux, who made do with very primitive technology to create paints that have endured more than 20,000 years?

And itā€™s very possible to ā€œhackā€ other things than technology. Metrical poetry springs to mind - all the ins and outs of finding a phrase that fits the meter, expresses the sense and Just Works, so it seems like the words just sprang directly from your brain. So maybe the hacking mindset isnā€™t actually just centuries, but millennia old.

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As someone who, for a living, often has to hack the equipment I work on, I also think that that the headline for that Omni article could simply have omitted the word ā€œfourā€ from the headline.

No one, as far as I know, has ever invented the definitive, final version of any device. If you look at all the ā€˜perfectā€™ machines we have (e.g.: the canoe and the kayak, the bicycle, screws and screwdrivers), theyā€™re ALL the result of incremental improvements made by lots and lots of people who kept finding that ā€œItā€™s pretty good. Except thereā€™s a small problemā€¦ā€

Back in my misspent youth a hacker was someone like Don Lancaster who took common circuit elements and ā€œhackedā€ them to make something new and unusual. It was entirely a creative movement at that time. Iā€™ve long regretted the negative stereotype that has been applied to hacking. I suppose that the positive form of hacking is now considered part of the so-called ā€œMakerā€ movement, but ā€œhackingā€ is a much more descriptive term.

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