Eric S. Raymond Quotes

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.

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.

People who are more than casually interested in computers should have at least some idea of what the underlying hardware is like. Otherwise the programs they write will be pretty weird.

I got my first computer in the 6th grade or so. As soon as I got it, I was interested in finding out how it worked and how the programs worked and then figuring out how to write programs at just deeper and deeper levels within the system.

See, unlike most hackers, I get little joy out of figuring out how to install the latest toy.

I had spent the summer of 1966 working at MIT in the group that was the MIT component of the Multics effort.

The workstation-class machines built by Sun and others opened up new worlds for hackers.

As a young boy, I was taught in high school that hacking was cool.

I'm the worst at a computer.

Computers intimidate me.

In personal conversations with technical people, I call myself a hacker. But when I'm talking to journalists I just say "programmer" or something like that.

To write a kernel without a data structure and have it be as consistent and graceful as UNIX would have been a much, much harder challenge.

The visible things that have come from the group have been the Plan 9 system and Inferno, but I hasten to say that the ideas and the work have come from colleagues.

I was around computers from birth; we had one of the first Macs, which came out shortly before I was born, and my dad ran a company that wrote computer operating systems. I don't think I have any particular technical skills; I just got a really large head start.

The first programming assignment I had in high school was to find the first 100 Fibonacci numbers. Instead, I thought it would be cooler to write a program to get the teacher's password and all the other students' passwords. And the teacher gave me an A and told the class how smart I was.

I think Linux is a great thing, in the big picture. It's a great hacker's tool, and it has a lot of potential to become something more.

We can't defend French culture without a [computer] software industry.

I love technology and I can handle myself around a computer.

All of the coding and hacking stuff that we do and I talk about, I always have them explain what it means so I know what I'm saying.

I'm a PC guy.

I'm into computers and have been for a while.

I was a programmer.

I would still describe myself as a hacker. I still remember feeling the magic, the sense of discovery, when I first connected to a bulletin board. It seemed like the world was somehow brighter, the greens were greener. Like I'd stepped through a portal to the other side. I knew back then that things would never be the same again for me.

It was on a bulletin board that I first learned about hacker culture, the 'Let's just break through this wall and see what's on the other side' mentality.

My dad used to build computers for the U.S. government, for military intelligence. So he always had computers around the house.