Hacker Folklore Page

I recently gave a paper entitled The Heroic Hacker: Legends of the Computer Age at the American Folklore Society annual meeting in Pittsburgh PA. On this page you will find this paper, as well as some other hacker folklore that I've collected from the net.

Folklore-Related Information

Postscript version of the paper entitled The Heroic Hacker: Legends of the Computer Age

HTML hypertext version of the paper entitled The Heroic Hacker: Legends of the Computer Age

HTML version of The Story of Mel, A Real Programmer

Postscript for an annotated version of The Story of Mel, A Real Programmer. This has a long annotation section that you might or might not really want to print out...

HMTL Hypertext for an annotated version of The Story of Mel, A Real Programmer

Postscript of the overhead slides used in my October 1996 American Folklore Society talk.

Pdfostscript of the overhead slides used in my October 1996 American Folklore Society talk.

Postscript of the overhead slides used in the talk, but formatted four to a page to keep the size down.

Postscript version of the Datamation article entitled "Real Programmers Don't Use Pascal." This is the 1983 article that The Story of Mel was responding to.

ASCII version of the Datamation article.

HTML version of A Story About Magic, the story of the mysterious magic switch on the side of the MIT AI Lab PDP-10.

ASCII version of an email message about squeezing code into the tiny space of a satellite. Mel would have *loved* it.

ASCII version of a story explaining the hacker phrase "Always mount a scratch monkey."

ASCII version of the Robin Hood and Friar Tuck hack.

ASCII version of the good-bye message from the SAIL (Stanford AI Lab) machine when it was decommisioned in 1991.

ASCII file containing a variety of "Easter Eggs" in commercial programs. These are hidden features of programs that are not part of the real user interface (like scrolling pictures of the program creators, for example).

Link to the Jargon File also known as the Hackers Dictionary.

ASCII section from the GNU Emacs FAQ that discusses RMS' view about the GNU copyleft agreement. The entire GNU Emacs FAQ can be found here.

HTML version of a biblical-style account of the birth of the C programming language.

Last modified May 10, 1999.