Hacker Resources

This section is dedicated to providing insight and tools for Unix Like Systems, Security, and Maintenance. Check out some of the ebooks provided at the left. It's also a nod to the true hackers that started it all.

GNU Founder Richard Stallman

a Serious Bio

Richard Stallman is the founder of the GNU Project, launched in 1984 to develop the free software operating system GNU. The name ``GNU'' is a recursive acronym for ``GNU's Not Unix''.

GNU is free software: everyone is free to copy it and redistribute it, as well as to make changes either large or small. Non-free software keeps users divided and helpless, forbidden to share it and unable to change it. A free operating system is essential for people to be able to use computers in freedom.

Today, Linux-based variants of the GNU system, based on the kernel Linux developed by Linus Torvalds, are in widespread use. There are estimated to be some 20 million users of GNU/Linux systems today.

Richard Stallman is the principal author of the GNU Compiler Collection, a portable optimizing compiler which was designed to support diverse architectures and multiple languages. The compiler now supports over 30 different architectures and 7 programming languages.

Stallman also wrote the GNU symbolic debugger (gdb), GNU Emacs, and various other programs for the GNU operating system.

Stallman graduated from Harvard in 1974 with a BA in physics. During his college years, he also worked as a staff hacker at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab, learning operating system development by doing it. He wrote the first extensible Emacs text editor there in 1975. He also developed the AI technique of dependency-directed backtracking, also known as truth maintenance. In January 1984 he resigned from MIT to start the GNU project.

Stallman received the Grace Hopper award for 1991 from the Association for Computing Machinery, for his development of the first Emacs editor. In 1990 he was awarded a Macarthur foundation fellowship, and in 1996 an honorary doctorate from the Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden. In 1998 he received the Electronic Frontier Foundation's pioneer award along with Linus Torvalds. In 1999 he received the Yuri Rubinski award. In 2001 he received a second honorary doctorate, from the University of Glasgow, and shared the Takeda award for social/economic betterment with Torvalds and Ken Sakamura. In 2002 he was elected to the US National Academy of Engineering, and in 2003 to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2003 he was named an honorary professor of the Universidad Nacional de Ingenieria in Peru, and received an honorary doctorate from the Free University of Brussels. In 2004 he received an honorary doctorate from the Universidad Nacional de Salta, in Argentina.

Richard Stallman's 1983 biography

(this biography was published in the first edition of "The Hacker's Dictionary".)

I was built at a laboratory in Manhattan around 1953, and moved to the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab in 1971. My hobbies include affection, international folk dance, flying, cooking, physics, recorder, puns, science fiction fandom, and programming; I magically get paid for doing the last one. About a year ago i split up with the PDP-10 computer to which i was married for ten years. We still love each other, but the world is taking us in different directions. For the moment I still live in Cambridge, Massachusetts, among our old memories. "Richard Stallman" is just my mundane name; you can call me "rms".

Linux Kernel Inventor Linus Torvalds

Taken from Thocp.net

In 1991 Linus Torvalds, a 21-year-old computer science student at the University of Helsinki, Fin., having just purchased his first personal computer (PC), decided that he was not satisfied with the computer's operating system (OS). His PC used MS-DOS (the disk operating system from Microsoft Corp.), but Torvalds preferred the UNIX operating system he had used on the university's computers. He decided to create his own PC-based version of UNIX. Months of determined programming work yielded the beginnings of an operating system known as Linux that, eight years later, developed into what many observers saw as a genuine threat to mighty Microsoft and its seemingly ubiquitous Windows OS. By 1999 Torvalds had become a cult hero to a devoted band of computer users.

Torvalds was born in 1969 and grew up in Helsinki, father Nils Torvalds(eds.). At the age of 10 he began to dabble in computer programming on his grandfather's Commodore VIC-20. By the time he reached college, Torvalds considered himself an accomplished enough programmer to take on the Herculean task of creating an alternate operating system for his new PC. Once he had completed a rough version of Linux, he posted a message on the Internet to alert other PC users to his new system. He made the software available for free downloading, and, as was a common practice among software developers at the time, he released the source code, which meant that anyone with knowledge of computer programming could modify Linux to suit their own purposes. Linux soon had a following of enthusiastic supporters who, because they had access to the source code, were able to help Torvalds retool and refine the software.

Operating Linux required a certain amount of technical acumen; it was not as easy to use as more popular operating systems such as Windows, Apple Computer Inc.'s Mac OS, or IBM's OS/2. Because its volunteer developers prided themselves on the quality of their work, however, Linux evolved into a remarkably reliable, efficient system that rarely crashed. Linux got its big break in the late 1990s when competitors of Microsoft began taking the upstart OS seriously. Netscape Communications Corp., Corel Corp., Oracle Corp., Intel Corp., and other companies announced plans to support Linux as an inexpensive alternative to Windows. As this scenario took shape, Linux devotees and the media delighted in portraying Torvalds as David out to slay the giant, Bill Gates, Microsoft's cofounder and CEO.

Torvalds said he had no qualms with Gates's or Microsoft's financial success--he simply detested poorly engineered software. By 1999 an estimated seven million computers were running on Linux, still available free of charge, and many major software companies had announced plans to support it. Meanwhile, Torvalds had taken a position with Transmeta Corp., owned by Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen, working on a top-secret project that many in the high-tech community assumed would involve some future assault on the Microsoft empire.

Unix Inventors Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie

Ken Thompson From Wikipedia , the free encyclopedia.

Kenneth Thompson (born February 4, 1943) is a computer scientist, notable for his work on the UNIX operating system. Thompson was born in New Orleans, Louisiana, USA. He received a Bachelor's degree and Master's degree, both in electrical engineering, from the University of California, Berkeley.

In 1969, while at Bell Labs, Thompson and Dennis Ritchie were the principal creators of the UNIX operating system. Thompson also wrote the B programming language, a precursor to Dennis Ritchie's C programming language, currently one of the world's most commonly used programming languages. In addition, while writing the MULTICS operating system, he created the Bon programming language. He also wrote the original standard Unix editor, ed, which was descended from an earlier editor, QED. Somewhat later, while still at Bell Labs, he and Rob Pike were the principal creators of the Plan 9 operating system. During this work, he created the UTF-8 character encoding for use on the Plan 9 operating system.

He also wrote programs for generating the complete enumeration of chess endings, for all 4, 5, and currently 6-piece endings. Using these, a chess-playing computer program can play perfectly once a position stored in them is reached.

Thompson and Ritchie jointly received the Turing Award in 1983 "for their development of generic operating systems theory and specifically for the implementation of the UNIX operating system". Thompson's style of programming has influenced others, notably in the terseness of his expressions and a preference for clear statements. Thompson retired from Bell Labs on December 1, 2000, and is currently a fellow at Entrisphere, Inc.

Dennis Ritchie From Wikipedia , the free encyclopedia.

Dennis MacAlistair Ritchie (September 9, 1941- ) is a computer scientist notable for his influence on ALTRAN, B, BCPL, C, Multics, and UNIX. Born in Bronxville, New York, Ritchie graduated from Harvard with degrees in physics and applied mathematics. In 1967, he began working at the Bell Labs' Computing Sciences Research Center; he is currently the head of Lucent Technologies' System Software Research Department. In 1983, he and Ken Thompson jointly received the Turing award "for their development of generic operating systems theory and specifically for the implementation of the UNIX operating system."

When asked what influenced him in developing C in the manner he did, Ritchie has been quoted to have said that it "looked like a good thing to do", and that anyone else in the same place at the same time would have done the same thing. Many, however, have said that this is part of Ritchie's modest personality. One of his Bell Labs colleagues, Bjarne Stroustrup, who developed and designed the C++ programming language, an object oriented version of C, has been quoted to have said that "If Dennis had decided to spend that decade on esoteric math, Unix would have been stillborn". Indeed, being the inventor of the C programming language, as well as co-inventor of the UNIX operating system alongside Ken Thompson, Ritchie has earned an important position in the history of the computer industry. C is still widely used today in application and operating system development and its influence can be seen in many more recent programming languages such as C++, C#, Objective-C, Java, and JavaScript. In the operating system world, UNIX is also quite influential; there are many dialects of it available on the market today, such as AIX, Solaris, Mac OS X, BSD, and similar systems like Minix, as well as the popular GNU/Linux Operating System which is considered to be the crowning achievement of the open source and free software movements. Indeed, even Microsoft, whose Windows operating systems compete with UNIX, has developed UNIX compatibility tools and C compilers for users and developers of their products.

Dennis himself contributed the two official successors of Unix and C: the Plan 9 operating system and the Limbo programming language both of which build upon his previous work.