If you take this perspective, hacking has progressively been dying since 1940. So choosing the prototypical 1990s hacker is quite arbitrary. In the 40s Turing h

If you take this perspective, hacking has progressively been dying since 1940. So choosing the prototypical 1990s hacker is quite arbitrary. In the 40s Turing had to make his own electro-mechanical computers from scratch and invent his own statistical techniques. In the 1990s, assembling computers was already vastly simplified. Whereas today you might buy a motherboard with integrated video, audio, and I/O, back then you had separate cards for everything and perhaps a choice of upgrading to 512 kB of L2 cache with a COAST module. In the 1990s you had to worry about IRQs and perhaps roll your own autoexec.bat and config.sys files to make sure you had enough conventional RAM to run your favourite game. This knowledge was much less technical than what our predecessors had to know and I'm sure they were saying the same things about us back then. The thing is, most of the hackers that lament a bygone era have simply had the tasks they knew well made obsolete. They are upset because they learned tasks and not skills. Nobody cares today if you can roll a kick-ass DOS boot disk unless you were skilled enough to translate that knowledge into, say, fitting OS X Leopard onto a 1 GB USB memory stick.