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[–] 24 points 3 months ago (3 children)

Is this an actual artifact? I never ran across this when I researched the origin of “Information wants to be free”… and it’s a word for word match to how Steven Levy later described the hacker ethos of the era in his own words in his book Hackers. I’m wondering if someone just rendered it out to look like it came from an old typewriter, and that context got lost as people shared it.

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  • [–] 10 points 3 months ago (1 child)

    I was also curious and I can find no reference to this wording existing beyond the book, so my guess is this is bullshit.

    While the word hacker is believed to come from MIT nobody seems to know exactly when in the 50s it came into use and was largely used for describing a specific type of prankster rather than what we know if for today. I highly doubt that ‘modern’ hacker culture would have been established by 1962 anyway.

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