Loving machines Favourites of programming virtuosos, who like to see themselves as the elite of computer wizardry, are usually not ready-to-use mass programmes for normal users, condescendingly referred to as "lusers" (cf. "The on-line Hacker's Dictionary", printed version by Eric Raymond 1991). Their mollycoddled computers and programmes, whose main use is not pure everyday usefulness, are "creatures", results of brilliant programming, objects of virtuosos' passion. Lusers expect their tools or toys to be as easy to use as possible, hackers, on the other hand, like orienting themselves towards the machine and frown upon superfluous paraphernalia. While lusers move around their Macintosh or MS Windows computers with a leisurely click on the user interface with the mouse, hackers prefer entering commands of the Unix operating system, developed about 25 years ago by computer virtuosos at Berkeley university, the programming mecca. (Peter H. Salus, A Quarter Century of Unix. Reading, Addison-Wesley, 1994)