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)