Z:gnu-www-ja-ough-interview--9c986f-Starting from 40 years ago, wh/en

Starting from 40 years ago, when I joined the hacker community at MIT, I've been proud to call myself a hacker. I was hired by MIT to be a system hacker, meaning to make the system better. At the time, we used an operating system called ITS, the Incompatible Timesharing System, which had been developed by the team of hackers at the Artificial Intelligence Lab; and then they hired me to be part of the team. My job was to make the system better. Hacking had a more general meaning, which meant basically being playfully clever and pushing the limits of what was possible.