I am one of the "original hackers". Back in the day, we hacked at ROMs and made Atari's and Lisa's do things their creators had never dreamed possible. When the PC came out, we hacked away and made Z80 processors do wonderful things, MFM hard drives became RLL and yielded larger disk space. The modem, ah the 300 baud modem, suddenly the world opened to us (think WarGames, without the missiles). After years of paying $8 an hour for long distance calls to distant computers, the Internet came about. For only $6 an hour, at first. And modems got faster. Computers got smarter. We got smarter. Hackers became geeks. Geeks became dot com tycoons. Years of study, decades of learning and decades of building web technologies. Got my ham ticket this year, now a General and working toward the Extra.