[HN Gopher] Hacker Purity Test (1989)
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Hacker Purity Test (1989)
Author : oliverkwebb
Score : 94 points
Date : 2024-08-23 04:13 UTC (18 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.armory.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.armory.com)
| schoen wrote:
| Archive link:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20240517122419/http://www.armory...
| osamagirl69 wrote:
| Important to note that the 'score' button doesn't work on the
| archive.org version
|
| Then again any half decent hacker would know their score before
| clicking the button anyway ;-)
| schoen wrote:
| When I first took this test (around 1994) I wanted to improve my
| score, so in 1995 I learned troff in order to get the last point
| in this sequence: 0x1D1 Can you solve the Towers
| of Hanoi recursively? 0x1D2 ... Non-recursively?
| 0x1D3 ... Using the Troff text formatter?
|
| I successfully managed to get the point:
|
| http://www.loyalty.org/~schoen/troff-hanoi.txt
| globular-toast wrote:
| There is also a point for "have you tried to improve your
| hacker score?"
| bandrami wrote:
| I knew that light pen would be useful some day
| monocasa wrote:
| 0xDD - I feel like that's pretty decent these days.
| kstenerud wrote:
| Nerds of the era would have made a joke about that, but it
| would be inappropriate nowadays.
| zaptrem wrote:
| Need an updated version for those of us who were born after
| nearly everything mentioned here was no longer
| manufactured/supported/commonly used!
| can16358p wrote:
| Exactly.
|
| This might be the perfect test for ones born in 60s-mid 80s but
| anyone later born will have probably score much lower than
| their actual "hackerness" (is there such a word?) and the test
| would really not reflect the truth simply because the used
| tools and techniques and memes of the era.
|
| (But hey the test is from 1989 so it makes perfect sense)
| oliverkwebb wrote:
| I see it more as a piece of history than any actual
| measurement of someones "hackerness". It's a fun way of
| peering into the realm of 80s hacker culture and seeing what
| was popular or cutting-edge at the time ("Have you ever
| programmed in the X windowing system?")
| ascorbic wrote:
| Mid-80s is a bit late for a test from 1989. Most of these
| questions would need you to be in university or work. I'd say
| mid 40s to early 70s is more realistic. My uncle was born
| around '48 and was working at Cambridge Computer Lab in 1989,
| so I'm sure would have answered this.
| anthk wrote:
| Indeed Mid-80s would be either using Debian/Slackware,
| writting a device driver for Linux/BSD, tampering with
| Video4Linux, cracking TV cards by nearly decoding Nagra by
| hand, writting something akin to minimodem/tempest for
| Eliza, hacking a cable-modem to get free internet access,
| smashing the stack, doing anything close to what Fabrice
| Bellard did and so on.
| kelnos wrote:
| Agreed. I was born in '81, and by the time I got my first
| computer (coincidentally, probably '89, when this test was
| compile), a ton of the questions on that list would have
| required you to have been in the industry for a couple
| decades already. I feel like even a hacker born in 1970
| would have a trouble answering "yes" to many of those
| questions.
| ozim wrote:
| Just live with thought that there are no pure hackers anymore;)
| globular-toast wrote:
| That's because hacker culture no longer exists.
| can16358p wrote:
| I think it has changed shape: the ideologies are the same but
| the application is different due to the society, complexity
| of tech, social media, internet, regulation etc.
| ThrowawayR2 wrote:
| Sad but true. We are all the corporate code drones that the
| hackers prided themselves on not being.
| ainiriand wrote:
| I wrote a virus in 1998! Other than that I achieved a meager 15%,
| pity me.
| gala8y wrote:
| Not bad, this gets rather steep!
| xcdzvyn wrote:
| > 0x0D0 Do you use more than 16 megabytes of disk space?
|
| > 0x1B2 Have you ever set up a blind date over the computer?
|
| Aged like wine.
|
| Anyway, 0x83.
| Woshiwuja wrote:
| Ever drop a card deck? Im gonna assume this is talking about my
| yugioh deck, checked.
| mikewarot wrote:
| wow... I got 105 of 510... and a score of 79.4%
|
| This thing obviously needs an update. Who doesn't have a Terabyte
| of storage these days?
| pfg_ wrote:
| It does ask about if you use, not have. So maybe some people
| have a terabyte but only use 600gb
| teekert wrote:
| Have you ever argued the semantics of questions from this
| test with a stranger on the internet? Check.
| PhilipRoman wrote:
| > ... Xedit (in VM/CMS)?
|
| Anyone know if this refers to the same xorg-xedit program which
| you can install for x11? I've used it but I have no idea what is
| either VM or CMS.
| anon35 wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XEDIT
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VM_(operating_system)
| HaZeust wrote:
| 83% pure -- but then again, it took me 12 years after this was
| published to become a human.
| praptak wrote:
| Being fifty I think I can say I grew up in this culture. Looking
| at this test made me realize I grew up to dislike it. (This, or I
| got grumpy with age)
|
| The chest banging coming from knowing obscure and useless details
| is kinda cringe. Yeah I know this test is tongue-in-cheek but I
| remember dudes who were really like that.
| belZaah wrote:
| Might it because you do not remember the currency of the time
| was knowledge? In absence of Internet, people traded knowledge,
| their status depended on this, they got access to cool things
| because of it. And, as with any valuable, there's bound to be
| hoarding.
| praptak wrote:
| Maybe. I think I was in the camp of "I will share my
| knowledge whether you want it or not", always eager to tell
| people they are doing things in an uninformed way, like not
| using the right editor ;)
| asveikau wrote:
| > their status depended on this
|
| But it's not inevitable that people chase status and lord it
| over others. Doing that is a choice. People can always choose
| to focus on something more healthy and productive.
| wffurr wrote:
| I think it is inevitable though when a bunch of hairless
| apes taught sand how to think.
| blueyes wrote:
| what is the currency now?
| throwway120385 wrote:
| Data
| bunderbunder wrote:
| Upvotes.
| kelnos wrote:
| Engagement, likes, garbage like that.
| bunderbunder wrote:
| I see what you're getting at, and I agree.
|
| But at the same time, reading this again also made me a bit
| nostalgic for at least some parts of 1990s hacker culture. (I'm
| a bit too young to have experienced the 80s.) There's an
| irreverence that seems to have been lost. The culture was full
| of cringey gatekeeping behavior and that wasn't even the worst
| of it. And the purity test did revel in that a little bit. But
| it also represents nerd culture taking the piss out of itself
| in the same breath. The BOFH files also come to mind as an
| example of this.
|
| It seems like a lot of modern nerd culture isn't quite so able
| to do that. Gamer culture, for example, is also rife with
| gatekeeping behavior. And there's also a lot of humor, but what
| I don't see quite so much is gamer nerds taking a good hard
| look at _themselves_ , and laughing at what they see.
| freestyle24147 wrote:
| If I were one to use the word "cringe", a fifty year old
| willfully using the words "kinda cringe" would absolutely be
| cringe.
| kens wrote:
| I don't think anyone has mentioned the context of the Hacker
| Purity Test. Back in the 80s, the "Purity Test" was a well-
| known thing on Usenet, a long list of sexual activities, drugs,
| and so forth. By checking off which things you had done, you
| could get your purity score. (This test made for a lot of
| interesting discussions with friends.) The Hacker Purity Test
| is a humorous parody of the original Purity Test. Its humor
| comes from replacing wild sex acts with super-nerdy activities,
| while keeping the form and style of the original test.
| ebiester wrote:
| Also, remember this as a set of in-jokes. Many of these entries
| were meant to laugh at, not seriously use as a benchmark.
| segmondy wrote:
| Grumpy, This is not about knowing obscure and useless details,
| these things were not learnt in isolation but via exposure
| through lots of hacking/coding and the culture back then.
| brna-2 wrote:
| While I am largely out of sync with the timeframe of the topics
| in the test the personality-related questions made me giggle with
| joy several times.
| Symbiote wrote:
| I like how some of the questions which used to be very "hacker"
| now apply to a large segment of the population.
|
| Have you ever used a computer for more than 8 hours continuously?
|
| Do you log in before breakfast?
|
| Have you ever set up a blind date over the computer?
|
| Do you talk to the person next to you via computer?
| themoonisachees wrote:
| Also:
|
| Do you use more than 8Mb?
|
| I was actually surprised the test make thought to include
| terabytes at all
| ozim wrote:
| People find this funny but then we get interviews having to check
| out random boxes.
| bux93 wrote:
| 0x1AC Do you think garbage collection means memory management?
|
| Woah, this debate again..
| BalinKing wrote:
| I had to think about what this question meant for a few
| seconds, because I forgot that "garbage collection" could ever
| mean anything other than memory management....
| themoonisachees wrote:
| I read is as "you're such a hacker that hearing garbage
| collection makes you think of memory management instead of the
| much more normal public service"
| vincent-manis wrote:
| One of my grad student colleagues once asked a faculty member
| whose specialty was discrete-event simulation what he knew
| about garbage collection. The prof was taken aback and said,
| "almost nothing", until the student clarified that he was
| asking about simulating waste management pickup.
| sgt wrote:
| You answered "yes" to 162 of 510 questions, making you 68.2%
| hacker pure; that is, you are 68.2% pure in the hacker domain
| (you have 31.8% hacker in you). According to the
| scoring guide, your hacker experience level is: User
| Your Weirdness Factor (AKA Uniqueness Factor) is 17%, based on a
| comparison of your test results with 64695 other submissions for
| this test. The average purity for this test is 76.9%.
| jmclnx wrote:
| Yes, I got a similar result. Most of the question I have
| forgotten about.
|
| But one curious thing, I am surprised they did not have
| questions like "Ever change and compile a kernel ?".
| ThrowawayR2 wrote:
| The test is from '89. Linux 0.01 was two years in the future.
| dfox wrote:
| Loadable device drivers are somewhat modern invention. On
| many systems adding a device driver involved recompiling
| (or at least relinking) the kernel.
| spiritplumber wrote:
| Crazy how some of these still apply if you do hardware.
| dfox wrote:
| My favorite case of solving a software problem in hardware
| involves precision kick with steel-toed boot, which caused part
| of the machine to bend slightly such that the timing/position
| errors in software would not cause a jam.
| Terr_ wrote:
| In my memory, the era for this stuff was also when folks were
| taking questionnaires on their beliefs/preferences/circumstances
| which output an encoded string. This string would then be placed
| into an e-mail signature in lieu of an "About me" webpage
| somewhere.
| praptak wrote:
| These were called Geek codes (it took me a while to recall the
| name!). I remember them being pretty popular during the Usenet
| era.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geek_Code
| zzo38computer wrote:
| I have borrowed Art of Computer Programming from a interlibrary
| loan in the past (although I do not own a copy), and I have
| written a MIX simulator, and an assembler. It supports both
| decimal and binary. (I also have written programs in both MIX and
| in MMIX.)
|
| I had never used computers with cards, but I had made an option
| (it can be switched on and off) in an assembler so that you can
| easily find the first and last cards from the holes and the rest
| are allowed to be in any order, in order to solve a problem of
| getting them mixed up, many years after they have been no longer
| in common use.
|
| I have written self-modifying code in a few programming
| languages, including uxn (it is common to modify literal values
| but I have also sometimes used it to modify instructions, in an
| error handling routine), and PostScript, and in 6502 assembly
| language (with code running from RAM in NES/Famicom). I had also
| once written a self-modifying code in GWBASIC by opening a file
| and writing to it and then using CHAIN MERGE to load the modified
| code. (I had probably done some others as well but do not
| remember the details.)
|
| I am currently wearing a shirt with the circuit diagram of a
| "blue box". I had also programmed a computer to do the functions
| of blue box and red box (but had never used them to control any
| telephones), and also to generate a dial tone and many other
| tones relating to telephones.
|
| I do have a flowchart template from IBM.
|
| I also have a fortune file, which I maintain.
|
| I have also reverse-engineered and decompiled some parts of some
| of programs, and I have patched binary code too.
| AeZ1E wrote:
| feeling like a hacker wizard with a 0x018 purity level after
| taking this funky test! who else out there is hacking their way
| to guru status? let's compare our results and geek out together!
| cnity wrote:
| Thank you for validating the dead internet theory.
| AeZ1E wrote:
| No problem. Can I further help you?
| cnity wrote:
| Yes! Can you please give me a recipe for anchovy soup?
| M95D wrote:
| What was the most weird answer that you could check on that test?
|
| For me, it was "0x11A Have you ever toggled in boot code on the
| front panel?" When I still used PATA HDDs and BIOSes didn't have
| F11/F12 boot menu, I wired a front panel switch to Master/Slave
| HDD jumpers, so I could toggle boot drive without entering the
| BIOS setup. I guess that counts.
| eythian wrote:
| It's a wee bit different. It wasn't my time, so someone correct
| me if my details are wrong, but this is using the rows of
| switches on the front panel of, say, an early IBM machine to
| actually put in the bootloader code in binary. I.e you could do
| something like set the address with one set of switches, set
| the opcode with another set, and press a button (or something)
| that would then write that opcode into that point in memory.
| Repeat until you've put the whole bootloader in. And, I
| imagine, hope you never have to go through that again.
| linux2647 wrote:
| Yes exactly this. For example on the PDP-11: https://cdn.chan
| gelog.com/uploads/news_items/RRqw/large.jpg?...
| spogbiper wrote:
| sorry friend, no that does not count
| ok123456 wrote:
| They mean like toggling the switches on the front of a PDP/8 to
| make it do something other than be a paperweight.
| vincent-manis wrote:
| There was a time when I could toggle the PDP-8 RIM bootstrap
| loader by heart (my programs had a nasty habit of destroying
| the memory-resident copy by accident).
| kayge wrote:
| Probably not super weird for a lot of this crowd, but
|
| "Have you IPLed an IBM off the tape drive?"
|
| considering I'm in my 30s and it happened within the last
| couple years, is likely pretty weird :)
| aaron695 wrote:
| Puffer train has a great Wikipedia page -
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puffer_train 0x040
| Can you build a puffer train? 0x041 ... Do you know what it
| is?
|
| Can you imagine Gen Z seeing the real circa 90's Purity Test and
| being told it was pretty average for pre-internet society? Here
| "internet" as shorthand for WWW kinda fails, although pre-WWW the
| sum of the decades of internet is probably a week/day by most
| metrics today.
| makapuf wrote:
| archive.org mirror:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20240214000951/http://www.armory...
| anthk wrote:
| I did that long ago as Debian had that since forever on his
| repos. OFC, Ubuntu and Trisquel might have it too.
|
| There are both purity and purity-off.
|
| Another fun stuff from (nearly) that era would be geekcode, asr-
| manpages and funny-manpages, as they span from early to mid-late
| 90's.
| Karellen wrote:
| If you have the right package installed purity
| /usr/share/games/purity/hacker
|
| will do the same thing, but local-first. Also:
| dpkg -L purity
|
| or whatever equivalent lists package files on your system, will
| indicate the presence of other tests you can take.
|
| Also also, `purity-off`
| raesene9 wrote:
| The armory is a fun site, part of the Santa Cruz geek houses
| (http://www.geek.org/geekhouse.html). Most of the sites are gone
| now, but there's still a couple (like this one) still going!
| gattilorenz wrote:
| Nice, I didn't realise this was on the Armory. 10/15 years ago
| it was still relatively alive
| Retr0id wrote:
| > Have you ever patched binary code?
|
| > ... While the program was running?
|
| One of my favourite activities.
| dfox wrote:
| One thing is when you do that as an exploit, another thing is
| doing that intentionally in order to fix an obscure issue in
| production without down time and having to recompile the thing.
| At seven in the morning after a whole-night infrastructure
| upgrade... did that, twice.
| jdblair wrote:
| hugged to death, its also here:
| https://github.com/nyxgeek/nyxgeek-readinglist/blob/master/h...
| jimmaswell wrote:
| > 0x07B Do you have any defunct documentation?
|
| > 0x07C ... Do you still read it?
|
| I still like to flip through my cherished copy of Windows 98 For
| Dummies on occasion, the book given to me in 3rd grade that I
| read front to back and probably played a part in kickstarting me
| on computer literacy. That would have been 2003 for reference.
|
| I also just enjoy looking through similar old books when I can,
| like one I saw recently on VB6, or a "guide to the internet" from
| the late 90s.
| klik99 wrote:
| > 0x087 Ever had your activities mentioned in the newspaper? >
| 0x088 ... Did you get away with it?
| Jun8 wrote:
| (Among many others) I didn't know what a lace card was so I had
| to look up: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lace_card. How would
| you even make one? And it had to be cleared with a "card knife"!
| bunderbunder wrote:
| You use one of these: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keypunch
| dfox wrote:
| You punch 80 columns worth of DEL. The card will jam the
| reader, but will get punched just fine.
| kens wrote:
| Since I work with punch cards at the Computer History Museum, I
| can answer this. A standard IBM punch card has 80 columns and
| 12 rows, with each character represented by 1-3 punches in a
| column. A lace card has all the holes punched, so it's not
| punched with a normal card pattern. You can create a lace card,
| though, with a keypunch if you hold down the "multi punch" key.
| This lets you punch multiple times in a single card column,
| allowing you to punch patterns that don't have keys. So you
| could type &-0123456789 with multi-punch in each column to
| punch all 12 holes, which would be tedious but give you a lace
| card. (More efficient key combinations exist).
|
| A second alternative is punching the card via computer using
| the card reader/punch attached to the computer. Normally, this
| lets you punch characters on the card. But using the optional
| "punch column binary" instruction, you can punch an arbitrary
| 12-bit binary value in each column. So you can create a lace
| card this way, if it doesn't jam.
| vincent-manis wrote:
| I remember that a lace card was a really good way of jamming an
| IBM 029 (or 026) card. You put the card in the feed hopper, and
| selected DUPlicate, it would almost always jam in the read
| station.
| vunderba wrote:
| _0x017 Have you ever wanted to download pizza?_
|
| Surprisingly relevant when the makers of EverQuest added the
| /pizza command.
|
| https://www.pcgamer.com/games/mmo/just-the-right-kind-of-wei...
| kuroguro wrote:
| > your hacker experience level is: Computer Illiterate
|
| Well, apparently I can't use the computer ^^;
| ocean_moist wrote:
| if i was born 30 years earlier i would have had much more. still
| got 72.9%
| bithead wrote:
| I can remember when you had to have a credible account of a
| coding run to converse with people who were self-described
| 'hackers' - EMACS/TPU skills notwithstanding.
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