It’s me again. 🙂
I’ve come to read an interview with David Copperfield in a (german) magazine lately and he explained how exactly he became a magician (or illusionist). He said it had to do with him being such an isolated person when he was a child (probably something like a geek or nerd). And when he came into magic it was like finally finding something to attract other people. Something that made him special and gave sense to his life.
I came to think that computer people (that includes but is not limited to hackers, crackers etc.) start getting into computers for quite the same reasons. Most of us (for I’m quite sure it was at least one of my reasons) had a hard time getting in touch with other people. And we were looking for something that made us special. Something we could be quite good at. Something that would make us acceptable (not only to others but probably even to ourselves). And suddenly: There were computers.
Well, to most of the people that are not into computers all we do is simply like magic (in some cases I think it truly is magic, if you read some people’s code you may even find comments like # let’s do some magic or # even more magic). So in general there seems to be a strong relationship between magic/illusions and using computers. And we probably should have a thought on this because as you know, magicians are not allowed to share their knowledge with non-magicians. So nobody knows the trick. It might be a good idea to start keeping our tricks for ourselves as well, if you not already act like that by habit. Maybe one day a famous hacker gets his own show in Las Vegas and Thousands of people visit the show to see him installing Linux on a calculator. Or he might let some jpeg pictures disappear on a ntfs partition and suddenly they appear on the reiserfs partition on another system… without wlan or serial connection…
It’s magic…