Infamy and alias: 11 famous hackers and their handles

The origins of what we think of as modern hacker culture emerged from the same California milieu as the 1960s counterculture, and it shows. In 1973, programmers from Berkeley who had worked on the time-sharing Berkeley Operating System launched Community Memory, the first public bulletin board system, and prominent among these pioneers was Jude Milhon, aka St. Jude. She passed away in 2003, much beloved. At the other end of the state, a few years later Susan Headley fell in with a gang and helped hack into DEC’s systems; she went by the name Susy Thunder. Why not take on a kooky new name? It was a sign of the times.

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