Budgeting for (seriously!) and programming calculators, budgeting (team time and money) for buggy z100s (8086 "clone or compatible") and buggy software. Petitioning for mainframe and mini cpu time measured in milliseconds or MIPs (million not billion) or seconds/semester both in college and later at work. I much prefer now and free software running on highly capable inexpensive desktop hardware and distributed processing and communications nets. Teams and sharing brought us here today, not heroic solitary efforts. No doubt a lot of the valuable skills, components, and expertise were acquired or created in heroic solitary efforts. However, it takes a mighty big hero to outperform even a small effective team. Hence sharing and community and development of ways to enjoy the same.
For a historical view of the synergistic potential inherent in effective sharing and/or team activities see the Tower of Babel incident in the Bible.
tk If you prefer isolation and solitude, by all means sinfully enjoy yourself. To each rat his own cat.
I fail to understand how all the talk about sharing and contributing back to the community prevents you from hacking all by yourself just for the sheer joy of it, anytime you choose.
My perception of "hackerdom" is that it has always been about the freedom to use telecommunications and computer technology as one pleases as long as it caused no harm to others. Is freedom a sin?
It pleases some of us to share some efforts and form some communities around common goals and interests. Some of which are far too large for an individual to undertake with any expectation of completion in a single human lifetime.
Does it reduce your joy of personal programming somehow if others are cooperating and sharing to build bigger, better, useful, profitable, amazing, colossal, stupendous, marvelous, wondrous, software tools or monuments to human ingenuity and sentience? Or doing something useful or desired with these tools, toys, techniques, etc.?
Fear not! If we once again become successful enough to sinfully challenge the universe or verge on the potential to safely ignore the almighty .... no doubt he has a trick or two remaining up his sleeve for our eddification. Would you turn your back on or ignore indefinately a species that learned how to create debabelizers out of sand after they once proved dangerous with straw and clay bricks?
When messengers arrive it will be good to have some home coding alone types righteously working on one person projects requiring no dangerously effective communications or task sharing to point at while evacuating the cities.