Title : The Hackers are Best Author : Tony Duell Original : A Song of Patriotic Prejudice (The English are Best) Group : Flanders and Swann Intro : You can replace F-ing with the obvious thing if you want an 'X-rated' version The mention of the headcrash and servo microcode refers roughly to a problem with the DEC RA90 disk drive, where updating the microcode program on the servo processor could cause HDA problems (although not an actual headcrash) Song : The Hackers, the Hackers, the Hackers are Best! I wouldn't give tuppence for all of the rest The day-to-day use of this system of ours We've left in the hands of three unfriendly powers Examine the Serviceman, User, or Op You'll find he's a luser with nothing up top. The oper is mean, as we're all well aware And if you crash the system, he's sure to go spare He deletes our print jobs, he works all the day And he hasn't the source code to show him the way The Hackers, the Hackers, the Hackers are best I wouldn't give tuppence for all of the rest The serviceman now our contempt is beneath He swaps random parts and he strips all the teeth He causes headcrashes, or so I have heard And blames it on the servo microcode word The Hackers are vocal, the Hackers are nice And worth any other at double the price The User writes programs, which crash when they can Not assembler code, but unstructured Fortran He works all the day with a Mouse in his hand And has problems with bitwise binary AND And out on the network, you cannot say much For the IBM or DEC, the Sequent or such The support is useless, they make us see red And they work the hours when we should be in bed The Hackers are moral, the Hackers are good And clever, and modest, and misunderstood And all the world over, each system's the same They've simply no notion of being insane They chose obvious password, they leave when they're done And they read the F-ing manual, which ruins the fun The Hackers, the hackers, the hackers are best So up with the Hackers and down with the rest It's not that they're wicked or naturally bad It's knowing they're lusers that makes us so mad For the Hackers are all that a people should be And the flower of the Hackers are and me @@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@