Since there are a lot of younger people on here, we should mention that this is a parody of the 1980s-90s “Purity Test” phenomenon: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purity_test (cw adult humor)
Most of these no longer apply, of course, as the hacker test was published almost 30 years ago. But that makes it really interesting to me as a historical document of what was part of the “hacker” culture. So I think it would be fun to start documenting all of the references in test. I started the project here, feel free to contribute!
I remember taking this test back in the early 90’s after getting it off netnews and it’s always been a fond memory of mine. I’ll see what I can do about documenting what I can.
My school’s WiFi in 2005 had an 802.1x authentication scheme that required a software client to connect. While my PDA had a client (literally named Funk Odyssey) that claimed it was compatible, it wouldn’t work for some reason.
Realizing that I had a spare PCI 56k modem which could answer as well as dial, a flip phone with Bluetooth modem capability (exposed as an emulated COM port), unlimited cell phone minutes, and a landline I would never use, I set out to make my own mobile network by tethering the PDA to the phone.
Unfortunately it didn’t work: the connection wouldn’t establish, and since dial-up modems stopped playing handshake noise in the mid-2000s I couldn’t debug what was wrong. To test the receiving modem, I called up my landline and whistled. Happily the receiving modem started the connection but human mouths can’t get much further than that.
I later tried issuing AT modem commands to the phone directly and noticed they were ineffective. My guess was Verizon disabled the functionality of the device (either permanently or temporarily as some kind of paid upgrade). This was back when carriers had complete control of the device and did whatever they wanted. I recall when phone cameras first debuted you had two options to get photos off the device: MMS them (costing upwards of $1 per message) or connect a cable from your phone to your computer. Verizon disabled the photo transfer capability on the device I had (presumably to make you pay a buck a photo) but there was a loophole: putting a photo in a draft MMS copied the photo to a location visible from the computer-mounted filesystem. You could only do this for one photo at a time, by doing this tedious process for each photo you could copy all of them to your computer. I’m always astonished how much free time and patience I had in youth.
I’ll share my score. Even though some questions are very outdated, it might still be interesting to wrap some UI around it and automate the test. Neat thing about this page is that it’s all plaintext so it’s very easy to parse.
Since there are a lot of younger people on here, we should mention that this is a parody of the 1980s-90s “Purity Test” phenomenon: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purity_test (cw adult humor)
Hi, I’m a high school student.
This is definitely still a thing right now. (I get made fun of for getting a high score. 🤷♀️)
Ooof.
Thank you for reminding me THAT I AM SO FREAKING OLD.
Most of these no longer apply, of course, as the hacker test was published almost 30 years ago. But that makes it really interesting to me as a historical document of what was part of the “hacker” culture. So I think it would be fun to start documenting all of the references in test. I started the project here, feel free to contribute!
This is beautiful.
I remember taking this test back in the early 90’s after getting it off netnews and it’s always been a fond memory of mine. I’ll see what I can do about documenting what I can.
That’s a good idea. We could also do a modern one or several for different niches. Could start it with questions on this that still apply.
My school’s WiFi in 2005 had an 802.1x authentication scheme that required a software client to connect. While my PDA had a client (literally named Funk Odyssey) that claimed it was compatible, it wouldn’t work for some reason.
Realizing that I had a spare PCI 56k modem which could answer as well as dial, a flip phone with Bluetooth modem capability (exposed as an emulated COM port), unlimited cell phone minutes, and a landline I would never use, I set out to make my own mobile network by tethering the PDA to the phone.
Unfortunately it didn’t work: the connection wouldn’t establish, and since dial-up modems stopped playing handshake noise in the mid-2000s I couldn’t debug what was wrong. To test the receiving modem, I called up my landline and whistled. Happily the receiving modem started the connection but human mouths can’t get much further than that.
I later tried issuing AT modem commands to the phone directly and noticed they were ineffective. My guess was Verizon disabled the functionality of the device (either permanently or temporarily as some kind of paid upgrade). This was back when carriers had complete control of the device and did whatever they wanted. I recall when phone cameras first debuted you had two options to get photos off the device: MMS them (costing upwards of $1 per message) or connect a cable from your phone to your computer. Verizon disabled the photo transfer capability on the device I had (presumably to make you pay a buck a photo) but there was a loophole: putting a photo in a draft MMS copied the photo to a location visible from the computer-mounted filesystem. You could only do this for one photo at a time, by doing this tedious process for each photo you could copy all of them to your computer. I’m always astonished how much free time and patience I had in youth.
They never expected the inflation in the byte market, did they?
I’ll share my score. Even though some questions are very outdated, it might still be interesting to wrap some UI around it and automate the test. Neat thing about this page is that it’s all plaintext so it’s very easy to parse.
Final Score -> 0x74
Score Breakdown -> 48 3 19 0 4 6 1 0 9 1 2 8 3 9 2 1 0
My favourite, and friends’ and relatives’ least favourite:
Has anyone ever actually surpassed 0x180?
Legend has one person surpassed 0xffff, but I think it was really just someone trying to explain how they failed with a zero.