Hacker Purity Test (1989)

When I first took this test (around 1994) I wanted to improve my score, so in 1995 I learned troff in order to get the last point in this sequence:<p><pre><code> 0x1D1 Can you solve the Towers of Hanoi recursively? 0x1D2 ... Non-recursively? 0x1D3 ... Using the Troff text formatter? </code></pre> I successfully managed to get the point:<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.loyalty.org&#x2F;~schoen&#x2F;troff-hanoi.txt" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.loyalty.org&#x2F;~schoen&#x2F;troff-hanoi.txt</a>

Being fifty I think I can say I grew up in this culture. Looking at this test made me realize I grew up to dislike it. (This, or I got grumpy with age)<p>The chest banging coming from knowing obscure and useless details is kinda cringe. Yeah I know this test is tongue-in-cheek but I remember dudes who were really like that.

I like how some of the questions which used to be very &quot;hacker&quot; now apply to a large segment of the population.<p>Have you ever used a computer for more than 8 hours continuously?<p>Do you log in before breakfast?<p>Have you ever set up a blind date over the computer?<p>Do you talk to the person next to you via computer?

Need an updated version for those of us who were born after nearly everything mentioned here was no longer manufactured&#x2F;supported&#x2F;commonly used!

(Among many others) I didn’t know what a lace card was so I had to look up: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Lace_card" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Lace_card</a>. How would you even make one? And it had to be cleared with a “card knife”!

I have borrowed Art of Computer Programming from a interlibrary loan in the past (although I do not own a copy), and I have written a MIX simulator, and an assembler. It supports both decimal and binary. (I also have written programs in both MIX and in MMIX.)<p>I had never used computers with cards, but I had made an option (it can be switched on and off) in an assembler so that you can easily find the first and last cards from the holes and the rest are allowed to be in any order, in order to solve a problem of getting them mixed up, many years after they have been no longer in common use.<p>I have written self-modifying code in a few programming languages, including uxn (it is common to modify literal values but I have also sometimes used it to modify instructions, in an error handling routine), and PostScript, and in 6502 assembly language (with code running from RAM in NES&#x2F;Famicom). I had also once written a self-modifying code in GWBASIC by opening a file and writing to it and then using CHAIN MERGE to load the modified code. (I had probably done some others as well but do not remember the details.)<p>I am currently wearing a shirt with the circuit diagram of a &quot;blue box&quot;. I had also programmed a computer to do the functions of blue box and red box (but had never used them to control any telephones), and also to generate a dial tone and many other tones relating to telephones.<p>I do have a flowchart template from IBM.<p>I also have a fortune file, which I maintain.<p>I have also reverse-engineered and decompiled some parts of some of programs, and I have patched binary code too.

If you have the right package installed<p><pre><code> purity &#x2F;usr&#x2F;share&#x2F;games&#x2F;purity&#x2F;hacker </code></pre> will do the same thing, but local-first. Also:<p><pre><code> dpkg -L purity </code></pre> or whatever equivalent lists package files on your system, will indicate the presence of other tests you can take.<p>Also also, `purity-off`

What was the most weird answer that you could check on that test?<p>For me, it was &quot;0x11A Have you ever toggled in boot code on the front panel?&quot; When I still used PATA HDDs and BIOSes didn&#x27;t have F11&#x2F;F12 boot menu, I wired a front panel switch to Master&#x2F;Slave HDD jumpers, so I could toggle boot drive without entering the BIOS setup. I guess that counts.

Ever drop a card deck? Im gonna assume this is talking about my yugioh deck, checked.

In my memory, the era for this stuff was also when folks were taking questionnaires on their beliefs&#x2F;preferences&#x2F;circumstances which output an encoded string. This string would then be placed into an e-mail signature in lieu of an &quot;About me&quot; webpage somewhere.

83% pure -- but then again, it took me 12 years after this was published to become a human.

&gt; 0x07B Do you have any defunct documentation?<p>&gt; 0x07C ... Do you still read it?<p>I still like to flip through my cherished copy of Windows 98 For Dummies on occasion, the book given to me in 3rd grade that I read front to back and probably played a part in kickstarting me on computer literacy. That would have been 2003 for reference.<p>I also just enjoy looking through similar old books when I can, like one I saw recently on VB6, or a &quot;guide to the internet&quot; from the late 90s.

<p><pre><code> You answered &quot;yes&quot; to 162 of 510 questions, making you 68.2% hacker pure; that is, you are 68.2% pure in the hacker domain (you have 31.8% hacker in you). According to the scoring guide, your hacker experience level is: User Your Weirdness Factor (AKA Uniqueness Factor) is 17%, based on a comparison of your test results with 64695 other submissions for this test. The average purity for this test is 76.9%.</code></pre>

While I am largely out of sync with the timeframe of the topics in the test the personality-related questions made me giggle with joy several times.

The armory is a fun site, part of the Santa Cruz geek houses (<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.geek.org&#x2F;geekhouse.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.geek.org&#x2F;geekhouse.html</a>). Most of the sites are gone now, but there&#x27;s still a couple (like this one) still going!

0x1AC Do you think garbage collection means memory management?<p>Woah, this debate again..

<i>0x017 Have you ever wanted to download pizza?</i><p>Surprisingly relevant when the makers of EverQuest added the &#x2F;pizza command.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.pcgamer.com&#x2F;games&#x2F;mmo&#x2F;just-the-right-kind-of-weird-how-the-secret-weapon-of-a-pizza-command-let-everquest-2-slice-into-wow-and-accidentally-end-up-topping-pizza-hut-on-google&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.pcgamer.com&#x2F;games&#x2F;mmo&#x2F;just-the-right-kind-of-wei...</a>

I knew that light pen would be useful some day

wow... I got 105 of 510... and a score of 79.4%<p>This thing obviously needs an update. Who doesn&#x27;t have a Terabyte of storage these days?

Archive link: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;20240517122419&#x2F;http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.armory.com&#x2F;tests&#x2F;hacker.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;20240517122419&#x2F;http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.armory...</a>

I did that long ago as Debian had that since forever on his repos. OFC, Ubuntu and Trisquel might have it too.<p>There are both purity and purity-off.<p>Another fun stuff from (nearly) that era would be geekcode, asr-manpages and funny-manpages, as they span from early to mid-late 90&#x27;s.

Anybody remembers Geek Code?<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Geek_Code" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Geek_Code</a>

People find this funny but then we get interviews having to check out random boxes.

I can remember when you had to have a credible account of a coding run to converse with people who were self-described &#x27;hackers&#x27; - EMACS&#x2F;TPU skills notwithstanding.

&gt; ... Xedit (in VM&#x2F;CMS)?<p>Anyone know if this refers to the same xorg-xedit program which you can install for x11? I&#x27;ve used it but I have no idea what is either VM or CMS.

&gt; <i>0x00D Have you ever written a flight simulator?</i><p>After 4, or maybe even 5, decades, BCPL finally* got a floating point datatype.<p>Why? Because Martin Richards was writing a flight simulator for the Raspberry Pi.<p>&gt; <i>0x046 ... Is it out-of-date?</i><p>Specifically, 1969: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;dosfanboy.wordpress.com&#x2F;wp-content&#x2F;uploads&#x2F;2017&#x2F;01&#x2F;snoopy.gif?w=924" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;dosfanboy.wordpress.com&#x2F;wp-content&#x2F;uploads&#x2F;2017&#x2F;01&#x2F;s...</a><p>&gt; <i>0x04D ... Emacs</i><p>&quot;Eight Megabytes and [therefore] Continuously Swapping&quot;<p>&gt; <i>0x072 Have you ever received a case of beer with your computer?</i><p>IIRC, this would&#x27;ve been a Cray<p>&gt; <i>0x09F Ever been asked for a cookie?</i><p>This was an early fairly benign virus, not the cookie inquiries we&#x27;re all thinking of.<p>EDIT: * <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cl.cam.ac.uk&#x2F;~mr10&#x2F;bcplman.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cl.cam.ac.uk&#x2F;~mr10&#x2F;bcplman.pdf</a> says floats were added during 2014, so 47 years later.

&gt; 0x087 Ever had your activities mentioned in the newspaper? &gt; 0x088 ... Did you get away with it?

archive.org mirror: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;20240214000951&#x2F;http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.armory.com&#x2F;tests&#x2F;hacker.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;20240214000951&#x2F;http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.armory...</a>

hugged to death, its also here: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;nyxgeek&#x2F;nyxgeek-readinglist&#x2F;blob&#x2F;master&#x2F;hacker-purity-test.md">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;nyxgeek&#x2F;nyxgeek-readinglist&#x2F;blob&#x2F;master&#x2F;h...</a>

&gt; your hacker experience level is: Computer Illiterate<p>Well, apparently I can&#x27;t use the computer ^^;

&gt; Have you ever patched binary code?<p>&gt; ... While the program was running?<p>One of my favourite activities.

I wrote a virus in 1998! Other than that I achieved a meager 15%, pity me.

0xDD - I feel like that&#x27;s pretty decent these days.

Crazy how some of these still apply if you do hardware.

What a wonderful view into the past!

if i was born 30 years earlier i would have had much more. still got 72.9%

feeling like a hacker wizard with a 0x018 purity level after taking this funky test! who else out there is hacking their way to guru status? let&#x27;s compare our results and geek out together!

Puffer train has a great Wikipedia page - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Puffer_train" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Puffer_train</a><p><pre><code> 0x040 Can you build a puffer train? 0x041 ... Do you know what it is? </code></pre> Can you imagine Gen Z seeing the real circa 90&#x27;s Purity Test and being told it was pretty average for pre-internet society? Here &quot;internet&quot; as shorthand for WWW kinda fails, although pre-WWW the sum of the decades of internet is probably a week&#x2F;day by most metrics today.

&gt; 0x0D0 Do you use more than 16 megabytes of disk space?<p>&gt; 0x1B2 Have you ever set up a blind date over the computer?<p>Aged like wine.<p>Anyway, 0x83.