Jude Milhon in Anderson, Indiana

Anderson, Indiana

Anderson is a city in and the county seat of Madison County, Indiana, United States. It is the principal city of the Anderson, Indiana Metropolitan Statistical Area which encompasses Madison county. Anderson is the headquarters of the Church of God and home of Anderson University, which is...

, best known by her pseudonym

Pseudonym

A pseudonym is a name that a person assumes for a particular purpose and that differs from his or her original orthonym...

 St. Jude, was a hacker and author

Author

An author is broadly defined as "the person who originates or gives existence to anything" and that authorship determines responsibility for what is created. Narrowly defined, an author is the originator of any written work.-Legal significance:...

 in the San Francisco Bay Area

San Francisco Bay Area

The San Francisco Bay Area, commonly known as the Bay Area, is a populated region that surrounds the San Francisco and San Pablo estuaries in Northern California. The region encompasses metropolitan areas of San Francisco, Oakland, and San Jose, along with smaller urban and rural areas...

.

Milhon coined the term cypherpunk

Cypherpunk

A cypherpunk is an activist advocating widespread use of strong cryptography as a route to social and political change.Originally communicating through the Cypherpunks electronic mailing list, informal groups aimed to achieve privacy and security through proactive use of cryptography...

 and was a founding member of the cypherpunks. Another term she is credited with coining is hippie

Hippie

The hippie subculture was originally a youth movement that arose in the United States during the mid-1960s and spread to other countries around the world. The etymology of the term 'hippie' is from hipster, and was initially used to describe beatniks who had moved into San Francisco's...

, in 1962 in Cleveland http://www.well.com/conf/inkwell.vue/topics/190/St-Jude-Memorial-and-Virtual-Wak-page01.html#post1. She began programming

Computer programming

Computer programming is the process of designing, writing, testing, debugging, and maintaining the source code of computer programs. This source code is written in one or more programming languages. The purpose of programming is to create a program that performs specific operations or exhibits a...

 in 1967, writing software

Computer software

Computer software, or just software, is a collection of computer programs and related data that provide the instructions for telling a computer what to do and how to do it....

 for the Horn and Hardart company. Among the projects she contributed to were the Berkeley Operating System and Community Memory

Community Memory

Community Memory was the first public computerized bulletin board system. Established in 1973 in Berkeley, California, it used an SDS 940 timesharing system in San Francisco connected via a 110 baud link to a teleprinter at a record store in Berkeley to let users enter and retrieve messages...

. She was a member of Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility

Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility

Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility is a global organization promoting the responsible use of computer technology. in 1983 . It educates policymakers and the public on a wide range of issues...

, and the author of several books, including The Cyberpunk Handbook (1995) and How to Mutate and Take Over the World (1996) ISBN 0-345-39216-7. She was a senior editor at the magazine Mondo 2000

Mondo 2000

Mondo 2000 was a glossy cyberculture magazine published in California during the 1980s and 1990s. It covered cyberpunk topics such as virtual reality and smart drugs. It was a more anarchic and subversive prototype for the later-founded Wired magazine....

and frequent contributor to Boing Boing

Boing Boing

Boing Boing is a publishing entity, first established as a magazine, later becoming a group blog.-History:...

. On July 19, 2003, Milhon died of cancer.

Quotes

• "Hacking is the clever circumvention of imposed limits, whether imposed by your government, your IP server, your own personality, or the laws of physics." — St. Jude

• "If we can't have sanity, we can fake it with humor. Humor gives you the same distance from the situation, the same metaview, only laughing is easier than sanity and possibly more fun." — St. Jude

• "Give us bandwidth or kill us!" — St. Jude

• "Girls need modems!" — St. Jude

• "I'm a future-hacker; I'm trying to get root access to the future. I want to raid its system of thought." — St. Jude

• "Are you fast? Are you dense?" — St. Jude

External links

• The WELL's St. Jude Memorial and Virtual Wake
• Interviewed by Rosie Cross in Wired Magazine - http://www.docstoc.com/docs/26639290/Modem-Grrrl