Origin
In phreak culture, a lamer is one who scams codes off others rather than doing cracks or really understanding the fundamental concepts. In warez culture, where the ability to wave around cracked commercial software within days of (or before) release to the commercial market is much esteemed, the lamer might try to upload garbage or shareware or something incredibly old.
This term seems to have originated in the Commodore 64 scene in the mid 1980s. It was popularized among Amiga crackers of the mid-1980s by ‘Lamer Exterminator’, the most famous and feared Amiga virus ever, which gradually corrupted non-write-protected floppy disks with bad sectors. The bad sectors, when looked at, were overwritten with repetitions of the string “LAMER!”.
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Famous quotes containing the word origin:
“High treason, when it is resistance to tyranny here below, has its origin in, and is first committed by, the power that makes and forever re-creates man.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The essence of morality is a questioning about morality; and the decisive move of human life is to use ceaselessly all light to look for the origin of the opposition between good and evil.”
—Georges Bataille (1897–1962)
“For, though the origin of most of our words is forgotten, each word was at first a stroke of genius, and obtained currency, because for the moment it symbolized the world to the first speaker and to the hearer. The etymologist finds the deadest word to have been once a brilliant picture.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)