Filo was a total hacker, reportedly still is. At least into the late 90's, he was active on the FreeBSD mailing lists with encyclopedic knowledge of SCSI card and NIC drivers and assorted other hardware and FreeBSD stuff. He was oft found sitting on the hallway floor in the first colo I used (ISI in Mountain View), screwdrivering the chassis' of Yahoo's early servers.
http://zer0.org/daemons/yahoobsd.html