09.19.05
Hackers
I just finished reading a book titled “Hackers” by Steven Levy and I must say I thoroughly enjoyed it! In sort, the book describes the extraordinary lives of the people that shaped the world of computing, most of the time not even realizing it.
First of all, to clear a common misconception, the word hacker here refers to, in Levy’s words, “those computer programmers and designers who regard computing as the most important thing in the world”. It doesn’t refer to a malicious person poking around a system with criminal intent. True hackers use the term “cracker” to refer to these people. What perhaps characterizes hackers better than anything else is a set of beliefs that has come to be known as the Hacker Ethic. The main tenet of the hacker ethic is that access to computers and any information associated with them should be free. This maybe sounds absurd in our days, but for those early hackers it was quite natural. The first hackers were concentrated around the MIT AI Lab. Most of the computers at that point were huge IBM “Haulking Giants” that took up entire floors sometimes, and which you could not access directly, but had to instead submit your code in the form of a punch card, which priviledged engineers, known as the priesthood, would feed into the machine, and return the answers to you.
But the young generation of hackers wanted more! They wanted direct access to a machine, type in programs, see the results as they come out, and debug the programs accordingly. Then a miracle occured. The lab came to own a TX-0, which was relatively small, taking over only most of a medium-sized room, and required only 15 tons of air-conditioning equipment. And for the first time, it did not require card. You typed in your code using a Flexowriter, and see the results immediately in a cathode ray tube display. Later on a PDP-1 came to the lab, where the first computer game, Spacewar was developed.
The computers were running all the time, and people would sign up for time with them. The group of the first hackers who were there would basically hang around the room, waiting to take advantage of any time when they could access the terminal. The they would program as if there was no tomorrow. The computer was everything to them. The programs they would write would be kept in a drawer next to the computer, and anyone could access your code, and would try to improve on it, making it run with fewer instructions, a process called “bumming”. In other words, your code belonged to the world, and anyone had the right to modify it and improve on it. People were just purely based on their hacking abilites, and not based on “bogus criteria such as degrees, age, race, or position”. This free exchange of information remained the way things were done in the hacker community for two more decades, and is in some sense one of the main contributions of hackerism.
Levy does an excellent work in describing this and subsequent generations of hackers, their story and their lives, from Bill Gosper and Richard Greenblatt in MIT to Lee Felsenstein and the hardware hackers of the Bay Area, Stephen “Woz” Wozniak (the designer of Apple II), and finally Richard Stallman, “The Last Of The Hackers”. This has been a very enjoyable read, and I recommend it to anyone who wants to find out about the early days of personal computers, and to find out about this truly fascinating period in computing, where most of the things we now take for granted appeared for the first time.
Wikipedia information on the book. Online copy of the 1984 edition.
The first two chapters.
A list of the who’s who of that era.
Later, Haris
