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It was a philosophy of sharing, openness, decentralization, and getting your hands on machines at any cost to improve the machines and to improve the world.
Hackers like Richard Greenblatt, Bill Gosper, Lee Felsenstein, and John Harris are the spirit and soul of computing itself.
Peter Samson had long been fascinated by trains, especially subways.
Head of S&P was an upperclassman named Bob Saunders,
Alan Kotok,
and a project undertaken or a product built not solely to fulfill some constructive goal, but with some wild pleasure taken in mere involvement, was called a “hack.”
Marge Saunders would drive to the Safeway every Saturday morning in the Volkswagen and upon her return ask her husband, “Would you like to help me bring in the groceries?” Bob Saunders would reply, “No.” Stunned, Marge would drag in the groceries herself. After the same thing occurred a few times, she exploded, hurling curses at him and demanding to know why he said no to her question. “That’s a stupid question to ask,” he said. “Of course I won’t like to help you bring in the groceries. If you ask me if I’ll help you bring them in, that’s another matter.” It was as if Marge had submitted a
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Access to computers—and anything that might teach you something about the way the world works—should be unlimited and total. Always yield to the Hands-On Imperative!
Imperfect systems infuriate hackers, whose primal instinct is to debug them. This is one reason why hackers generally hate driving cars—the system of randomly programmed red lights and oddly laid out one-way streets cause delays that are so goddamned unnecessary that the impulse is to rearrange signs, open up traffic-light control boxes . . . redesign the entire system.
All information should be free.
This prevented the dreaded, time-wasting ritual of reinventing the wheel: instead of everybody writing his own version of the same program, the best version would be available to everyone, and everyone would be free to delve into the code and improve on that. A world studded with feature-full programs, bummed to the minimum, debugged to perfection.
Mistrust Authority—Promote Decentralization.
What really drove the hackers crazy was the attitude of the IBM priests and sub-priests, who seemed to think that IBM had the only “real” computers, and the rest were all trash.
Hackers should be judged by their hacking, not bogus criteria such as degrees, age, race, or position.
The PDP-1 (the initials were short for Programmed Data Processor, a term considered less threatening than “computer,” which had all kinds of hulking-giant connotations)
When you wrote a fine program you were building a community, not churning out a product. Anyway, people shouldn’t have to pay for software—information should be free!
