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The most productive people working on S&P called themselves “hackers” with great pride.
strays—science-mad people whose curiosity burned like a hunger, who like Peter Samson would be exploring the uncharted maze of laboratories at MIT.
he shared the common hacker experience of seeing his grades suffer from missed classes.
the hackers would exploit every possible thread of parliamentary procedure to create a meeting as convoluted as the programs they were hacking on the TX-0.
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!
In a perfect hacker world, anyone pissed off enough to open up a control box near a traffic light and take it apart to make it work better should be perfectly welcome to make the attempt.
What was a computer but something that benefited from a free flow of information?
The best way to promote this free exchange of information is to have an open system, something that presents no boundaries between a hacker and a piece of information or an item of equipment that he needs in his quest for knowledge, improvement, and time online.
Hackers should be judged by their hacking, not bogus criteria such as degrees, age, race, or position.
Hackers felt otherwise: anything that seemed interesting or fun was fodder for computing—and using interactive computers, with no one looking over your shoulder and demanding clearance for your specific project, you could act on that belief.
If everyone could interact with computers with the same innocent, productive, creative impulse that hackers did, the Hacker Ethic might spread through society like a benevolent ripple, and computers would
The TX-0 hackers had become accustomed to the most advanced interactive software anywhere, a dazzling set of systems programs, written by hackers themselves and implicitly tailored to their relentless demands for control of the machine.
Anyway, people shouldn’t have to pay for software—information should be free!
He had that breathless chipmunk speech pattern so common among hackers, along with thick glasses, modest height, and a fanatic taste for computers, bad movies, and pulp science fiction.
They loved smooth-running systems and reliable tools, so the fact that they would be stuck with something that didn’t work right drove them crazy.
Hacker Ethic: an urge to get inside the workings of the thing and make it better had led to measurable improvement.
“Women, even today, are considered grossly unpredictable,” one PDP-6 hacker noted, almost two decades later.
The Right Thing to do was to make sure that any good program got the fullest exposure possible, because information was free and the world would only be improved by its accelerated flow.
there was not much he could do to slow Stew Nelson’s eternal quest for systems knowledge.
wanting to find out what might happen was the ultimate justification, stronger than self-defense or temporary insanity.
Nelson was displaying an extension of the Hacker Ethic—if we all acted on our drive to discover, we’d discover more, produce more, be in control of more.
The more he programmed, the better he got, and the better he got, the more he wanted to program.
Dan Edwards thought was of even less concern: his position of authority, like that of most bureaucrats, was deemed an accident.
Because to hackers, passwords were even more odious than locked doors.
In their view, hacking would be better served by using the best system possible.
but by and large ITS proved that the best security was no security at all.
Systems are organic, living creations: if people stop working on them and improving them, they die.
This was no small feat, since hackers were generally opposed to the requirements of California life, particularly driving and recreational exposure to the sun.
For the first time in my life I was reading things which had not been approved by the Prophet’s censors, and the impact on my mind was devastating. Sometimes I would glance over my shoulder to see who was watching me, frightened in spite of myself. I began to sense faintly that secrecy is the keystone of all tyranny. (from Revolt in 2100)
What would come out of these systems was not as important as the act of understanding, exploring, and changing the systems
Dompier got over four hundred calls like that. There were a lot more hackers out there than anyone imagined.
in keeping with the Hacker Ethic, no artificial boundaries were maintained.
She noted the lack of female hardware hackers, and was enraged at the male hacker obsession with technological play and power.
central tenets of the Hacker Ethic: the free flow of information, particularly information that helped fellow hackers understand, explore, and build systems.
There is nothing more frustrating to a hacker than to see an extension to a system and not be able to keep hands-on.
Every problem has a better solution when you start thinking about it differently than the normal way.
But mostly people hacked Tools to Make Tools. Or games. And they would come into computer stores to show off their hacks.
and a tendency to take offense at an inefficient, suboptimal way of doing things.
He became determined to discover its secrets, the mysteries of its system, the better to extend it and control it.
To a hacker, translating a useful or fun program from one machine to another was inherently good.
From their point of view, it seemed to indicate another hacker sin—inefficiency.
Crucial to the Hacker Ethic was the fact that computers, by nature, do not consider information proprietary.
To hackers, a program was an organic entity that had a life independent from that of its author.
the Hacker Ethic, which instructs you to keep working until your hack tops previous efforts.
‘But wait a minute—Stallman doesn’t have anybody to argue with all night over there. He’s working alone! It’s incredible anyone could do this alone!’”
to absorb, explore, and expand the intricacies of those bewitching systems;
I think that hackers—dedicated, innovative, irreverent computer programmers—are the most interesting and effective body of intellectuals since the framers of the U.S. Constitution . . . No other group that I know of has set out to liberate a technology and succeeded. They not only did so against the active disinterest of corporate America, their success forced corporate America to adopt their style in the end. In reorganizing the Information Age around the individual, via personal computers, the hackers may well have saved the American economy . . . The quietest of all the ’60s sub-subcultures
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