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jiggle some diodes, and tweak a few connections. Peter Samson and his friends had grown up with a specific relationship to the world, wherein things had meaning only if you found out how they worked.
When a piece of equipment wasn’t working, it was “losing”; when a piece of equipment was ruined, it was “munged” (mashed until no good);
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.”
to qualify as a hack, the feat must be imbued with innovation, style, and technical virtuosity.
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!
Hackers believe that essential lessons can be learned about the systems—about the world—from taking things apart, seeing how they work, and using this knowledge to create new and even more interesting things. They resent any person, physical barrier, or law that tries to keep them from doing this.
Imperfect systems infuriate hackers, whose primal instinct is to debug them.
All information should be free. If you don’t have access to the information you need to improve things, how can you fix them? A free exchange of information, particularly when the information was in the form of a computer program, allowed for greater overall creativity.
Mistrust Authority—Promote Decentralization. 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. The last thing you need is a bureaucracy. Bureaucracies, whether corporate, government, or university, are flawed systems, dangerous in that they cannot accommodate the exploratory impulse of true hackers.
Hackers should be judged by their hacking, not bogus criteria such as degrees, age, race, or position.
The game Spacewar, a computer program itself, helped show how all games—and maybe everything else—worked like computer programs. When you went a bit astray, you modified your parameters and fixed it. You put in new instructions.
“If hackers are born, then they’re going to get made, and if they’re made into it, they were born.”
“The Right Thing,” Gosper would later explain, “very specifically meant the unique, correct, elegant solution . . . the thing that satisfied all the constraints at the same time, which everyone seemed to believe existed for most problems.”
“He was very persistent. If you try a few times and give up, you’ll never get there. But if you keep at it . . . There’s a lot of problems in the world which can really be solved by applying two or three times the persistence that other people will.”
his position of authority, like that of most bureaucrats, was deemed an accident.
Bureaucracies were always threatened by people who wanted to know how things worked. Bureaucrats knew their survival depended on keeping people in ignorance,
And Minsky continued, telling him that the world is built a certain way, and the most important thing we can do with the world is avoid randomness, and figure out ways by which things can be planned.
an important corollary of hackerism states that no system or program is ever completed. You can always make it better. Systems are organic, living creations: if people stop working on them and improving them, they die.
“Secrecy is the keystone of all tyranny,” said Heinlein’s Revolt in 2100 protagonist,
“I’m not asking you what you want to do, I’m asking what have you done?”
—ALL WATCHED OVER BY MACHINES OF LOVING GRACE
Doctor Benway, the Naked Lunch character, was “a manipulator and coordinator of symbol systems, an expert on all phases of interrogation, brainwashing, and control.”
“It was the same as ham radio. I didn’t want to spend my money to get on the air bragging about my equipment. I wanted to build things.”
He would become interested in a subject and devour it wholesale. “I tend to consume shelves in libraries,” he’d later explain.
“There are only two kinds of gratification that a human being can possess,” he would say, “ego and wallet. That’s it, baby. If you got those you’re in business.
About two thousand people, sight unseen, sent checks, money orders, three, four, five hundred dollars apiece, to an unknown company in a relatively unknown city, in a technically unknown state. These people were different. They were adventurers in a new land. They were the same people who went West in the early days of America. The weirdos who decided they were going to California, or Oregon, or Christ knows where.”
purer than one could find anywhere else. Ed Roberts later spoke of the power: “When you talk about wealth, what you’re really saying is, ‘How many people do you control?’ If I were to give you an army of ten thousand people, could you build a pyramid?
Buckminster Fuller had developed the concept of synergy—the collective power, more than the sum of the parts, that comes of people and/or phenomena working together in a system—and
It was from those Indians, Les Solomon insisted, that he learned the vital principle of vril, a power that allows you to move huge objects with very little force.
transformation: “I take a day of rest now. I won’t turn on the computer on Sunday.” “The other six days, I’ll work like a dog.”
‘Design by Geniuses for Use by Idiots,’
“Because they all had the same thing,” Solomon would later explain. “That little burning inside the eyeball. She used to say there was an inside personality, and though they looked like disreputable bums, you looked them in the face, you looked in those eyes and you knew who they were. She’d look at them and what would come out was the brightness, the intenseness.”
“He would pass judgment, which is his major talent:
“It was amazing to watch the anarchists put on a different shirt,”
You start by thinking there’s a god in the box. And then you find there isn’t anything in the box. You put the god in the box.”
To be a leader of men, a deft builder of competent, well-meshed employee teams, a persuasive promoter, and a constructive manipulator . . . this was what Dick Sunderland aspired toward.
. there was an aura of the illegitimate about the product, only slightly more respectable than hard-core porno books.
Success is heady. Can you stand it?”
can summarize what it takes in three words: marketing, marketing, marketing.”
Software always takes longer than you expect.
Ken had also developed a theory about friends and business. “Everything is personal and good friends up to about ten thousand dollars,” Ken later explained. “Once past ten thousand dollars, friendship doesn’t matter.”
Now, after months of delay, some due to an unexpectedly long debugging period (there has never been an unexpectedly short debugging period in the history of computers),
industry. Pat Mariott summed it up in a whisper, quoting gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson: “When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.”
[Socializing] gets less and less possible as the business gets more and more cutthroat. You want your competitors to know less and less what you’re doing.”
The thing he liked about the AI lab at Tech Square was that “there were no artificial obstacles, things that are insisted upon that make it hard for people to get any work done—things like bureaucracy, security, refusals to share with other people.”
Burrell Smith, the designer of the Macintosh computer, said it as well as anyone in one of the sessions at the first Hacker Conference: “Hackers can do almost anything and be a hacker. You can be a hacker carpenter. It’s not necessarily high tech. I think it has to do with craftsmanship and caring about what you’re doing.”
“The right information in the right place just changes your life.
