Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution

by Steven Levy

He was not the last administrator to feel the wrath of a hacker thwarted in the quest for access.

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.

Imperfect systems infuriate hackers, whose primal instinct is to debug them.

All information should be free.

Mistrust Authority — Promote Decentralization.

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. Bureaucrats hide behind arbitrary rules (as opposed to the logical algorithms by which machines and computer programs operate): they invoke those rules to consolidate power, and perceive the constructive impulse of hackers as a threat. The epitome of the bureaucratic world was to be found at a very large company called International Business Machines — IBM.

Sometimes when you didn’t need much speed or space, and you weren’t thinking about art and beauty, you’d hack together an ugly program, attacking the problem with “brute force” methods.

It would be so compact that the whole setup was no larger than three refrigerators

space opera novels of E.E. “Doc” Smith,

look into?

For instance, one day when a piece of equipment was broken, Kotok called up Maynard and told DEC about it; they said, “Come up and get a replacement.” By the time Kotok got up there, it was well after 5 P.M. and the place was closed. But the night watchman let him go in, find the desk of the engineer he’d been talking to, and root through the desk until he found the part.

“weapons or tools that aren’t very trustworthy are held in very low esteem — people really like to be able to trust their tools and weapons. That was very clear in that case.”

The man of the future. Hands on a keyboard, eyes on a CRT, in touch with the body of information and thought that the world had been storing since history began. It would all be accessible to Computational Man.

computing was much more important than getting involved in a romantic relationship. It was a question of priorities.

“Women, even today, are considered grossly unpredictable,” one PDP-6 hacker noted, almost two decades later. “How can a hacker tolerate such an imperfect being?”

Hah. It's difficult certainly.

“If he worried how to spell things, he wouldn’t have gotten anything written. He did what he was good at. He was a complete pragmatist. What people thought, be damned. If anyone thought he was stupid or nerdly, that was their problem. Some people did, and they were wrong.”

Principles of Electricity and Electronics Applied to Telephone and Telegraph Work

rematriculate.

“Why should we limit computers to the lies people tell them through keyboards?”

They wouldn’t know what The Right Thing was if it fell on them.

There are fun programs with jokes in them, there are exciting programs which do The Right Thing, and there are sad programs which make valiant tries but don’t quite fly.

One thing that helped Sussman in his turnaround from loser to winner was a sense of what The Right Thing was.

It would be like trying to make love to your wife, knowing she was simultaneously making love to six other people!

To the hackers, the system was an end in itself. Most hackers, after all, had been fascinated by systems since early childhood.

Systems are organic, living creations: if people stop working on them and improving them, they die.

There was even some talk at antiwar meetings that some of the computers at Tech Square were used to help run the war. Harvey would try to tell them it wasn’t so, but the radicals would not only disbelieve him but get angry that he’d try to feed them bullshit.

“There’s nothing illegal about a Defense Department funding research. It’s certainly better than a Commerce Department or Education Department funding research . . . because that would lead to thought control. I would much rather have the military in charge of that . . . the military people make no bones about what they want, so we’re not under any subtle pressures. It’s clear what’s going on. The case of ARPA was unique, because they felt that what this country needed was people good in defense technology. In case we ever needed it, we’d have it.”

At one point a research firm was called in to do a study of the excessive, inescapable noise, and they concluded that the hum of the air conditioner was so bothersome because there weren’t enough competing noises — so they fixed the machines to make them give off a loud, continual hiss. In Greenblatt’s words, this change “was not a win,” and the constant hiss made the long hours on the ninth floor rather nerve-racking for some.

This strikes close to home with our office's awful pink noise generators.

LIFE was much more than your normal hack. He saw it as a way to “basically do science in a new universe where all the smart guys haven’t already nixed you out two or three hundred years ago. It’s your life story if you’re a mathematician: every time you discover something neat, you discover that Gauss or Newton knew it in his crib. With LIFE you’re the first guy there, and there’s always fun stuff going on. You can do everything from recursive function theory to animal husbandry. There’s a community of people who are sharing these experiences with you. And there’s the sense of connection between you and the environment. The idea of where’s the boundary of a computer. Where does the computer leave off and the environment begin?”

Gosper had disdained NASA’s human-wave approach toward things. He had been adamant in defending the AI lab’s more individualistic form of hacker elegance in programming, and in computing style in general. But now he saw how the real world, when it got its mind made up, could have an astounding effect. NASA had not applied the Hacker Ethic, yet it had done something the lab, for all its pioneering, never could have done. Gosper realized that the ninth-floor hackers were in some sense deluding themselves, working on machines of relatively little power compared to the computers of the future — yet still trying to do it all, change the world right there in the lab.

all that the hackers wound up doing was making Tools to Make Tools. It was embarrassing.

FREE THE INDIANAPOLIS 500

“Secrecy is the keystone of all tyranny,”

“I love computers and hate what computers can do,”

Remedial FORTRAN, his “one-day course for people who had been to IBM school and hadn’t learned anything,”

Sometimes housewives would bring their kids in, try the computers themselves, and get hooked, programming so much that husbands worried that the loyal matriarchs were abandoning children and kitchen for the joys of BASIC.

THIS BOOK IS FOR PERSONAL FREEDOM. AND AGAINST RESTRICTION AND COERCION

Anything as flexible as computers should inspire people to engage in equally flexible activity.

Years of working in the free-flow world of electronics had infused Marsh with the Hacker Ethic, and he saw school as an inefficient, repressive system. Even when he worked at a radical school with an open classroom, he thought it was a sham, still a jail.

A computer gives the average person, a high school freshman, the power to do things in a week that all the mathematicians who ever lived until thirty years ago couldn’t do.”

That method was a tortuous courting of the bitch goddess Disaster,

Now, in the movement to wipe away generations of centralized, antihacker control of the computer industry, to change the world’s disapproving view of computers and computer people,

“I’m into it for esthetic purposes

in magazines like Dr. Dobbs. The Apple ad even said, “our philosophy is to provide software for our machines free or at minimal cost.”

He had no sympathy for people who wanted to know how things worked, people who wanted to explore things, people who wanted to improve the systems they studied and dreamed about.

Roberta’s dad cosigned a student loan for $1,500, tuition for a trade school called Control Data Institute.

Tools-to-Make-Tools syndrome.

But did you really benefit from your computer if you did not program it?

John Harris’ art hinged on impressing people who shared his passions, which were few and well defined: science fiction (films and comics — not books, because John was not much of a reader). Games. And hacking.

He was involved in a new type of business in a brand-new industry and was not about to establish the same hateful, claustrophobic, secretive, bureaucratic environment that he despised so much at almost every company he had worked for.

Warren became aware that the love he had for hacking was a threat to his devotion to God, and though he still loved programming he tried to moderate his hacking sessions so that he was not diverted from his true purpose.