Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution

by Steven Levy

trying to cut off instructions without affecting the outcome came to be called “program bumming,”

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.

You couldn’t talk to those people — they were beyond convincing. They were batch-processed people, and it showed

Hackers should be judged by their hacking, not bogus criteria such as degrees, age, race, or position.

John McCarthy illustrated that belief when he said that the natural state of man was to be online to a computer all the time. “What the user wants is a computer that he can have continuously at his beck and call for long periods of time.”

one instruction called Push-J,

It's CALL/RET that saves PC and flags on the stack; normally it's PUSHJ/POPJ or PUSHJ/POP/JSR2

There was no way in hell Bill Gosper was going to work under a man who did not know why the logarithm of the sum was not the sum of the logarithms.