Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution

by Steven Levy

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. And how would you go about that if not by getting your hands on them?

The core members hung out at the club for hours, constantly improving The System, arguing about what could be done next, and developing a jargon of their own that seemed incomprehensible to outsiders who might chance on these teen-aged fanatics, with their checked short-sleeve shirts, pencils in their pockets, chino pants, and, always, a bottle of Coca-Cola by their side. (TMRC purchased its own Coke machine for the then forbidding sum of $165; at a tariff of five cents a bottle, the outlay was replaced in three months; to facilitate sales, Saunders built a change machine for Coke buyers that was still in use a decade later.) 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); the two desks in the corner of the room were not called the office, but the “orifice”; one who insisted on studying for courses was a “tool”; garbage was called “cruft”; 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.”

While someone might call a clever connection between relays a “mere hack,” it would be understood that, to qualify as a hack, the feat must be imbued with innovation, style, and technical virtuosity.

McCarthy was one of a very few people working in an entirely new form of scientific inquiry with computers. The volatile and controversial nature of his field of study was obvious from the very arrogance of the name that McCarthy had bestowed upon it: Artificial Intelligence. This man actually thought that computers could be smart. Even at such a science-intensive place as MIT, most people considered the thought ridiculous: they considered computers to be useful, if somewhat absurdly expensive, tools for number-crunching huge calculations and for devising missile defense systems (as MIT’s largest computer, the Whirlwind, had done for the early-warning SAGE system), but scoffed at the thought that computers themselves could actually be a scientific field of study.

John McCarthy had once noticed that his graduate students who loitered around the 704 would work over their computer programs to get the most out of the fewest instructions, and get the program compressed so that fewer cards would need to be fed to the machine. Shaving off an instruction or two was almost an obsession with them. McCarthy compared these students to ski bums. They got the same kind of primal thrill from “maximizing code” as fanatic skiers got from swooshing frantically down a hill. So the practice of taking a computer program and trying to cut off instructions without affecting the outcome came to be called “program bumming,” and you would often hear people mumbling things like, “Maybe I can bum a few instructions out and get the octal correction card loader down to three cards instead of four.”

When you programmed a computer, you had to be aware of where all the thousands of bits of information were going from one instruction to the next, and be able to predict—and exploit—the effect of all that movement. When you had all that information glued to your cerebral being, it was almost as if your own mind had merged into the environment or the computer. Sometimes it took hours to build up to the point where your thoughts could contain that total picture, and when you did get to that point, it was such a shame to waste it that you tried to sustain it by marathon bursts, alternately working on the computer or poring over the code that you wrote on one of the offline Flexowriters in the Kluge Room. You would sustain that concentration by “wrapping around” to the next day.

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. This is especially true when a hacker wants to fix something that (from his point of view) is broken or needs improvement. 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. 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.

The belief, sometimes taken unconditionally, that information should be free was a direct tribute to the way a splendid computer, or computer program, works—the binary bits moving in the most straightforward, logical path necessary to do their complex job. What was a computer but something that benefited from a free flow of information? If, say, the accumulator found itself unable to get information from the input/output (I/O) devices like the tape reader or the switches, the whole system would collapse. In the hacker viewpoint, any system could benefit from that easy flow of information.

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. 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.

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

A certain esthetic of programming style had emerged. Because of the limited memory space of the TX-0 (a handicap that extended to all computers of that era), hackers came to deeply appreciate innovative techniques that allowed programs to do complicated tasks with very few instructions. The shorter a program was, the more space you had left for other programs, and the faster a program ran. 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. “Well, we can do this by adding twenty numbers,” Samson might say to himself, “and it’s quicker to write instructions to do that than to think out a loop in the beginning and the end to do the same job in seven or eight instructions.” But the latter program might be admired by fellow hackers, and some programs were bummed to the fewest lines so artfully that the author’s peers would look at it and almost melt with awe.

Sometimes program bumming became competitive, a macho contest to prove oneself so much in command of the system that one could recognize elegant shortcuts to shave off an instruction or two, or, better yet, rethink the whole problem and devise a new algorithm that would save a whole block of instructions. (An algorithm is a specific procedure which one can apply to solve a complex computer problem; it is sort of a mathematical skeleton key.) This could most emphatically be done by approaching the problem from an offbeat angle that no one had ever thought of before, but that in retrospect made total sense. There was definitely an artistic impulse residing in those who could utilize this genius-from-Mars technique—a black-magic, visionary quality that enabled them to discard the stale outlook of the best minds on earth and come up with a totally unexpected new algorithm.

Surely the computer had changed their lives, enriched their lives, given their lives focus, made their lives adventurous. It had made them masters of a certain slice of fate. Peter Samson later said, “We did it twenty-five to thirty percent for the sake of doing it because it was something we could do and do well, and sixty percent for the sake of having something which was in its metaphorical way alive, our offspring, which would do things on its own when we were finished. That’s the great thing about programming, the magical appeal it has . . . Once you fix a behavioral problem [a computer or program] has, it’s fixed forever, and it is exactly an image of what you meant.” Like Aladdin’s lamp, you could get it to do your bidding.

To Samson and the others, using the computer was such a joy that they would have paid to do it. The fact that they were getting paid the princely sum of $1.60 an hour to work on the computer was a bonus. As for royalties, wasn’t software more like a gift to the world, something that was reward in itself? The idea was to make a computer more usable, to make it more exciting to users, to make computers so interesting that people would be tempted to play with them, explore them, and eventually hack on them. 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!

The Right Thing implied that to any problem, whether a programming dilemma, a hardware interface mismatch, or a question of software architecture, a solution existed that was just . . . it. The perfect algorithm. You’d have hacked right into the sweet spot, and anyone with half a brain would see that the straight line between two points had been drawn, and there was no sense trying to top it. “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.”

Though some hackers led somewhat active social lives, the key figures in TMRC-PDP hacking had locked themselves into what would be called “bachelor mode.” It was easy to fall into—for one thing, many of the hackers were loners to begin with, socially uncomfortable. It was the predictability and controllability of a computer system—as opposed to the hopelessly random problems in a human relationship—which made hacking particularly attractive. But an even weightier factor was the hackers’ impression that computing was much more important than getting involved in a romantic relationship. It was a question of priorities. Hacking had replaced sex in their lives.

The hackers had a word to describe those graduate students. It was the same word they used to describe almost anyone who pretended to know something about computers and could not back it up with hacker-level expertise. The word was “loser.” The hackers were “winners.” It was a binary distinction: people around the AI lab were one or the other. The sole criterion was hacking ability. So intense was the quest to improve the world by understanding and building systems that almost all other human traits were disregarded. You could be fourteen years old and dyslexic, and be a winner. Or you could be bright, sensitive, and willing to learn, and still be considered a loser.

Even if the time-sharing system allowed the machine to respond to you in exactly the same way as it did in single user mode, you would just know that it wasn’t all yours. It would be like trying to make love to your wife, knowing she was simultaneously making love to six other people!

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

The problem of unrealistic software design is greatly diminished when the designer is the implementor. The implementor’s ease in programming and pride in the result is increased when he, in an essential sense, is the designer. Features are less likely to turn out to be of low utility if users are their designers and they are less likely to be difficult to use if their designers are their users.

Quote from a progress report written by hacker Don Eastlake five years after ITS was first running.

The machines which stood at the soul of hackerism were also loathed by millions of common, patriotic citizens who saw computers as a dehumanizing factor in society. Every time an inaccurate bill arrived at a home, and the recipient’s attempts to set it right wound up in a frustrating round of calls—usually leading to an explanation that “the computer did it,” and only herculean human effort could erase the digital blot—the popular contempt toward computers grew. Hackers, of course, attributed those slipups to the brain-damaged, bureaucratic, batch-processed mentality of IBM. Didn’t people understand that the Hacker Ethic would eliminate those abuses by encouraging people to fix bugs like thousand-dollar electric bills? But in the public mind there was no distinction between the programmers of Hulking Giants and the AI lab denizens of the sleek, interactive PDP-6. And in that public mind all computer programmers, hackers or not, were seen either as wild-haired mad scientists plotting the destruction of the world or as pasty-skinned, glassy-eyed automatons, repeating wooden phrases in dull monotones while planning the next foray into technological big-brotherism.

The twenty miles or so between Palo Alto on the peninsula and San Jose at the lower end of San Francisco Bay had earned the title “Silicon Valley” from the material, made of refined sand, used to make semiconductors. Two decades before, Palo Alto had been the spawning ground of the transistor; this advance had been parlayed into the magic of integrated circuits (ICs)—tiny networks of transistors which were compressed onto chips, little plastic-covered squares with thin metallic connectors on the bottom. They looked like headless robot insects. And now, in the early 1970s, three daring engineers working for a Santa Clara company called Intel had invented a chip called a microprocessor: a dazzlingly intricate layout of connections which duplicated the complex grid of circuitry one would find in the central processing unit (CPU) of a computer.

He flicked on the terminal, and with violent confidence the line printer hammered out the words, HELLO. WHAT’S YOUR NAME. He typed in STEVE. The line printer hammered out HI STEVE WHAT DO YOU WANT TO DO, and Steve Dompier was blown away. He later described it: “It was the magic machine that had intelligence. Of course I didn’t understand how it worked. But on everybody’s face you could see the same thing for the first four or five months until they understood it really wasn’t intelligent. That’s the addictive part, that first magic where this machine talks back to you and does mathematics incredibly fast.”

He hit the RUN switch. The little radio on top of the big, menacing computer box began to make raspy, buzzy noises. It was music of a sort, and by the time the first few plaintive bars of Paul McCartney’s ballad were through, the room of hackers—normally abuzz with gossip about the latest chip—fell into an awed silence. Steve Dompier’s computer, with the pure, knee-shaking innocence of a first-grader’s first recital, was playing a song. As soon as the last note played, there was total, stunned silence. They had just heard evidence that the dream they’d been sharing was real. A dream that only a few weeks before had seemed vague and distant.

The difference between the Gates-Allen software library and the software library in the drawer by the PDP-6 or the Homebrew Club library was that the former was for sale only. Neither Bill Gates nor Ed Roberts believed that software was any kind of sanctified material, meant to be passed around as if it were too holy to pay for. It represented work, just as hardware did, and Altair BASIC was listed in the MITS catalog like anything else it sold.

The first Computer Faire was to the hardware hackers an event comparable to Woodstock in the movement of the sixties. Like the concert at Max Yasgur’s farm, this was both a cultural vindication and a signal that the movement had gotten so big that it no longer belonged to its progenitors. The latter revelation was slow to sink in. Everyone was flying, moving from booth to booth, seeing all sorts of ground-breaking hardware and mind-blowing software, meeting people you could swap subroutines and wire-wrapping schemes with, and attending some of the nearly one hundred workshops, which included Lee Felsenstein on the Community Memory movement, Tom Pittman on computer languages, Bob Kahn on the Lawrence Hall of Science computing program, Marc LeBrun on computer music, and Ted Nelson on the triumphant future.

Ken Williams was far from a dazzling programmer when he finished Control Data Institute, but he was certainly prepared to do anything required of him. And more. As much work as possible, to help him go as high as he could. Then take on another, more demanding job, whether or not he was qualified. Instead of cleanly breaking with the previous employer, Ken tried to keep on the payroll, in consultant mode. He would claim to know computer languages and operating systems he knew nothing about, reading a book about the subject hours before a job interview and bullshitting his way into the position. “Well, we’re looking for a programmer in BAL,” they would tell him, referring to an esoteric computer language, and he would laugh almost derisively. “BAL? I’ve been programming in BAL for three years!” Then he would immediately rush out to get hold of some books, since he had never even heard of BAL. But by the time the job started he would have procured documentation, uniformly buried in dense, cheaply printed loose-leaf manuals, to fake expertise in the “BAL environment,” or at least buy time until he could get into the machine and divine the secrets of BAL.

The Hacker Ethic was changing, even as it spread throughout the country. Its emissaries were the small, low-cost computers sold by Apple, Radio Shack, Commodore (the PET), and Atari. Each was a real computer; the sheer proliferation created a demand for more innovative programs that previous distribution methods could not address. A hacker could no longer distribute clever programs by leaving them in a drawer, as he had at MIT, nor could he rely on a Homebrew Computer Club system of swapping programs at club meetings. Many people who bought these new computers never bothered to join clubs. Instead they relied on computer stores, where they happily paid for programs. When you were desperate for something to fulfill the promise of this thrilling new machine, spending twenty-five dollars for Mystery House seemed almost a privilege. These pioneering computer owners in the early eighties might learn enough about their machines to appreciate the beauty of an unencumbered flow of information, but the Hacker Ethic, microcomputer-style, no longer necessarily implied that information was free.

On-Line’s corporate headquarters in 1981 was the second floor of a dark brown wood-frame structure on Route 41 whose ground floor housed a stationery store and a little print shop. You entered the office after climbing a flight of stairs on the outside of the building; you had to go outside past the staircase to go to the bathroom. Inside the office were a group of desks, fewer desks than there were employees. People played a continuous game of musical chairs to claim desk space and use of one of the several Apples. Boxes of disks, discarded computer monitors, and stacks of correspondence were piled on the floor. The disarray was mind-boggling. The noise level, routinely intolerable. The dress code, nonexistent. It was productive anarchy, reminiscent of the unstructured atmosphere of the AI lab or the Homebrew Club. But since it was also a prosperous business, and the participants so young, the On-Line office resembled a weird combination of Animal House and The Millionaire.

At first, the artistic goals of the hacker coincided neatly with the marketplace, because the marketplace had no expectations, and the hackers could blithely create the games they wanted to play, and adorn business programs with the nifty features that displayed their artistry. But as more nontechnical people bought computers, the things that impressed hackers were not as essential. While the programs themselves had to maintain a certain standard of quality, it was quite possible that the most exacting standards—those applied by a hacker who wanted to add one more feature, or wouldn’t let go of a project until it was demonstrably faster than anything else around—were probably counterproductive. What seemed more important was marketing. There were plenty of brilliant programs which no one knew about. Sometimes hackers would write programs and put them in the public domain, give them away as easily as John Harris had lent his early copy of Jawbreaker to the guys at the Fresno computer store. But rarely would people ask for public domain programs by name: they wanted the ones they saw advertised and discussed in magazines, demonstrated in computer stores. It was not so important to have amazingly clever algorithms. Users would put up with more commonplace ones.

The Hacker Ethic, of course, held that every program should be as good as you could make it (or better), infinitely flexible, admired for its brilliance of concept and execution, and designed to extend the user’s powers. Selling computer programs like toothpaste was heresy. But it was happening. Consider the prescription for success offered by one of a panel of high-tech venture capitalists, gathered at a 1982 software show: “I can summarize what it takes in three words: marketing, marketing, marketing.” When computers are sold like toasters, programs will be sold like toothpaste. The Hacker Ethic notwithstanding.

The Third Generation lived with compromises in the Hacker Ethic that would have caused the likes of Greenblatt and Gosper to recoil in horror. It all stemmed from money. The bottom line of programming was ineluctably tied to the bottom line on a publisher’s ledger sheet. Elegance, innovation, and coding pyrotechnics were much admired, but a new criterion for hacker stardom had crept into the equation: awesome sales figures. Early hackers might have regarded this as heresy: all software—all information—should be free, they’d argue, and pride should be invested in how many people use your program and how much they are impressed with it. But the Third-Generation hackers never had the sense of community of their predecessors, and early on they came to see healthy sales figures as essential to becoming winners.

One of the more onerous of the compromises in the Ethic grew out of publishers’ desire to protect their sales figures. It involved intentional tampering with computer programs to prevent a program from being easily copied by users, perhaps for distribution without further payment to the publisher or author. The software publishers called this process “copy protection,” but a substantial percentage of true hackers called it war. Crucial to the Hacker Ethic was the fact that computers, by nature, do not consider information proprietary. The architecture of a computer benefited from the easiest, most logical flow of information possible. Someone had to substantially alter a computer process to make data inaccessible to certain users. Using one short command, a user could duplicate an “unprotected” floppy disk down to the last byte in approximately thirty seconds. This ease was appalling to software publishers, who dealt with it by “copy-protecting” disks: altering the programs by special routines which prevented the computer from acting naturally when someone tried to copy a disk. A digital roadblock that did not enhance the program’s value to the user, but benefited the seller of the program.

Hackers hated the fact that copy-protected disks could not be altered. You couldn’t even look at the code, admire tricks and learn from them, modify a subroutine that offended you, insert your own subroutine . . . You couldn’t keep working on a program until it was perfect. This was unconscionable. To hackers, a program was an organic entity that had a life independent from that of its author. Anyone who could contribute to the betterment of that machine-language organism should be welcome to try. If you felt that the missiles in Threshold were too slow, you should be welcome to peruse the code and go deep into the system to improve on it. Copy protection was like some authority figure telling you not to go into a safe which contains machine-language goodies . . . things you absolutely need to improve your programs, your life, and the world at large. Copy-protect was a fascist goon saying, “Hands off.” As a matter of principle, if nothing else, copy-protected disks must therefore be “broken.” Just as the MIT hackers felt compelled to compromise “security” on the CTSS machine, or engaged in lock hacking to liberate tools. Obviously, defeating the fascist goon copy-protect was a sacred calling and would be lots of fun.

Early varieties of copy-protect involved “bit-shifting” routines that slightly changed the way the computer read information from the disk drive. Those were fairly simple to beat. The companies tried more complicated schemes, each one broken by hackers. One renegade software publisher began selling a program called Locksmith, specifically designed to allow users to duplicate copyprotected disks. You didn’t have to be a hacker, or even a programmer, to break copy protection anymore! The publisher of Locksmith assured the Apple World that his intent, of course, was only to allow users to make backup copies of programs they’d legally purchased. He insisted that users were not necessarily abusing his program in such a way that publishers were losing sales. And Buckminster Fuller announced he was becoming a placekicker for the New York Jets.

Electronic Arts was the brainchild of Trip Hawkins, who had quit his job as Apple’s director of marketing for the USA project to do this. He started the company out of an extra room in the office of a venture capital firm. Hawkins brought together a team from Apple, Atari, Xerox PARC, and VisiCorp, and, in a coup sure to charm the heart of any hacker, got Steve Wozniak to agree to sit on the board of directors.

“This is the event where Hollywood meets the Computer Age,” said Tom Tatum to the crowd of reporters and computer tradespeople in town for the Comdex show. “The ultra-contest of the eighties.” Tom Tatum’s creation was called Wizard vs. Wizards. It was to be a television contest where game designers play each other’s games for a set of prizes. Tatum had gathered programmers from companies like On-Line and Sirius because he sensed the arrival of a new kind of hero, one who fought with brains instead of muscle, one who represented America’s bold willingness to stay ahead of the rest of the world in the technological battle of supremacy: the hacker.

Did this Las Vegas event mark the early beginning of esports?

As the computer revolution grew in a dizzying upward spiral of silicon, money, hype, and idealism, the Hacker Ethic became perhaps less pure, an inevitable result of its conflict with the values of the outside world. But its ideas spread throughout the culture each time some user flicked the machine on, and the screen came alive with words, thoughts, pictures, and sometimes elaborate worlds built out of air—those computer programs which could make any man (or woman) a god.

Lee Felsenstein had learned to wear a suit with ease, to court women, to charm audiences. But what mattered was still the machine and its impact on people. He had plans for the next step. “There’s more to be done,” he said not long after Osborne Computer went down. “We have to find a relationship between man and machine which is much more symbiotic. It’s one thing to come down from one myth, but you have to replace it with another. I think you start with the tool: the tool is the embodiment of the myth. I’m trying to see how you can explain the future that way, create the future.”

The term “hacker” has always been bedeviled by discussion. When I was writing this book, the term was still fairly obscure. In fact, some months before publication, my editor told me that people in Doubleday’s sales force requested a title change—“Who knows what a hacker is?” they asked. Fortunately, we stuck with the original, and by the mid-eighties the term had become rooted in the vernacular. Unfortunately for many true hackers, however, the popularization of the term was a disaster. Why? The word hacker had acquired a specific and negative connotation. The trouble began with some well-publicized arrests of teenagers who electronically ventured into forbidden digital grounds, like government computer systems. It was understandable that the journalists covering these stories would refer to the young perps as hackers—after all, that’s what the kids called themselves. But the word quickly became synonymous with “digital trespasser.”

In the pages of national magazines, in television dramas and movies, in novels both pulp and prestige, a stereotype emerged: the hacker, an antisocial geek whose identifying attribute is the ability to sit in front of a keyboard and conjure up a criminal kind of magic. In these depictions, anything connected to a machine of any sort, from a nuclear missile to a garage door, is easily controlled by the hacker’s bony fingers, tapping away on the keyboard of a cheap PC or a workstation. According to this definition a hacker is at best benign, an innocent who doesn’t realize his true powers. At worst, he is a terrorist. In the past few years, with the emergence of computer viruses, the hacker has been literally transformed into a virulent force.

True, some of the most righteous hackers in history have been known to sneer at details such as property rights or the legal code in order to pursue the Hands-On Imperative. And pranks have always been part of hacking. But the inference that such high jinks were the essence of hacking was not just wrong, it was offensive to true hackers, whose work had changed the world, and whose methods could change the way one viewed the world. To read of talentless junior high school students logging on to computer bulletin boards, downloading system passwords or credit bureau codes, and using them to promote digital mayhem—and have the media call them hackers . . . well, it was just too much for people who considered themselves the real thing. They went apoplectic. The hacker community still seethes at the public burning it received in 1988 at Hacker Conference 5.0, when a reporting crew from CBS News showed up ostensibly to do a story on the glory of canonical hackers—but instead ran a piece loaded with security specialists warning of the Hacker Menace. To this day, I think that Dan Rather would be well advised to avoid attending future Hacker Conferences. But in the past ...

Finally, true hackers became cool. Under the rubric of “cyberpunk,” a term appropriated from the futuristic noir novels of smart new science fiction writers like William Gibson, Bruce Sterling, and Rudy Rucker, a new cultural movement emerged in the early 1990s. When the flagship publication of the movement, Mondo 2000 (a name change from Reality Hackers) began to elucidate cyberpunk principles, it turned out that the majority of them originated in the Hacker Ethic. The implicit beliefs of MIT’s Tech Model Railroad Club (Information Should Be Free, Access to Computers Should Be Unlimited and Total, Mistrust Authority . . .) have been shuffled to the top of the stack. By the time cyberpunk hit the zeitgeist, the media was ready to embrace a broader, more positive view of hacking. There were entire publications whose point of view ran parallel to hacker principles: Mondo 2000, and Wired, and loads of fanzines with names like Intertek and Boing Boing. There was an active computer trade press written by journalists who knew that their industry owed its existence to hackers. Even more significant, the concepts of hackerism were embraced by journalists at the same traditional publications whose cluelessness had tainted hackerism to begin with.

Once people understood what motivated hackers, it was possible to use those ideas as a measure to examine the values of Silicon Valley. At Apple Computer in particular, the hacker ideals were considered crucial to the company’s well-being . . . its very soul. Even more straitlaced companies came to realize that if they were to lead in their fields, the energy, vision, and problem-solving perseverance of hackers were required. In turn, it would be required of the companies to loosen their rules, to accommodate the freewheeling hacker style. Best of all, these ideas began to flow beyond the computer industry and into the culture at large. As I learned while writing Hackers, the ideals of my subject could apply to almost any activity one pursued with passion. 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.”

A new generation of hackers has emerged, techies who don’t see business as an enemy but the means through which their ideas and innovations can find the broadest audience. Take Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who has drawn four hundred million users to share their personal lives online. At twenty-five, he has proven a master at the black art of business development—deliberately and purposefully opening his site to advertisers and marketers. Yet he clearly thinks of himself as a hacker; last year, he told the audience at an event for would-be Internet entrepreneurs that “We’ve got this whole ethos that we want to build a hacker culture.” To find out what he meant by that, I visit him at Facebook headquarters, a large building on California Avenue in Palo Alto—the same street where I rented a room in 1983 to research Hackers. Surprisingly, the CEO, best known for wearing North Face fleece, is sporting a tie. He explains that he is nearing the end of a year in which he promised his team that he would show up for work in neckwear every day. It turned out to be a good one for Facebook—despite the recession, it doubled its user base and made hundreds of millions of dollars in profit. “Maybe it’s a charm,” he says, of the attire. “But I think it mostly just chokes me.”

Zuckerberg’s style may not come from the golden age of hacking, but his work ethic does. “We didn’t start with some grand theory, but a project we hacked together in a couple of weeks,” Zuckerberg says. “Our whole culture is we want to build something quickly.” Every six to eight weeks, Facebook conducts “hackathons” where people have one night to dream up and complete a project. “The idea is you can build something really good in a night,” says Zuckerberg. “And that’s part of the personality of Facebook now. We have a big belief in moving fast, pushing boundaries, saying that it’s OK to break things. It’s definitely very core in my personality.”

In the ongoing competition for talent, Zuckerberg believes that the company with the best hackers wins. “One good hacker can be as good as ten or twenty engineers, and we try to embrace that. We want to be the place where the best hackers want to work, because our culture is set up so they can build ...

Unlike the original hackers, Zuckerberg’s generation didn’t have to start from scratch or use assembly language to get control of their machines. “I never wanted to take apart my computer,” he says. As a budding hacker in the late 90s, Zuckerberg tinkered with the higher-level...

As was the case with Gates, Zuckerberg is often accused of turning his back on hacker ideals because he refused to allow other sites to access the information that Facebook users contribute. But Zuckerberg says that the truth is just the opposite; his company piggybacks on—and builds on—the free flow of information. “I never had this thing where I wanted to have information that other people didn’t,” he says. “I just thought it should all be more available. The world was becoming more open and more access to information was really good. From everything I read, that’s a very core part of hacker culture. Like ‘Information wants to be free’ and all that.”