Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution
Encyclopedia
Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution (ISBN 0-385-19195-2) is a book by Steven Levy
about hacker culture. It was published in 1984 in Garden City
, New York
by Anchor Press/Doubleday. Levy describes the people, the machines, and the events that defined the Hacker Culture and the Hacker Ethic
, from the early mainframe hackers at MIT, to the self-made hardware hackers and game hackers. Immediately following is a brief overview of the issues and ideas that are brought forward by Steven Levy's book, as well as a more detailed interpretation of each chapter of the book, mentioning some of the principal characters and events.
The book saw an edition with a new afterword (entitled "Afterword: Ten Years After") by the author in 1994. In 2010, a 25th anniversary edition with updated material was published by O'Reilly
.
The hacker ethic deals with the idea that individuals are performing a duty for the common good, an analogy to a modern day 'Robin Hood'. The hacker communities as a result are prided on the fact that they are the rebellion against authority figures that restrict this level of computer freedom. Hackers are only judged by their ability as opposed to the various systems in places that currently dictate authority, such as schools and universities. Mostly the hacker ethic idealizes the notion of hacking being an art-form, something revered as opposed to disputed and frowned upon. Popularized by 'phreakers' in the 1970s and 80s, this is something that is not only evident, but also widespread among the growing community. As Manuel Castells, another lecturer involved in the field of computing, it is something that reflects not only on this community, but also of the wider social, political and financial world. In a sense, hacking is something that should affect everyone, but it is whether or not the interpretation that is given to hackers by Steven Levy compared with negative stereotypes of the media that dictate this perception.
s who wrote dirty, 'nonstandard' computer code.”
For this book, Levy talked to many different hackers, who were active from the 1950s until the 1980s.
(also known as Captain Crunch), infamous phone phreaker
; Bill Gates
, Harvard dropout and “cocky wizard” who wrote Altair BASIC
; Richard Greenblatt
, the “hacker's hacker”; Steve Jobs
, visionary; Marvin Minsky
, “playful and brilliant" MIT professor who headed the MIT AI Lab; Richard Stallman
, The Last of the True Hackers; and many, many others. Among the machines mentioned are the Altair 8800
, Apple II
, Atari 800, IBM PC
, PDP-1
, TX-0
, and many others.
(TMRC) is a club at MIT that built sophisticated railroad and trains models. The members were among the first hackers. Key figures of the club were Peter Samson
, Alan Kotok
, Jack Dennis
, and Bob Saunders. The club was composed of two groups, those who were interested in the modeling and landscaping, and those who comprised the Signals and Power Subcommittee and created the circuits that made the trains run. The latter would be among the ones who popularized the term hacker among many other slang terms, and who eventually moved on to computers and programming. They were initially drawn to the IBM 704
, the multimillion-dollar mainframe
that was operated at Building 26, but access and time to the mainframe was restricted to more important people. The group really began being involved with computers when Jack Dennis, a former member, introduced them to the TX-0
, a three-million-dollar computer on long-term-loan from Lincoln Laboratory
. They would usually stake out the place where the TX-0 was housed until late in the night in hopes that someone who had signed up for computer time did not show up.
2. The Hacker Ethic
was a set of concepts, beliefs, and morals that came out of a symbiotic relationship between the hackers and the machines. It was not something that was written up as a manifesto, but a commonly, silently, agreed upon creed that simply came to be. The Ethic basically consisted of allowing all information to be free in order to learn about how the world worked; using the already available knowledge to create more knowledge. Anything that prevented them from getting to this knowledge was resented. The best system was an open one that could be debugged and improved upon by anyone. For them, bureaucracy
was the bane of open systems and the IBM
culture at the time was its epitome. The worth of a hacker should only be judged by looking at his hacking, not on other criteria such as education, age, race, or position, and anything a hacker created on a computer could be considered artistic and beautiful just like anything else. The most beautiful computer code was one that was aesthetic, innovative and did not waste memory
space. The practice of optimizing program
code was known as “bumming.” Another belief was that computers can enhance your life, even if you are not a hacker. At the time computers were not well understood and hackers had to convince others, including their professors, of this belief.
3. Spacewar!: Many of the hackers were also fascinated by the telephone companies and their exchange systems and would often go on tours the companies offered to learn as much about them as possible. Alan Kotok, who had acquired some prestige with his skills with the TX-0 and also worked for Western Electric
(the manufacturing arm of the Bell System), would read as much as he could about the technical details of the telephone system and then explore or fingerprint the network.
In September 1961, DEC
donated to MIT's RLE
lab the second PDP-1 that it had produced. The machine was a dream to hackers. Six of them, including Kotok, Samson, Saunders, and Wagner, spent a total of two hundred and fifty man-hours one weekend to rewrite the TX-0 compiler
for the PDP-1 because they did not like the first choice. They were only paid five hundred dollars for their feat, but the finished product that had come of the Hacker Ethic, was its own reward. Steve “Slug” Russell
was another PDP-1 hacker that came up with a 2D
game called Spacewar! in which two space ships, controlled by toggle switches on the PDP-1, would fly around the screen and shoot torpedoes at each other. His program was further improved by the other hackers. Samson, for example, changed the random dots that represented the stars to look like the real constellations and he made the screen scroll as the ships moved in space. Dan Edwards, another programmer, added a sun and the effect of gravitational pull. Kotok and Saunders even created the first computer joystick out of TMRC parts to aid with the playing. The game and the compiler were readily and freely available to anyone. Eventually two programs were started to make computers usable by more than one person at a time, a concept that was called time-sharing
. One was started by Jack Dennis for the PDP-1, and one was started by Professor Fernando J. Corbató
for the IBM 7090
. MIT would eventually be paid three million dollars a year by ARPA to develop time-sharing through Project MAC headed by Robert Fano
with the involvement of Corbató, Dennis, and Minsky who would focus on Artificial Intelligence
. Project MAC was housed on the ninth floor of Tech Square, and it would become a home to many hackers.
4. Greenblatt and Gosper: Ricky Greenblatt
was a born hacker, although when asked whether a hacker is born or made, he said, “If hackers are born, then they're going to get made, and if they're made into it, they were born.” He was an intelligent child, and used to play chess and make electrical devices at an early age. When he first got into MIT he was intent on making the Dean's List
, but by his sophomore year he flunked out, because he was spending too much time hacking relay circuits at the TMRC and programming for the PDP-1. He even programmed a FORTRAN
compiler for the PDP-1. Bill Gosper
was a math genius. He took a programming course with John McCarthy, and Minsky's course on artificial intelligence. The hackers enjoyed Chinese food, and they would order anything that seemed interesting to their exploratory minds. Most did not have much of a social life outside of hacking, and some such as Greenblatt were notorious for their lack of personal hygiene. Gosper managed to graduate, but he had to work to pay back the tuition money that the Navy
had paid him. Gosper did not like the Navy culture which did not allow programmers near the computers, and he hated the UNIVAC
computer that they used since he considered it erroneous in its very design. He managed to work for a private company and later for Project MAC. Greenblatt decided to write a better chess program because he found Kotok's version to be lacking in strategy. The program was good enough to defeat the renowned academic Hubert Dreyfus
who had proclaimed that no chess program would be good enough to beat a ten-year-old (and, correctly, that the MIT Artificial Intelligence
Programme was doomed to failure due to profound theoretical fallacies). Although the hackers proved the skeptic wrong, their Hacker Ethic concluded that convincing the outside world of the merits of computers was not as interesting as hacking them.
5. The Midnight Computer Wiring Society was created by Stew Nelson, a hacker who was really interested in phone networks and computer programming. He created the MCWS because he wanted to add an instruction to the PDP-1 computer, and the lab administrators had forbidden anyone “not qualified” from messing with the computer hardware. Just like many other hackers, he believed in the Hacker Ethic, and he would use any tools and make any modifications that he believed would improve the system. The hackers would find a way to unlock any door and any safe simply because they did not believe in bureaucracy and closed systems. Nelson also wired the PDP-1 to automatically dial and route telephone calls through the use of a blue box
. At the same time, he also believed that hacking should not be done for profit.
6. Winners and Losers were two classifications by hackers whereby they were the former, and the grad students were the latter because they were not capable of hacking feats and could not understand about doing "The Right Thing". Hackers were initially against time-sharing systems because they felt that a system should be used to its fullest, and this could only be done by one person at a time. The time-sharing systems at the time were slow and imposed many restrictions on its users. Greenblatt was convinced by Ed Fredkin that time-sharing systems could be more beneficial, so he set out, along with Nelson, to write a new time-sharing system called ITS, or Incompatible Time-sharing System, initially for the PDP-6
, and later the PDP-10
. This new system would allow many users to each run many programs at once. ITS allowed all users full access to all the files in the system, and it did not require any passwords. ITS continued to be improved by Greenblatt and the other hackers in an open fashion.
7. LIFE: Outside the ninth floor or Tech Square, life was very different. At one point it was the late 1960s and many students were protesting the war, and everything involved in the war. The AI Lab was funded by the Department of Defense so they were also the target of protests. Many hackers were also anti-war, but they did not feel that what they were doing had any direct effect on the war. When the protesters took their protest to the ninth floor itself, security was tightened and locks added. This was against the Hacker Ethic, but they felt that it had to be done in order to protect the equipment. The hacker way of life was also the target of criticism. Many felt that hackers were obsessed or even addicted to computers, and hardly had any social interactions in the real world. For some hackers the lack of sleep, malnutrition, the pressure of finishing a hack, and the entire lifestyle was too much. A hacker was even doing drugs, and later attempted suicide. He was not the only one. In this chapter, Levy explores the hacker lifestyle, and its effect on the hackers. The hacker culture though was spreading outside of MIT as computers became more common. One other center of hacker culture was Stanford's AI Lab (SAIL) which had been started by John McCarthy. At SAIL the atmosphere was more laid back. Whereas MIT's lab developed Spacewar!, SAIL developed an Adventure game
. SAIL even had a sauna
, in which some “willing young coeds” once participated in a sex orgy captured by video camera and transmitted at computer terminals for the hackers to watch. The Stanford hackers could be just as eccentric however, and they also lived by the Hacker Ethic. One hacker lived in his car parked outside the SAIL building, whereas others would sometimes sleep in the crawl space between the roof and the artificial ceiling. Some hackers moved to Stanford, whereas others stayed at MIT. The Hacker Ethic spread even further with the creation of ARPAnet
(the precursor to the Internet
) that connected several computer systems in different parts of the country in a network. LIFE
was a computer simulation
written by John Horton Conway
, and it became the focus of Gosper in 1970. This resulted in some arguments with Greenblatt, who was not as fascinated with LIFE, and did not think that Gosper and others should be monopolizing the machine with this simulation. Gosper was fascinated because LIFE was uncharted territory and it posed the question of what could be called real life. Funding started to dry up from ARPA after Congress
passed the Mansfield Amendment. The AI Lab could not hire any hacker who showed talent anymore. Instead, they started looking for more professors to teach computer courses. Gosper left MIT for Stanford where he would study under Donald Knuth
, while still hacking on the PDP-10 at Tech Square via ARPAnet. A new generation of hackers was coming along that would spread the gospel of computers by making them smaller and more affordable.
was one of the founders of Community Memory
, an offshoot of Resource One based in Berkeley, California
that wanted to establish a communication system for people to contact each other. They made use of a computer terminal
connected to a XDS-940 mainframe. He was joined by Efrem Lipkin, another hacker who was wary of any project that had military involvement, in forming Community Memory. Bob Albrecht and his computer-book publishing company Dymax also brought computing to the people by teaching young students to program. He formed People's Computer Company
, a storefront in Menlo Park
, California, to offer computer time and classes to ordinary people. PCC spun off a series of books and a tabloid newspaper.
9. Every Man a God: While Felsenstein and Bob Marsh were trying to build their Tom Swift Terminal, a company in Albuquerque, New Mexico
called MITS
and run by Ed Roberts
came out with an article in Popular Electronics
about a computer kit that cost only $397. The Altair 8800
, based on the Intel 8080
microprocessor, only had 256 bytes of memory, but it struck a chord with so many hackers that MITS went from being close to bankruptcy to having millions of dollars worth of orders, and being unable to fulfill the orders in time. Although it was not yet a computer for the general public, the Altair brought that dream a lot closer.
10. The Homebrew Computer Club
was founded by Fred Moore
and Gordon French as a way for electronics hobbyists and hackers to get together and exchange information and talk about their projects. The first meeting took place on March 5, 1975 in Gordon's garage in Silicon Valley
. There were only 32 people in the first meeting, among them Lee Felsenstein, Bob Marsh, Bob Albrecht, Steve Dompier, Allen Baum and Stephen Wozniak
. Dompier wrote a program that was able to play simple musical melodies on the Altair that could be heard on a radio because of electrical interference. Some of the participants thought of making some add on boards for the 8800, and they even formed their own small companies to sell these boards. The membership of the club grew to hundreds, and members were sharing equipment and knowledge in a continuation of the Hacker Ethic developed at MIT. Many products were introduced and critiqued during club meetings, and their schematics and source code
would be freely shared and improved.
11. Tiny BASIC: Altair BASIC was an interpreter
that translated instructions from the BASIC programming language into assembly instructions that the Altair 8800 could understand. It was developed by Bill Gates
and Paul Allen
, the founders of Micro-soft
, specifically for the Altair 8800 and it would fit in 4K of memory. Unlike previous hackers and against the Hacker Ethic, Micro-Soft and MITS felt that people should pay for BASIC just like they paid for any add-on card. Many hackers had in fact put in orders for BASIC, but still had to wait for the order to be shipped. During a show put up by MITS, someone got hold of and copied a paper tape containing Altair BASIC. The tapes were duplicated and passed around freely before the commercial product was even shipped to customers. Gates and Allen did not appreciate this turn of events since they were actually paid commission for each copy of BASIC that MITS sold. Gates responded by writing an open letter titled “Open Letter to Hobbyists
” that considered the sharing of software to be theft. Tiny BASIC
was a similar interpreter that would fit in only 2K of memory as it supported a subset of the functionality of Micro-Soft BASIC (which itself was a subset of Dartmouth BASIC
). It was developed by Dick Whipple and John Arnold in Tyler, Texas
and distributed freely in PCC magazine. Many more people sent in improvements and programs developed in Tiny BASIC to be published. This eventually led to the creation of Dr. Dobb's Journal
edited by Jim Warren that distributed free or very inexpensive software in response to Gates' claims of theft. Tom Pittman was someone else who did not take kindly to Gates' words. He wrote a version of Tiny BASIC for the Motorola 6800
microprocessor. Although he sold it to AMI for $3,500, he retained the rights to sell it to others and decided to charge only $5 for it. He received many orders and even money from people who had already gotten a copy and simply wanted to pay him for his efforts. Pittman also wrote the essay “Deus Ex Machina
” on the AI and hardware hackers and what tied them together. Lee Felsenstein and Bob Marsh
banded together to create a fully contained computer for an issue of Popular Electronics
that they called SOL that sold for under a thousand dollars.
12. Woz or Steve Wozniak
was a hardware hacker since high school. Along with another friend he went to the first Homebrew meeting and was happy to have found people with similar interests in hardware and computers. He was working for Hewlett-Packard
at the time he built his own computer based on the MOS Technology 6502
microprocessor. He was able to build a machine with fewer chips by thinking about problems in clever and different ways. Wozniak was friends with Steve Jobs
, who worked for Atari
at the time. Jobs was interested in the computer Wozniak had built and thought they should make more of these machines and sell them. Wozniak had to ask HP for permission because he worked for them, but they did so because they did not believe that it was marketable. They decided to call their company Apple
and sell their machines for $666.66. Their software and diagrams were available to others for free or for a minimal cost. They soon followed their first computer with the Apple II
that would spark a revolution in the computer industry. They built their company out of their garages with Steve Jobs taking care of managing the company, while Steve Wozniak hacked at the hardware. At the Homebrew club their machine was hailed by some, while others felt that the Sol machine was more adequate since it used more “standard” parts and software.
13. Secrets: The West Coast Computer Faire
, organized by Jim Warren and Bob Reiling in 1977, was amongst the first signs that a new industry was about to take off and that it would take computers into the houses of ordinary people. Machines like the Commodore PET
and the Radio Shack
TRS-80
came into the market and sold in big numbers. The Hacker Ethic fell to the wayside as companies started to keep their hardware and software specifications secret because of the competition. The Homebrew members started to dwindle as many hackers had either formed their own companies or had become employed and could not divulge what they knew anymore. Others were too busy to even attend the meetings. It signaled a shift in the hacker culture.
and Roberta Williams
were the founders of Sierra On-Line, one of the first computer gaming companies, and among a new generation of hackers. Ken learned programming on his own while doing work for different companies on mainframes. Ken got Roberta hooked to computers when he showed her the Adventure
game written by Don Woods. Ken was not as interested in the game as Roberta who immersed herself in it even though she was the mother of two small children at the time. Ken's younger brother had bought an Apple II, and soon afterwards Ken bought one as well. He decided to write a FORTRAN compiler and hired five other programmers to help him with it. Meanwhile Roberta devised a game of her own based on Adventure which they called Mystery House
. Ken scrapped the compiler project and instead wrote the code for the game. They talked to Programma, the biggest distributor of Apple software, and they were offered 25% in royalty, which could have netted them more than $9,000. Instead they decided they wanted all the profits and sold the game independently. They started making tens of thousands of dollars each month just from their games, while Ken was still working for a company and making $42,000 a year. Ken quit his job and they moved to the woods in Oakhurst, California
to live out their dream life. Their second game, Wizard and the Princess
made them even more money and that was only the beginning of a new genre of commercial software, games.
15. Brotherhood: Computers began to be bought by people who had no wish to program them, but rather bought their software at computer stores. Games were the hot item when it came to software. Among the game companies of the time were On-Line, Brøderbund
(the Brotherhood), and Sirius Software
. Some of these companies formed a sort of brotherhood of their own by communicating and cooperating with each other.
16. The Third Generation consisted of hackers who had much more access to computers than the former hardware hackers. Personal computers were becoming popular to the point where high school kids could afford them. Among this new generation was John Harris (software developer)
, an Atari
assembly hacker, who later produced games for On-Line.
17. Summer Camp was the nickname for On-Line's headquarters. The staff partied and had fun whenever they were not working. The atmosphere was very casual and free-spirited, but it could not last as the company was growing.
18. Frogger: John Harris decided to port the arcade
classic to the Atari 800 computer for On-Line systems. He spent a lot of time and energy perfecting the game, but his disks were stolen before he even finished the game at a trade show. He was devastated as he had also lost his entire software library. His relationship with Ken Williams suffered as John was unable to return to programming for two months. He eventually remade Frogger and the game was a big success for On-Line, but the atmosphere had changed. Ken no longer believed that business could go along with hackers and their ethic, instead it had to become more professional. He realized that he needed some professional management to handle On-Line which had grown beyond his control. Ken decided on Dick Sunderland, his former boss who had told him that he had “no management potential,” for On-Line's president. However, Ken could not remove himself from the company matters. Although he knew that he had to let a non-hacker run the company, he could not get away from the fun and excitement.
19. Applefest: The Third Generation was not as interested in the Hacker Ethic, instead sales figures started to matter a lot more, and many software companies started using copy protection
mechanisms to prevent their software from being used without permission. Hackers saw these mechanisms as just another form of locks to be picked in order to liberate the software (see also Software cracking
). Mark Duchaineau was a hacker who came up with a protection scheme called Spiradisk for the Apple computer. This scheme actually made the software loading process faster by loading data in spirals instead of in concentric circles. He started working for On-Line, which actually wanted him to use more conventional protection schemes. Mark basically held On-Line hostage by insisting on implementing copy protection on their big release, Ultima II
, with his Spiradisk scheme rather than conventional ones. The game could not be released without copy protection for fear of unauthorized copying
. The 1982, San Francisco Applefest
was among the last important Applefests, and it signaled a shift in company attitudes. From the days of the Brotherhood, to the new, more business oriented, competitive atmosphere.
20. Wizard vs. Wizards was a televised contest devised by Tom Tatum and held in Las Vegas
, where game authors would compete by playing each other's games.
, also known as RMS as per his initials, was called by Levy the "last of the true hackers". This did not mean "last real hacker", but rather the last faithful member of the class of hackers
that Levy called the "true hackers". Stallman was getting a physics degree from Harvard at the same time as he was hacking at MIT's Tech Square building. He was for people cooperating instead of competing, and he did not like computers that restricted user access to computers through passwords. He advocated choosing the empty password so anyone could use the computers. RMS also wrote the text editor EMACS
and shared it on the condition that those who modify its source code
also share their modifications.
While RMS was fighting to keep the Hacker Ethic going with the computers at MIT, Richard Greenblatt and other AI hackers came up with a LISP machine and sought to form a company to sell them. Greenblatt was unwilling to yield to business pressures and wanted to form a company that would maintain the Hacker Ethic. Many others disagreed and the result was two competing companies. LISP Machine Incorporated, or LMI, was headed by Greenblatt, and Symbolics
was headed by Russ Noftsker. Symbolics hired most of the lab hackers, and a schism was created between the two groups of hackers, to the point where some would not even talk to each other.
Stallman saw a whole hacker culture die as the existing hackers left for these companies and there were no new hackers to fill their shoes. RMS held Symbolics responsible for the lab's death, and set out to help their competitor LMI in response. RMS subsequently launched development of the GNU
operating system
, based on the UNIX
design but following the principles of free software
. Although the Hacker Ethic was not as pure as in the beginning, it was being spread along the World with the advent of the personal computer, and later of the Internet.
Steven Levy
Steven Levy is an American journalist who has written several books on computers, technology, cryptography, the Internet, cybersecurity, and privacy.-Career:...
about hacker culture. It was published in 1984 in Garden City
Garden City, New York
Garden City is a village in the town of Hempstead in central Nassau County, New York, in the United States. It was founded by multi-millionaire Alexander Turney Stewart in 1869, and is located on Long Island, to the east of New York City, from mid-town Manhattan, and just south of the town of...
, New York
New York
New York is a state in the Northeastern region of the United States. It is the nation's third most populous state. New York is bordered by New Jersey and Pennsylvania to the south, and by Connecticut, Massachusetts and Vermont to the east...
by Anchor Press/Doubleday. Levy describes the people, the machines, and the events that defined the Hacker Culture and the Hacker Ethic
Hacker ethic
Hacker ethic is the generic phrase which describes the moral values and philosophy that are standard in the hacker community. The early hacker culture and resulting philosophy originated at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the 1950s and 1960s...
, from the early mainframe hackers at MIT, to the self-made hardware hackers and game hackers. Immediately following is a brief overview of the issues and ideas that are brought forward by Steven Levy's book, as well as a more detailed interpretation of each chapter of the book, mentioning some of the principal characters and events.
The book saw an edition with a new afterword (entitled "Afterword: Ten Years After") by the author in 1994. In 2010, a 25th anniversary edition with updated material was published by O'Reilly
O'Reilly Media
O'Reilly Media is an American media company established by Tim O'Reilly that publishes books and Web sites and produces conferences on computer technology topics...
.
Levy's description of hacker ethics and principles
First and foremost to Levy's principles is the concept of the hacker ethic and the popularization of them to popular culture. In Levy's own words, the principles dictate;- Access to computers—and anything which might teach you something about the way the world works—should be unlimited and total. Always yield to the Hands-on Imperative!
- All information should be free.
- Mistrust authority—promote decentralization.
- Hackers should be judged by their hacking, not bogus criteria such as degrees, age, race or position.
- You can create art and beauty on a computer.
- Computers can change your life for the better.
The hacker ethic deals with the idea that individuals are performing a duty for the common good, an analogy to a modern day 'Robin Hood'. The hacker communities as a result are prided on the fact that they are the rebellion against authority figures that restrict this level of computer freedom. Hackers are only judged by their ability as opposed to the various systems in places that currently dictate authority, such as schools and universities. Mostly the hacker ethic idealizes the notion of hacking being an art-form, something revered as opposed to disputed and frowned upon. Popularized by 'phreakers' in the 1970s and 80s, this is something that is not only evident, but also widespread among the growing community. As Manuel Castells, another lecturer involved in the field of computing, it is something that reflects not only on this community, but also of the wider social, political and financial world. In a sense, hacking is something that should affect everyone, but it is whether or not the interpretation that is given to hackers by Steven Levy compared with negative stereotypes of the media that dictate this perception.
Preface
Levy decided to write about the subject of hackers because he thought they were fascinating people. He also wanted to present a more accurate view of hackers than the one most people had. Levy found them to be “adventurers, visionaries, risk-takers, [and] artists” rather than “nerdy social outcasts or 'unprofessional' programmerProgrammer
A programmer, computer programmer or coder is someone who writes computer software. The term computer programmer can refer to a specialist in one area of computer programming or to a generalist who writes code for many kinds of software. One who practices or professes a formal approach to...
s who wrote dirty, 'nonstandard' computer code.”
For this book, Levy talked to many different hackers, who were active from the 1950s until the 1980s.
Who's Who
At the beginning, Levy introduces many important hacker figures and machines. Among them are: John DraperJohn Draper
John Thomas Draper , also known as Captain Crunch, Crunch or Crunchman , is an American computer programmer and former phone phreak. He is a legendary figure within the computer programming world.- Background :Draper is the son of a U.S...
(also known as Captain Crunch), infamous phone phreaker
Phreaking
Phreaking is a slang term coined to describe the activity of a culture of people who study, experiment with, or explore telecommunication systems, such as equipment and systems connected to public telephone networks. As telephone networks have become computerized, phreaking has become closely...
; Bill Gates
Bill Gates
William Henry "Bill" Gates III is an American business magnate, investor, philanthropist, and author. Gates is the former CEO and current chairman of Microsoft, the software company he founded with Paul Allen...
, Harvard dropout and “cocky wizard” who wrote Altair BASIC
Altair BASIC
Altair BASIC was an interpreter for the BASIC programming language that ran on the MITS Altair 8800 and subsequent S-100 bus computers. It was Microsoft's first product , distributed by MITS under a contract...
; Richard Greenblatt
Richard Greenblatt (programmer)
Richard D. Greenblatt is an American computer programmer. Along with Bill Gosper, he may be considered to have founded the hacker community, and holds a place of distinction in the Lisp and the MIT AI Lab communities.-Childhood:...
, the “hacker's hacker”; Steve Jobs
Steve Jobs
Steven Paul Jobs was an American businessman and inventor widely recognized as a charismatic pioneer of the personal computer revolution. He was co-founder, chairman, and chief executive officer of Apple Inc...
, visionary; Marvin Minsky
Marvin Minsky
Marvin Lee Minsky is an American cognitive scientist in the field of artificial intelligence , co-founder of Massachusetts Institute of Technology's AI laboratory, and author of several texts on AI and philosophy.-Biography:...
, “playful and brilliant" MIT professor who headed the MIT AI Lab; Richard Stallman
Richard Stallman
Richard Matthew Stallman , often shortened to rms,"'Richard Stallman' is just my mundane name; you can call me 'rms'"|last= Stallman|first= Richard|date= N.D.|work=Richard Stallman's homepage...
, The Last of the True Hackers; and many, many others. Among the machines mentioned are the Altair 8800
Altair 8800
The MITS Altair 8800 was a microcomputer design from 1975 based on the Intel 8080 CPU and sold by mail order through advertisements in Popular Electronics, Radio-Electronics and other hobbyist magazines. The designers hoped to sell only a few hundred build-it-yourself kits to hobbyists, and were...
, Apple II
Apple II
The Apple II is an 8-bit home computer, one of the first highly successful mass-produced microcomputer products, designed primarily by Steve Wozniak, manufactured by Apple Computer and introduced in 1977...
, Atari 800, IBM PC
IBM PC
The IBM Personal Computer, commonly known as the IBM PC, is the original version and progenitor of the IBM PC compatible hardware platform. It is IBM model number 5150, and was introduced on August 12, 1981...
, PDP-1
PDP-1
The PDP-1 was the first computer in Digital Equipment Corporation's PDP series and was first produced in 1960. It is famous for being the computer most important in the creation of hacker culture at MIT, BBN and elsewhere...
, TX-0
TX-0
The TX-0, for Transistorized Experimental computer zero, but affectionately referred to as tixo , was an early fully transistorized computer and contained a then-huge 64K of 18-bit words of magnetic core memory. The TX-0 was built in 1955 and went online in 1956 and was used continually through the...
, and many others.
Part One: True Hackers
1. The Tech Model Railroad ClubTech Model Railroad Club
The Tech Model Railroad Club is a student organization at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology , and one of the most celebrated model railroad clubs in the world, because of its historic role as a wellspring of hacker culture...
(TMRC) is a club at MIT that built sophisticated railroad and trains models. The members were among the first hackers. Key figures of the club were Peter Samson
Peter Samson
Peter R. Samson is an American computer scientist, best known for creating pioneering computer software....
, Alan Kotok
Alan Kotok
Alan Kotok was an American computer scientist known for his work at Digital Equipment Corporation and at the World Wide Web Consortium...
, Jack Dennis
Jack Dennis
Jack Dennis is a computer scientist and retired MIT professor.Dennis entered the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1949 as an electrical engineering major; he received his MS degree in 1954, and continued doctoral research and received his ScD in 1958...
, and Bob Saunders. The club was composed of two groups, those who were interested in the modeling and landscaping, and those who comprised the Signals and Power Subcommittee and created the circuits that made the trains run. The latter would be among the ones who popularized the term hacker among many other slang terms, and who eventually moved on to computers and programming. They were initially drawn to the IBM 704
IBM 704
The IBM 704, the first mass-produced computer with floating point arithmetic hardware, was introduced by IBM in 1954. The 704 was significantly improved over the IBM 701 in terms of architecture as well as implementations which were not compatible with its predecessor.Changes from the 701 included...
, the multimillion-dollar mainframe
Mainframe computer
Mainframes are powerful computers used primarily by corporate and governmental organizations for critical applications, bulk data processing such as census, industry and consumer statistics, enterprise resource planning, and financial transaction processing.The term originally referred to the...
that was operated at Building 26, but access and time to the mainframe was restricted to more important people. The group really began being involved with computers when Jack Dennis, a former member, introduced them to the TX-0
TX-0
The TX-0, for Transistorized Experimental computer zero, but affectionately referred to as tixo , was an early fully transistorized computer and contained a then-huge 64K of 18-bit words of magnetic core memory. The TX-0 was built in 1955 and went online in 1956 and was used continually through the...
, a three-million-dollar computer on long-term-loan from Lincoln Laboratory
Lincoln Laboratory
MIT Lincoln Laboratory, located in Lexington, Massachusetts, is a United States Department of Defense research and development center chartered to apply advanced technology to problems of national security. Research and development activities focus on long-term technology development as well as...
. They would usually stake out the place where the TX-0 was housed until late in the night in hopes that someone who had signed up for computer time did not show up.
2. The Hacker Ethic
Hacker ethic
Hacker ethic is the generic phrase which describes the moral values and philosophy that are standard in the hacker community. The early hacker culture and resulting philosophy originated at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the 1950s and 1960s...
was a set of concepts, beliefs, and morals that came out of a symbiotic relationship between the hackers and the machines. It was not something that was written up as a manifesto, but a commonly, silently, agreed upon creed that simply came to be. The Ethic basically consisted of allowing all information to be free in order to learn about how the world worked; using the already available knowledge to create more knowledge. Anything that prevented them from getting to this knowledge was resented. The best system was an open one that could be debugged and improved upon by anyone. For them, bureaucracy
Bureaucracy
A bureaucracy is an organization of non-elected officials of a governmental or organization who implement the rules, laws, and functions of their institution, and are occasionally characterized by officialism and red tape.-Weberian bureaucracy:...
was the bane of open systems and the IBM
IBM
International Business Machines Corporation or IBM is an American multinational technology and consulting corporation headquartered in Armonk, New York, United States. IBM manufactures and sells computer hardware and software, and it offers infrastructure, hosting and consulting services in areas...
culture at the time was its epitome. The worth of a hacker should only be judged by looking at his hacking, not on other criteria such as education, age, race, or position, and anything a hacker created on a computer could be considered artistic and beautiful just like anything else. The most beautiful computer code was one that was aesthetic, innovative and did not waste memory
Computer memory
In computing, memory refers to the physical devices used to store programs or data on a temporary or permanent basis for use in a computer or other digital electronic device. The term primary memory is used for the information in physical systems which are fast In computing, memory refers to the...
space. The practice of optimizing program
Computer program
A computer program is a sequence of instructions written to perform a specified task with a computer. A computer requires programs to function, typically executing the program's instructions in a central processor. The program has an executable form that the computer can use directly to execute...
code was known as “bumming.” Another belief was that computers can enhance your life, even if you are not a hacker. At the time computers were not well understood and hackers had to convince others, including their professors, of this belief.
3. Spacewar!: Many of the hackers were also fascinated by the telephone companies and their exchange systems and would often go on tours the companies offered to learn as much about them as possible. Alan Kotok, who had acquired some prestige with his skills with the TX-0 and also worked for Western Electric
Western Electric
Western Electric Company was an American electrical engineering company, the manufacturing arm of AT&T from 1881 to 1995. It was the scene of a number of technological innovations and also some seminal developments in industrial management...
(the manufacturing arm of the Bell System), would read as much as he could about the technical details of the telephone system and then explore or fingerprint the network.
In September 1961, DEC
Digital Equipment Corporation
Digital Equipment Corporation was a major American company in the computer industry and a leading vendor of computer systems, software and peripherals from the 1960s to the 1990s...
donated to MIT's RLE
Research Laboratory of Electronics at MIT
The Research Laboratory of Electronics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology was founded in 1946 as the successor to the famed MIT Radiation Laboratory of World War II....
lab the second PDP-1 that it had produced. The machine was a dream to hackers. Six of them, including Kotok, Samson, Saunders, and Wagner, spent a total of two hundred and fifty man-hours one weekend to rewrite the TX-0 compiler
Compiler
A compiler is a computer program that transforms source code written in a programming language into another computer language...
for the PDP-1 because they did not like the first choice. They were only paid five hundred dollars for their feat, but the finished product that had come of the Hacker Ethic, was its own reward. Steve “Slug” Russell
Steve Russell
Steve "Slug" Russell is a programmer and computer scientist most famous for creating Spacewar!, one of the earliest videogames, in 1961 with the fellow members of the Tech Model Railroad Club at MIT working on a DEC Digital PDP-1...
was another PDP-1 hacker that came up with a 2D
2D computer graphics
2D computer graphics is the computer-based generation of digital images—mostly from two-dimensional models and by techniques specific to them...
game called Spacewar! in which two space ships, controlled by toggle switches on the PDP-1, would fly around the screen and shoot torpedoes at each other. His program was further improved by the other hackers. Samson, for example, changed the random dots that represented the stars to look like the real constellations and he made the screen scroll as the ships moved in space. Dan Edwards, another programmer, added a sun and the effect of gravitational pull. Kotok and Saunders even created the first computer joystick out of TMRC parts to aid with the playing. The game and the compiler were readily and freely available to anyone. Eventually two programs were started to make computers usable by more than one person at a time, a concept that was called time-sharing
Time-sharing
Time-sharing is the sharing of a computing resource among many users by means of multiprogramming and multi-tasking. Its introduction in the 1960s, and emergence as the prominent model of computing in the 1970s, represents a major technological shift in the history of computing.By allowing a large...
. One was started by Jack Dennis for the PDP-1, and one was started by Professor Fernando J. Corbató
Fernando J. Corbató
Fernando José "Corby" Corbató is a prominent American computer scientist, notable as a pioneer in the development of time-sharing operating systems....
for the IBM 7090
IBM 7090
The IBM 7090 was a second-generation transistorized version of the earlier IBM 709 vacuum tube mainframe computers and was designed for "large-scale scientific and technological applications". The 7090 was the third member of the IBM 700/7000 series scientific computers. The first 7090 installation...
. MIT would eventually be paid three million dollars a year by ARPA to develop time-sharing through Project MAC headed by Robert Fano
Robert Fano
Robert Mario Fano is an Italian-American computer scientist, currently professor emeritus of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Fano is known principally for his work on information theory, inventing Shannon-Fano coding...
with the involvement of Corbató, Dennis, and Minsky who would focus on Artificial Intelligence
Artificial intelligence
Artificial intelligence is the intelligence of machines and the branch of computer science that aims to create it. AI textbooks define the field as "the study and design of intelligent agents" where an intelligent agent is a system that perceives its environment and takes actions that maximize its...
. Project MAC was housed on the ninth floor of Tech Square, and it would become a home to many hackers.
4. Greenblatt and Gosper: Ricky Greenblatt
Richard Greenblatt (programmer)
Richard D. Greenblatt is an American computer programmer. Along with Bill Gosper, he may be considered to have founded the hacker community, and holds a place of distinction in the Lisp and the MIT AI Lab communities.-Childhood:...
was a born hacker, although when asked whether a hacker is born or made, he said, “If hackers are born, then they're going to get made, and if they're made into it, they were born.” He was an intelligent child, and used to play chess and make electrical devices at an early age. When he first got into MIT he was intent on making the Dean's List
Dean's List
A Dean's List is a category of students in a college or university who achieve high grades during their stay in an academic term or academic year. In secondary schools, or high schools, the term Consistent Honor List or Honor Roll is more common, but Dean's List and Consistent Honor List are...
, but by his sophomore year he flunked out, because he was spending too much time hacking relay circuits at the TMRC and programming for the PDP-1. He even programmed a FORTRAN
Fortran
Fortran is a general-purpose, procedural, imperative programming language that is especially suited to numeric computation and scientific computing...
compiler for the PDP-1. Bill Gosper
Bill Gosper
Ralph William Gosper, Jr. , known as Bill Gosper, is an American mathematician and programmer from Pennsauken Township, New Jersey...
was a math genius. He took a programming course with John McCarthy, and Minsky's course on artificial intelligence. The hackers enjoyed Chinese food, and they would order anything that seemed interesting to their exploratory minds. Most did not have much of a social life outside of hacking, and some such as Greenblatt were notorious for their lack of personal hygiene. Gosper managed to graduate, but he had to work to pay back the tuition money that the Navy
United States Navy
The United States Navy is the naval warfare service branch of the United States Armed Forces and one of the seven uniformed services of the United States. The U.S. Navy is the largest in the world; its battle fleet tonnage is greater than that of the next 13 largest navies combined. The U.S...
had paid him. Gosper did not like the Navy culture which did not allow programmers near the computers, and he hated the UNIVAC
UNIVAC
UNIVAC is the name of a business unit and division of the Remington Rand company formed by the 1950 purchase of the Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation, founded four years earlier by ENIAC inventors J. Presper Eckert and John Mauchly, and the associated line of computers which continues to this day...
computer that they used since he considered it erroneous in its very design. He managed to work for a private company and later for Project MAC. Greenblatt decided to write a better chess program because he found Kotok's version to be lacking in strategy. The program was good enough to defeat the renowned academic Hubert Dreyfus
Hubert Dreyfus
Hubert Lederer Dreyfus is an American philosopher. He is a professor of philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley....
who had proclaimed that no chess program would be good enough to beat a ten-year-old (and, correctly, that the MIT Artificial Intelligence
Artificial intelligence
Artificial intelligence is the intelligence of machines and the branch of computer science that aims to create it. AI textbooks define the field as "the study and design of intelligent agents" where an intelligent agent is a system that perceives its environment and takes actions that maximize its...
Programme was doomed to failure due to profound theoretical fallacies). Although the hackers proved the skeptic wrong, their Hacker Ethic concluded that convincing the outside world of the merits of computers was not as interesting as hacking them.
5. The Midnight Computer Wiring Society was created by Stew Nelson, a hacker who was really interested in phone networks and computer programming. He created the MCWS because he wanted to add an instruction to the PDP-1 computer, and the lab administrators had forbidden anyone “not qualified” from messing with the computer hardware. Just like many other hackers, he believed in the Hacker Ethic, and he would use any tools and make any modifications that he believed would improve the system. The hackers would find a way to unlock any door and any safe simply because they did not believe in bureaucracy and closed systems. Nelson also wired the PDP-1 to automatically dial and route telephone calls through the use of a blue box
Blue box
An early phreaking tool, the blue box is an electronic device that simulates a telephone operator's dialing console. It functioned by replicating the tones used to switch long-distance calls and using them to route the user's own call, bypassing the normal switching mechanism...
. At the same time, he also believed that hacking should not be done for profit.
6. Winners and Losers were two classifications by hackers whereby they were the former, and the grad students were the latter because they were not capable of hacking feats and could not understand about doing "The Right Thing". Hackers were initially against time-sharing systems because they felt that a system should be used to its fullest, and this could only be done by one person at a time. The time-sharing systems at the time were slow and imposed many restrictions on its users. Greenblatt was convinced by Ed Fredkin that time-sharing systems could be more beneficial, so he set out, along with Nelson, to write a new time-sharing system called ITS, or Incompatible Time-sharing System, initially for the PDP-6
PDP-6
The PDP-6 was a computer model developed by Digital Equipment Corporation in 1963. It was influential primarily as the prototype for the later PDP-10; the instruction sets of the two machines are almost identical.The PDP-6 was DEC's first "big" machine...
, and later the PDP-10
PDP-10
The PDP-10 was a mainframe computer family manufactured by Digital Equipment Corporation from the late 1960s on; the name stands for "Programmed Data Processor model 10". The first model was delivered in 1966...
. This new system would allow many users to each run many programs at once. ITS allowed all users full access to all the files in the system, and it did not require any passwords. ITS continued to be improved by Greenblatt and the other hackers in an open fashion.
7. LIFE: Outside the ninth floor or Tech Square, life was very different. At one point it was the late 1960s and many students were protesting the war, and everything involved in the war. The AI Lab was funded by the Department of Defense so they were also the target of protests. Many hackers were also anti-war, but they did not feel that what they were doing had any direct effect on the war. When the protesters took their protest to the ninth floor itself, security was tightened and locks added. This was against the Hacker Ethic, but they felt that it had to be done in order to protect the equipment. The hacker way of life was also the target of criticism. Many felt that hackers were obsessed or even addicted to computers, and hardly had any social interactions in the real world. For some hackers the lack of sleep, malnutrition, the pressure of finishing a hack, and the entire lifestyle was too much. A hacker was even doing drugs, and later attempted suicide. He was not the only one. In this chapter, Levy explores the hacker lifestyle, and its effect on the hackers. The hacker culture though was spreading outside of MIT as computers became more common. One other center of hacker culture was Stanford's AI Lab (SAIL) which had been started by John McCarthy. At SAIL the atmosphere was more laid back. Whereas MIT's lab developed Spacewar!, SAIL developed an Adventure game
Adventure game
An adventure game is a video game in which the player assumes the role of protagonist in an interactive story driven by exploration and puzzle-solving instead of physical challenge. The genre's focus on story allows it to draw heavily from other narrative-based media such as literature and film,...
. SAIL even had a sauna
Sauna
A sauna is a small room or house designed as a place to experience dry or wet heat sessions, or an establishment with one or more of these and auxiliary facilities....
, in which some “willing young coeds” once participated in a sex orgy captured by video camera and transmitted at computer terminals for the hackers to watch. The Stanford hackers could be just as eccentric however, and they also lived by the Hacker Ethic. One hacker lived in his car parked outside the SAIL building, whereas others would sometimes sleep in the crawl space between the roof and the artificial ceiling. Some hackers moved to Stanford, whereas others stayed at MIT. The Hacker Ethic spread even further with the creation of ARPAnet
ARPANET
The Advanced Research Projects Agency Network , was the world's first operational packet switching network and the core network of a set that came to compose the global Internet...
(the precursor to the Internet
Internet
The Internet is a global system of interconnected computer networks that use the standard Internet protocol suite to serve billions of users worldwide...
) that connected several computer systems in different parts of the country in a network. LIFE
Conway's Game of Life
The Game of Life, also known simply as Life, is a cellular automaton devised by the British mathematician John Horton Conway in 1970....
was a computer simulation
Computer simulation
A computer simulation, a computer model, or a computational model is a computer program, or network of computers, that attempts to simulate an abstract model of a particular system...
written by John Horton Conway
John Horton Conway
John Horton Conway is a prolific mathematician active in the theory of finite groups, knot theory, number theory, combinatorial game theory and coding theory...
, and it became the focus of Gosper in 1970. This resulted in some arguments with Greenblatt, who was not as fascinated with LIFE, and did not think that Gosper and others should be monopolizing the machine with this simulation. Gosper was fascinated because LIFE was uncharted territory and it posed the question of what could be called real life. Funding started to dry up from ARPA after Congress
United States Congress
The United States Congress is the bicameral legislature of the federal government of the United States, consisting of the Senate and the House of Representatives. The Congress meets in the United States Capitol in Washington, D.C....
passed the Mansfield Amendment. The AI Lab could not hire any hacker who showed talent anymore. Instead, they started looking for more professors to teach computer courses. Gosper left MIT for Stanford where he would study under Donald Knuth
Donald Knuth
Donald Ervin Knuth is a computer scientist and Professor Emeritus at Stanford University.He is the author of the seminal multi-volume work The Art of Computer Programming. Knuth has been called the "father" of the analysis of algorithms...
, while still hacking on the PDP-10 at Tech Square via ARPAnet. A new generation of hackers was coming along that would spread the gospel of computers by making them smaller and more affordable.
Part Two: Hardware Hackers
8. Revolt in 2100: Lee FelsensteinLee Felsenstein
Lee Felsenstein is an American computer engineer who played a central role in the development of the personal computer...
was one of the founders of Community Memory
Community Memory
Community Memory was the first public computerized bulletin board system. Established in 1973 in Berkeley, California, it used an SDS 940 timesharing system in San Francisco connected via a 110 baud link to a teleprinter at a record store in Berkeley to let users enter and retrieve messages...
, an offshoot of Resource One based in Berkeley, California
Berkeley, California
Berkeley is a city on the east shore of the San Francisco Bay in Northern California, United States. Its neighbors to the south are the cities of Oakland and Emeryville. To the north is the city of Albany and the unincorporated community of Kensington...
that wanted to establish a communication system for people to contact each other. They made use of a computer terminal
Computer terminal
A computer terminal is an electronic or electromechanical hardware device that is used for entering data into, and displaying data from, a computer or a computing system...
connected to a XDS-940 mainframe. He was joined by Efrem Lipkin, another hacker who was wary of any project that had military involvement, in forming Community Memory. Bob Albrecht and his computer-book publishing company Dymax also brought computing to the people by teaching young students to program. He formed People's Computer Company
People's Computer Company
People's Computer Company was an organization, a newsletter and, later, a quasiperiodical called the "dragonsmoke." PCC was founded and produced by Bob Albrecht & George Firedrake in Menlo Park, California in the early 1970s.The first newsletter announced itself with the following...
, a storefront in Menlo Park
Menlo Park, California
Menlo Park, California is a city at the eastern edge of San Mateo County, in the San Francisco Bay Area of California, in the United States. It is bordered by San Francisco Bay on the north and east; East Palo Alto, Palo Alto, and Stanford to the south; Atherton, North Fair Oaks, and Redwood City...
, California, to offer computer time and classes to ordinary people. PCC spun off a series of books and a tabloid newspaper.
9. Every Man a God: While Felsenstein and Bob Marsh were trying to build their Tom Swift Terminal, a company in Albuquerque, New Mexico
Albuquerque, New Mexico
Albuquerque is the largest city in the state of New Mexico, United States. It is the county seat of Bernalillo County and is situated in the central part of the state, straddling the Rio Grande. The city population was 545,852 as of the 2010 Census and ranks as the 32nd-largest city in the U.S. As...
called MITS
Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems
Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems was an American electronics company founded in Albuquerque, New Mexico that began manufacturing electronic calculators in 1971 and personal computers in 1975. Ed Roberts and Forrest Mims founded MITS in December 1969 to produce miniaturized telemetry...
and run by Ed Roberts
Ed Roberts (computers)
Henry Edward "Ed" Roberts was an American engineer, entrepreneur and medical doctor who designed the first commercially successful personal computer in 1975. He is most often known as "the father of the personal computer"...
came out with an article in Popular Electronics
Popular Electronics
Popular Electronics was an American magazine started by Ziff-Davis Publishing in October 1954 for electronics hobbyists and experimenters. It soon became the "World's Largest-Selling Electronics Magazine". The circulation was 240,151 in April 1957 and 400,000 by 1963. Ziff-Davis published Popular...
about a computer kit that cost only $397. The Altair 8800
Altair 8800
The MITS Altair 8800 was a microcomputer design from 1975 based on the Intel 8080 CPU and sold by mail order through advertisements in Popular Electronics, Radio-Electronics and other hobbyist magazines. The designers hoped to sell only a few hundred build-it-yourself kits to hobbyists, and were...
, based on the Intel 8080
Intel 8080
The Intel 8080 was the second 8-bit microprocessor designed and manufactured by Intel and was released in April 1974. It was an extended and enhanced variant of the earlier 8008 design, although without binary compatibility...
microprocessor, only had 256 bytes of memory, but it struck a chord with so many hackers that MITS went from being close to bankruptcy to having millions of dollars worth of orders, and being unable to fulfill the orders in time. Although it was not yet a computer for the general public, the Altair brought that dream a lot closer.
10. The Homebrew Computer Club
Homebrew Computer Club
The Homebrew Computer Club was an early computer hobbyist users' group in Silicon Valley, which met from March 5, 1975 to December 1986...
was founded by Fred Moore
Fred Moore (activist)
Fred Moore was a political activist who was central to the early history of the personal computer. He was an active member of the People's Computer Company and one of the founders of the Homebrew Computer Club, urging its members to "bring back more than you take."Moore is prominently featured in...
and Gordon French as a way for electronics hobbyists and hackers to get together and exchange information and talk about their projects. The first meeting took place on March 5, 1975 in Gordon's garage in Silicon Valley
Silicon Valley
Silicon Valley is a term which refers to the southern part of the San Francisco Bay Area in Northern California in the United States. The region is home to many of the world's largest technology corporations...
. There were only 32 people in the first meeting, among them Lee Felsenstein, Bob Marsh, Bob Albrecht, Steve Dompier, Allen Baum and Stephen Wozniak
Steve Wozniak
Stephen Gary "Woz" Wozniak is an American computer engineer and programmer who founded Apple Computer, Co. with Steve Jobs and Ronald Wayne...
. Dompier wrote a program that was able to play simple musical melodies on the Altair that could be heard on a radio because of electrical interference. Some of the participants thought of making some add on boards for the 8800, and they even formed their own small companies to sell these boards. The membership of the club grew to hundreds, and members were sharing equipment and knowledge in a continuation of the Hacker Ethic developed at MIT. Many products were introduced and critiqued during club meetings, and their schematics and source code
Source code
In computer science, source code is text written using the format and syntax of the programming language that it is being written in. Such a language is specially designed to facilitate the work of computer programmers, who specify the actions to be performed by a computer mostly by writing source...
would be freely shared and improved.
11. Tiny BASIC: Altair BASIC was an interpreter
Interpreter (computing)
In computer science, an interpreter normally means a computer program that executes, i.e. performs, instructions written in a programming language...
that translated instructions from the BASIC programming language into assembly instructions that the Altair 8800 could understand. It was developed by Bill Gates
Bill Gates
William Henry "Bill" Gates III is an American business magnate, investor, philanthropist, and author. Gates is the former CEO and current chairman of Microsoft, the software company he founded with Paul Allen...
and Paul Allen
Paul Allen
Paul Gardner Allen is an American business magnate, investor, and philanthropist. Allen co-founded Microsoft with Bill Gates...
, the founders of Micro-soft
Microsoft
Microsoft Corporation is an American public multinational corporation headquartered in Redmond, Washington, USA that develops, manufactures, licenses, and supports a wide range of products and services predominantly related to computing through its various product divisions...
, specifically for the Altair 8800 and it would fit in 4K of memory. Unlike previous hackers and against the Hacker Ethic, Micro-Soft and MITS felt that people should pay for BASIC just like they paid for any add-on card. Many hackers had in fact put in orders for BASIC, but still had to wait for the order to be shipped. During a show put up by MITS, someone got hold of and copied a paper tape containing Altair BASIC. The tapes were duplicated and passed around freely before the commercial product was even shipped to customers. Gates and Allen did not appreciate this turn of events since they were actually paid commission for each copy of BASIC that MITS sold. Gates responded by writing an open letter titled “Open Letter to Hobbyists
Open Letter to Hobbyists
The Open Letter to Hobbyists was an open letter written by Bill Gates, the co-founder of Microsoft, to early personal computer hobbyists, in which Gates expresses dismay at the rampant copyright infringement taking place in the hobbyist community, particularly with regard to his company's...
” that considered the sharing of software to be theft. Tiny BASIC
Tiny BASIC
Tiny BASIC is a dialect of the BASIC programming language that can fit into as little as 2 or 3 KB of memory. This small size made it invaluable in the early days of microcomputers , when typical memory size was only 4–8 KB.- History :...
was a similar interpreter that would fit in only 2K of memory as it supported a subset of the functionality of Micro-Soft BASIC (which itself was a subset of Dartmouth BASIC
Dartmouth BASIC
Dartmouth BASIC is the original version of the BASIC programming language. It is so named because it was designed and implemented at Dartmouth College...
). It was developed by Dick Whipple and John Arnold in Tyler, Texas
Texas
Texas is the second largest U.S. state by both area and population, and the largest state by area in the contiguous United States.The name, based on the Caddo word "Tejas" meaning "friends" or "allies", was applied by the Spanish to the Caddo themselves and to the region of their settlement in...
and distributed freely in PCC magazine. Many more people sent in improvements and programs developed in Tiny BASIC to be published. This eventually led to the creation of Dr. Dobb's Journal
Dr. Dobb's Journal
Dr. Dobb's Journal was a monthly journal published in the United States by CMP Technology. It covered topics aimed at computer programmers. DDJ was the first regular periodical focused on microcomputer software, rather than hardware. It later became a monthly section within the periodical...
edited by Jim Warren that distributed free or very inexpensive software in response to Gates' claims of theft. Tom Pittman was someone else who did not take kindly to Gates' words. He wrote a version of Tiny BASIC for the Motorola 6800
Motorola 6800
The 6800 was an 8-bit microprocessor designed and first manufactured by Motorola in 1974. The MC6800 microprocessor was part of the M6800 Microcomputer System that also included serial and parallel interface ICs, RAM, ROM and other support chips...
microprocessor. Although he sold it to AMI for $3,500, he retained the rights to sell it to others and decided to charge only $5 for it. He received many orders and even money from people who had already gotten a copy and simply wanted to pay him for his efforts. Pittman also wrote the essay “Deus Ex Machina
Deus ex machina
A deus ex machina is a plot device whereby a seemingly inextricable problem is suddenly and abruptly solved with the contrived and unexpected intervention of some new event, character, ability, or object.-Linguistic considerations:...
” on the AI and hardware hackers and what tied them together. Lee Felsenstein and Bob Marsh
Processor Technology
Processor Technology Corporation was a microcomputer company founded by Bob Marsh and Gary Ingram in April 1975. Its best known product is the Sol-20 computer.-History:...
banded together to create a fully contained computer for an issue of Popular Electronics
Popular Electronics
Popular Electronics was an American magazine started by Ziff-Davis Publishing in October 1954 for electronics hobbyists and experimenters. It soon became the "World's Largest-Selling Electronics Magazine". The circulation was 240,151 in April 1957 and 400,000 by 1963. Ziff-Davis published Popular...
that they called SOL that sold for under a thousand dollars.
12. Woz or Steve Wozniak
Steve Wozniak
Stephen Gary "Woz" Wozniak is an American computer engineer and programmer who founded Apple Computer, Co. with Steve Jobs and Ronald Wayne...
was a hardware hacker since high school. Along with another friend he went to the first Homebrew meeting and was happy to have found people with similar interests in hardware and computers. He was working for Hewlett-Packard
Hewlett-Packard
Hewlett-Packard Company or HP is an American multinational information technology corporation headquartered in Palo Alto, California, USA that provides products, technologies, softwares, solutions and services to consumers, small- and medium-sized businesses and large enterprises, including...
at the time he built his own computer based on the MOS Technology 6502
MOS Technology 6502
The MOS Technology 6502 is an 8-bit microprocessor that was designed by Chuck Peddle and Bill Mensch for MOS Technology in 1975. When it was introduced, it was the least expensive full-featured microprocessor on the market by a considerable margin, costing less than one-sixth the price of...
microprocessor. He was able to build a machine with fewer chips by thinking about problems in clever and different ways. Wozniak was friends with Steve Jobs
Steve Jobs
Steven Paul Jobs was an American businessman and inventor widely recognized as a charismatic pioneer of the personal computer revolution. He was co-founder, chairman, and chief executive officer of Apple Inc...
, who worked for Atari
Atari
Atari is a corporate and brand name owned by several entities since its inception in 1972. It is currently owned by Atari Interactive, a wholly owned subsidiary of the French publisher Atari, SA . The original Atari, Inc. was founded in 1972 by Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney. It was a pioneer in...
at the time. Jobs was interested in the computer Wozniak had built and thought they should make more of these machines and sell them. Wozniak had to ask HP for permission because he worked for them, but they did so because they did not believe that it was marketable. They decided to call their company Apple
Apple Computer
Apple Inc. is an American multinational corporation that designs and markets consumer electronics, computer software, and personal computers. The company's best-known hardware products include the Macintosh line of computers, the iPod, the iPhone and the iPad...
and sell their machines for $666.66. Their software and diagrams were available to others for free or for a minimal cost. They soon followed their first computer with the Apple II
Apple II
The Apple II is an 8-bit home computer, one of the first highly successful mass-produced microcomputer products, designed primarily by Steve Wozniak, manufactured by Apple Computer and introduced in 1977...
that would spark a revolution in the computer industry. They built their company out of their garages with Steve Jobs taking care of managing the company, while Steve Wozniak hacked at the hardware. At the Homebrew club their machine was hailed by some, while others felt that the Sol machine was more adequate since it used more “standard” parts and software.
13. Secrets: The West Coast Computer Faire
West Coast Computer Faire
The West Coast Computer Faire was an annual computer industry conference and exposition most often associated with San Francisco, its first and most frequent venue. The first fair was held in 1977 and was organized by Jim Warren and Bob Reiling. At the time it was the biggest computer show in the...
, organized by Jim Warren and Bob Reiling in 1977, was amongst the first signs that a new industry was about to take off and that it would take computers into the houses of ordinary people. Machines like the Commodore PET
Commodore PET
The Commodore PET was a home/personal computer produced from 1977 by Commodore International...
and the Radio Shack
Radio shack
Radio shack is a slang term for a room or structure for housing radio equipment.-History:In the early days of radio, equipment was experimental and home-built. The first radio transmitters used a noisy spark to generate radio waves and were often housed in a garage or shed. When radio was first...
TRS-80
TRS-80
TRS-80 was Tandy Corporation's desktop microcomputer model line, sold through Tandy's Radio Shack stores in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The first units, ordered unseen, were delivered in November 1977, and rolled out to the stores the third week of December. The line won popularity with...
came into the market and sold in big numbers. The Hacker Ethic fell to the wayside as companies started to keep their hardware and software specifications secret because of the competition. The Homebrew members started to dwindle as many hackers had either formed their own companies or had become employed and could not divulge what they knew anymore. Others were too busy to even attend the meetings. It signaled a shift in the hacker culture.
Part Three: Game Hackers
14. The Wizard and the Princess: KenKen Williams (gaming)
Ken Williams is an American game programmer and co-founded On-Line Systems, which later became Sierra On-Line, together with his wife Roberta Williams. Roberta and Ken married at the age of 19 and have two children...
and Roberta Williams
Roberta Williams
Roberta Williams is an American video game designer. She is most famous for her pioneering work in graphical adventure games, particularly the King's Quest series.-Career:...
were the founders of Sierra On-Line, one of the first computer gaming companies, and among a new generation of hackers. Ken learned programming on his own while doing work for different companies on mainframes. Ken got Roberta hooked to computers when he showed her the Adventure
Colossal Cave Adventure
Colossal Cave Adventure gave its name to the computer adventure game genre . It was originally designed by Will Crowther, a programmer and caving enthusiast who based the layout on part of the Mammoth Cave system in Kentucky...
game written by Don Woods. Ken was not as interested in the game as Roberta who immersed herself in it even though she was the mother of two small children at the time. Ken's younger brother had bought an Apple II, and soon afterwards Ken bought one as well. He decided to write a FORTRAN compiler and hired five other programmers to help him with it. Meanwhile Roberta devised a game of her own based on Adventure which they called Mystery House
Mystery House
Mystery House is an adventure computer game released in 1980 by Roberta and Ken Williams for the Apple II. The game is remembered as one of the first adventure games to feature computer graphics and the first game produced by On-Line Systems, the company which would evolve into Sierra On-Line...
. Ken scrapped the compiler project and instead wrote the code for the game. They talked to Programma, the biggest distributor of Apple software, and they were offered 25% in royalty, which could have netted them more than $9,000. Instead they decided they wanted all the profits and sold the game independently. They started making tens of thousands of dollars each month just from their games, while Ken was still working for a company and making $42,000 a year. Ken quit his job and they moved to the woods in Oakhurst, California
Oakhurst, California
Oakhurst is a census-designated place in Madera County, California, south of the entrance to Yosemite National Park, in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountain range. Oakhurst is located on the Fresno River south-southwest of Yosemite Forks, at an elevation of 2274 feet...
to live out their dream life. Their second game, Wizard and the Princess
Wizard and the Princess
Wizard and the Princess, also known as Adventure in Serenia, is a 1980 computer game by On-Line Systems for the Apple II and Apple II Plus. It is the second title released in On-Line Systems' "Hi-Res Adventure" series after Mystery House...
made them even more money and that was only the beginning of a new genre of commercial software, games.
15. Brotherhood: Computers began to be bought by people who had no wish to program them, but rather bought their software at computer stores. Games were the hot item when it came to software. Among the game companies of the time were On-Line, Brøderbund
Brøderbund
Brøderbund Software, Inc. was an American maker of computer games, educational software and The Print Shop productivity tools. It was best known as the original creator and publisher of the popular Carmen Sandiego games. The company was founded in Eugene, Oregon, but moved to San Rafael,...
(the Brotherhood), and Sirius Software
Sirius Software
Sirius Software was a video game publisher of Apple II, Commodore 64 and Atari computer games in the early 1980s.- Founding and early history :The company was founded in the early 1980s by Jerry Jewell and Nasir Gebelli...
. Some of these companies formed a sort of brotherhood of their own by communicating and cooperating with each other.
16. The Third Generation consisted of hackers who had much more access to computers than the former hardware hackers. Personal computers were becoming popular to the point where high school kids could afford them. Among this new generation was John Harris (software developer)
John Harris (software developer)
John D. Harris is a well-known computer programmer, hacker, and author of some classical 1980s Atari computer games.A lot of work carried out early in John's career is considered as groundbreaking in the industry...
, an Atari
Atari
Atari is a corporate and brand name owned by several entities since its inception in 1972. It is currently owned by Atari Interactive, a wholly owned subsidiary of the French publisher Atari, SA . The original Atari, Inc. was founded in 1972 by Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney. It was a pioneer in...
assembly hacker, who later produced games for On-Line.
17. Summer Camp was the nickname for On-Line's headquarters. The staff partied and had fun whenever they were not working. The atmosphere was very casual and free-spirited, but it could not last as the company was growing.
18. Frogger: John Harris decided to port the arcade
Arcade game
An arcade game is a coin-operated entertainment machine, usually installed in public businesses such as restaurants, bars, and amusement arcades. Most arcade games are video games, pinball machines, electro-mechanical games, redemption games, and merchandisers...
classic to the Atari 800 computer for On-Line systems. He spent a lot of time and energy perfecting the game, but his disks were stolen before he even finished the game at a trade show. He was devastated as he had also lost his entire software library. His relationship with Ken Williams suffered as John was unable to return to programming for two months. He eventually remade Frogger and the game was a big success for On-Line, but the atmosphere had changed. Ken no longer believed that business could go along with hackers and their ethic, instead it had to become more professional. He realized that he needed some professional management to handle On-Line which had grown beyond his control. Ken decided on Dick Sunderland, his former boss who had told him that he had “no management potential,” for On-Line's president. However, Ken could not remove himself from the company matters. Although he knew that he had to let a non-hacker run the company, he could not get away from the fun and excitement.
19. Applefest: The Third Generation was not as interested in the Hacker Ethic, instead sales figures started to matter a lot more, and many software companies started using copy protection
Copy protection
Copy protection, also known as content protection, copy obstruction, copy prevention and copy restriction, refer to techniques used for preventing the reproduction of software, films, music, and other media, usually for copyright reasons.- Terminology :Media corporations have always used the term...
mechanisms to prevent their software from being used without permission. Hackers saw these mechanisms as just another form of locks to be picked in order to liberate the software (see also Software cracking
Software cracking
Software cracking is the modification of software to remove or disable features which are considered undesirable by the person cracking the software, usually related to protection methods: copy protection, trial/demo version, serial number, hardware key, date checks, CD check or software annoyances...
). Mark Duchaineau was a hacker who came up with a protection scheme called Spiradisk for the Apple computer. This scheme actually made the software loading process faster by loading data in spirals instead of in concentric circles. He started working for On-Line, which actually wanted him to use more conventional protection schemes. Mark basically held On-Line hostage by insisting on implementing copy protection on their big release, Ultima II
Ultima II
Ultima II: The Revenge of the Enchantress, released on August 24, 1982 , is the second computer role-playing game in the Ultima series.It was also the only official Ultima game published by Sierra On-Line...
, with his Spiradisk scheme rather than conventional ones. The game could not be released without copy protection for fear of unauthorized copying
Copyright infringement of software
Copyright infringement of software=The copyright infringement of software refers to several practices which involve the unauthorized copying of computer software. Copyright infringement of this kind varies globally...
. The 1982, San Francisco Applefest
Applefest
Applefest is a yearly village-wide food, entertainment and crafts fair, taking place in several towns in Canada, the United States and England.-Brighton, Ontario:...
was among the last important Applefests, and it signaled a shift in company attitudes. From the days of the Brotherhood, to the new, more business oriented, competitive atmosphere.
20. Wizard vs. Wizards was a televised contest devised by Tom Tatum and held in Las Vegas
Las Vegas, Nevada
Las Vegas is the most populous city in the U.S. state of Nevada and is also the county seat of Clark County, Nevada. Las Vegas is an internationally renowned major resort city for gambling, shopping, and fine dining. The city bills itself as The Entertainment Capital of the World, and is famous...
, where game authors would compete by playing each other's games.
Epilogue: The Last of the True Hackers
Richard StallmanRichard Stallman
Richard Matthew Stallman , often shortened to rms,"'Richard Stallman' is just my mundane name; you can call me 'rms'"|last= Stallman|first= Richard|date= N.D.|work=Richard Stallman's homepage...
, also known as RMS as per his initials, was called by Levy the "last of the true hackers". This did not mean "last real hacker", but rather the last faithful member of the class of hackers
that Levy called the "true hackers". Stallman was getting a physics degree from Harvard at the same time as he was hacking at MIT's Tech Square building. He was for people cooperating instead of competing, and he did not like computers that restricted user access to computers through passwords. He advocated choosing the empty password so anyone could use the computers. RMS also wrote the text editor EMACS
Emacs
Emacs is a class of text editors, usually characterized by their extensibility. GNU Emacs has over 1,000 commands. It also allows the user to combine these commands into macros to automate work.Development began in the mid-1970s and continues actively...
and shared it on the condition that those who modify its source code
Source code
In computer science, source code is text written using the format and syntax of the programming language that it is being written in. Such a language is specially designed to facilitate the work of computer programmers, who specify the actions to be performed by a computer mostly by writing source...
also share their modifications.
While RMS was fighting to keep the Hacker Ethic going with the computers at MIT, Richard Greenblatt and other AI hackers came up with a LISP machine and sought to form a company to sell them. Greenblatt was unwilling to yield to business pressures and wanted to form a company that would maintain the Hacker Ethic. Many others disagreed and the result was two competing companies. LISP Machine Incorporated, or LMI, was headed by Greenblatt, and Symbolics
Symbolics
Symbolics refers to two companies: now-defunct computer manufacturer Symbolics, Inc., and a privately held company that acquired the assets of the former company and continues to sell and maintain the Open Genera Lisp system and the Macsyma computer algebra system.The symbolics.com domain was...
was headed by Russ Noftsker. Symbolics hired most of the lab hackers, and a schism was created between the two groups of hackers, to the point where some would not even talk to each other.
Stallman saw a whole hacker culture die as the existing hackers left for these companies and there were no new hackers to fill their shoes. RMS held Symbolics responsible for the lab's death, and set out to help their competitor LMI in response. RMS subsequently launched development of the GNU
GNU
GNU is a Unix-like computer operating system developed by the GNU project, ultimately aiming to be a "complete Unix-compatible software system"...
operating system
Operating system
An operating system is a set of programs that manage computer hardware resources and provide common services for application software. The operating system is the most important type of system software in a computer system...
, based on the UNIX
Unix
Unix is a multitasking, multi-user computer operating system originally developed in 1969 by a group of AT&T employees at Bell Labs, including Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, Brian Kernighan, Douglas McIlroy, and Joe Ossanna...
design but following the principles of free software
Free software
Free software, software libre or libre software is software that can be used, studied, and modified without restriction, and which can be copied and redistributed in modified or unmodified form either without restriction, or with restrictions that only ensure that further recipients can also do...
. Although the Hacker Ethic was not as pure as in the beginning, it was being spread along the World with the advent of the personal computer, and later of the Internet.
See also
- Hacker (programmer subculture)
- Hacker EthicHacker ethicHacker ethic is the generic phrase which describes the moral values and philosophy that are standard in the hacker community. The early hacker culture and resulting philosophy originated at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the 1950s and 1960s...
- Open SourceOpen sourceThe term open source describes practices in production and development that promote access to the end product's source materials. Some consider open source a philosophy, others consider it a pragmatic methodology...
- Free as in Freedom (book about Richard M. Stallman)
- Hackers & PaintersHackers & PaintersHackers & Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age is a collection of essays from Paul Graham discussing hacking, programming languages, start-up companies, and many other technological issues....
(book written by Paul Graham) - The Cathedral and the BazaarThe Cathedral and the BazaarThe Cathedral and the Bazaar is an essay by Eric S. Raymond on software engineering methods, based on his observations of the Linux kernel development process and his experiences managing an open source project, fetchmail. It examines the struggle between top-down and bottom-up design...
(book written by Eric S. RaymondEric S. RaymondEric Steven Raymond , often referred to as ESR, is an American computer programmer, author and open source software advocate. After the 1997 publication of The Cathedral and the Bazaar, Raymond was for a number of years frequently quoted as an unofficial spokesman for the open source movement...
) - The Hackers ConferenceThe Hackers ConferenceThe Hackers Conference is an annual invitation-only gathering of designers, engineers and programmers to discuss the latest developments and innovations in the computer industry....
External links
- Read Chapters 1 and 2 from Project GutenbergProject GutenbergProject Gutenberg is a volunteer effort to digitize and archive cultural works, to "encourage the creation and distribution of eBooks". Founded in 1971 by Michael S. Hart, it is the oldest digital library. Most of the items in its collection are the full texts of public domain books...
. - Hackers page on Steven Levy's website.
- Hacker Spaces