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- Steven Levy
This 25th anniversary edition of Steven Levy's classic book traces the exploits of the computer revolution's original hackers -- those brilliant and eccentric nerds from the late 1950s through the early '80s who took risks, bent the rules, and pushed the world in a radical new direction. With updated material from noteworthy hackers such as Bill Gates, Mark Zukerberg, Richard Stallman, and Steve Wozniak, Hackers is a fascinating story that begins in early computer research labs and leads to the first home computers. Levy profiles the imaginative brainiacs who found clever and unorthodox solutions to computer engineering problems. They had a shared sense of values, known as "the hacker ethic," that still thrives today. Hackers captures a seminal period in recent history when underground activities blazed a trail for today's digital world, from MIT students finagling access to clunky computer-card machines to the DIY culture that spawned the Altair and the Apple II. Amazon.com Exclusive: The Rant Heard Round the World By Steven Levy Author Steven Levy When I began researching Hackers--so many years ago that its scary--I thought Id largely be chronicling the foibles of a sociologically weird cohort who escaped normal human interaction by retreating to the sterile confines of computers labs. Instead, I discovered a fascinating, funny cohort who wound up transforming human interaction, spreading a culture that affects our views about everything from politics to entertainment to business. The stories of those amazing people and what they did is the backbone of Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution. But when I revisited the book recently to prepare the 25th Anniversary Edition of my first book, it was clear that I had luckily stumbled on the origin of a computer (and Internet) related controversy that still permeates the digital discussion. Throughout the book I write about something I called The Hacker Ethic, my interpretation of several principles implicitly shared by true hackers, no matter whether they were among the early pioneers from MITs Tech Model Railroad Club (the Mesopotamia of hacker culture), the hardware hackers of Silicon Valleys Homebrew Computer Club (who invented the PC industry), or the slick kid programmers of commercial game software. One of those principles was Information Should Be Free. This wasnt a justification of stealing, but an expression of the yearning to know more so one could hack more. The programs that early MIT hackers wrote for big computers were stored on paper tapes. The hackers would keep the tapes in a drawer by the computer so anyone could run the program, change it, and then cut a new tape for the next person to improve. The idea of ownership was alien. This idea came under stress with the advent of personal computers. The Homebrew Club was made of fanatic engineers, along with a few social activists who were thrilled at the democratic possibilities of PCs. The first home computer they could get their hands on was 1975s Altair, which came in a kit that required a fairly hairy assembly process. (Its inventor was Ed Roberts, an underappreciated pioneer who died earlier this year.) No software came with it. So it was a big deal when 19-year-old Harvard undergrad Bill Gates and his partner Paul Allen wrote a BASIC computer language for it. The Homebrew people were delighted with Altair BASIC, but unhappy that Gates and Allen charged real money for it. Some Homebrew people felt that their need for it outweighed their ability to pay. And after one of them got hold of a borrowed tape with the program, he showed up at a meeting with a box of copies (because it is so easy to make perfect copies in the digital age), and proceeded to distribute them to anyone who wanted one, gratis. This didnt sit well with Bill Gates, who wrote what was to become a famous Letter to Hobbyists, basically accusing them of stealing his property. It was the computer-age equivalent to Luther posting the Ninety-Five Theses on the Castle Church. Gates complaints would reverberate well into the Internet age, and variations on the controversy persist. Years later, when another undergrad named Shawn Fanning wrote a program called Napster that kicked off massive piracy of song files over the Internet, we saw a bloodier replay of the flap. Today, issues of cost, copying and control still rage--note Viacoms continuing lawsuit against YouTube and Google. And in my own businessjournalism--availability of free news is threatening more traditional, expensive new-gathering. Related issues that also spring from controversies in Hackers are debates over the walled gardens of Facebook and Apples iPad. I ended the original Hackers with a portrait of Richard Stallman, an MIT hacker dedicated to the principle of free software. I recently revisited him while gathering new material for the 25th Anniversary Edition of Hackers, he was more hard core than ever. He even eschewed the Open Source movement for being insufficiently noncommercial. When I spoke to Gates for the update, I asked him about his 1976 letter and the subsequent intellectual property wars. Dont call it war, he said. Thank God we have an incentive system. Striking the right balance of how this should work, you know, there's going to be tons of exploration. Then he applied the controversy to my own situation as a journalism. Things are in a crazy way for music and movies and books, he said. Maybe magazine writers will still get paid 20 years from now. Who knows? Maybe you'll have to cut hair during the day and just write articles at night. So Amazon.com readers, its up to you. Those who have not read Hackers,, have fun and be amazed at the tales of those who changed the world and had a hell of time doing it. Those who have previously read and loved Hackers, replace your beat-up copies, or the ones you loaned out and never got back, with this beautiful 25th Anniversary Edition from OReilly with new material about my subsequent visits with Gates, Stallman, and younger hacker figures like Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook. If you dont I may have to buy a scissors--and the next bad haircut could be yours! Read Bill Gates' letter to hobbyists
Cited By
Chan T, McMurray J, Levy A, Sveistrup H and Wallace J Post-Hackathon Learning Circles: Supporting Lean Startup Development Extended Abstracts of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, (1-8)- Annett M, Grossman T, Wigdor D and Fitzmaurice G (2019). Exploring and Understanding the Role of Workshop Environments in Personal Fabrication Processes, ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction, 26:2, (1-43), Online publication date: 28-Apr-2019.
- Rowan R (2018). Review of "Exploratory Programming for the Arts and Humanities," by Montfort, N. (2016). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press., Communication Design Quarterly, 5:3, (78-82), Online publication date: 16-Feb-2018.
- Goddard W and Cercos R Playful Hacking within Research-through-Design Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Australian Special Interest Group for Computer Human Interaction, (333-337)
- de Lange M, Verhoeff N, de Waal M, Foth M and Brynskov M Digital cities 9 workshop - hackable cities Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Communities and Technologies, (165-167)
Index Terms
- Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution - 25th Anniversary Edition
Reviews
Anthony L. Clapes
This book was first published in 1984. An edition containing an afterword appeared in 1984, and the reviewed (2010) edition ends with quotes from Gates, Wozniak, Zuckerberg, and Stallman. It is a paean to a time past and to a cast of characters who lived in that time, and who the author, Steven Levy, senior writer for Wired magazine, singled out for attention as being important to the development of the computer industry in that time. At around 500 pages, with roughly ten words per line and 35 lines per page, the book asks much of the reader, and offers in return a broad, though not terribly deep, entree into critical aspects of the lives of these people, their travails, and their achievements. The book covers the period from the late 1950s to the early 1980s. The characters in question are predominantly young men, mostly antisocial or otherwise ill at ease in dominant society (at least as described by the author). Some of them tended to pay little or no attention to personal hygiene, "proper" behavior, property rights, the law, academic rules and regulations, or women. Most of them, however, possessed highly logic-based thought patterns. The genus into which we would place them in modern terminology is that of "geek," and the species of geek that they occupy is "nerd" (due to their disinterest in acculturating into dominant society). Within that species, they would reside in the subspecies "computer hacker," and in some cases also "phone hacker," for classification purposes. These young people, some of whom were barely in their teens, gravitated to centers of computer competency on opposite coasts of the US: MIT and Stanford. Some of them were students, and some just hangers-on, allowed to work on their own programming projects and to engage in minor mischief. One of the more interesting sociological aspects of the book is the difference between the ethos of the MIT hackers of the 1960s, who seem to have viewed hacking (an invented synonym for "coding" or "programming") as an end in itself, and the Silicon Valley youngsters, who came to the fore in the late 1970s and the early 1980s, who saw hacking as a means to an end: a way to get rich quick. Through the stories of the hackers, we watch the computer industry move through the massive transition from punch-card input to the use of input devices allowing for direct communication between human and machine, and from mainframes sequestered in their climate-controlled environments to minicomputers, to personal computers on desktops, in homes, and in libraries. We witness the clumsy birth of the personal computer. We watch the hackers grow up and grow old, a few reaching dot-com heights of wealth on the way, and others falling by the wayside. In most tales based on following individuals' lives during periods of societal change, an evil typically lurks in the background. In this book, the enemy is IBM. Levy goes out of his way, briefly but repeatedly, to criticize "evil IBM," IBM's employees, employees of IBM's customers who tended to the IBM computers that their employers had bought, and large computers in general. Those references are just salvos fired for effect to separate the "good guy" hackers (some of whom were no angels themselves) from the "bad guys" (IBM and other suppliers of mainframes). It seemed to me, though, that the nature of the supposed evil done by mainframers, whatever the author thought it to have been, should either have been fleshed out or omitted. Full disclosure and a detour: During much of the era covered by this book, I was a lawyer for IBM. In connection with one legal matter, the IBM "hackers" taught me how to code in machine language. It was a skill that was difficult to apply, and easy to forget. Levy's hackers tended to code in assembly language or higher-level languages. In this book, Levy announces a concept that is supposedly central to the hacker way of life: the "Hacker Ethic" (H.E.). The H.E. is a somewhat slippery concept that I wasn't able to grasp very firmly. One of its principles is that "information wants to be free," which, at its limit, would allow anyone anywhere to take from anyone any information he or she wanted to have. Outside of libraries, phone directories, and the Free Software Foundation, I am hard pressed to come up with a large-scale proof of that tenet. Certainly, the hackers introduced in Levy's book did not adhere strictly to it. Our economy operates principally on the opposite premise: that information of value belongs to its creator. Because of my extended immersion in the computer industry, I found the substance of this book (except for the ever-shifting Hacker Ethic) easy to follow and pleasant to read, despite Levy's delivery, which is a bit precious for my taste. Your results may vary. Online Computing Reviews Service
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