"I think that hackers dedicated, innovative, irreverent computer programmers are the most interesting and effective body of intellectuals since the framers of the U.S. Constitution... No other group that I know of has set out to liberate a technology and succeeded. They not only did so against the active disinterest of corporate America, their success forced corporate America to adopt their style in the end. In reorganizing the Information Age around the individual, via personal computers, the hackers may well have saved the American economy... The quietest of all the '60s sub-subcultures has emerged as the most innovative and powerful..."
Stewart Brand
Founder, Whole Earth Catalog
IN November 1984, on the damp, windswept headlands north of San Francisco, one hundred fifty canonical programmers and techno-ninjas gathered for the first Hacker Conference. Originally conceived by Whole Earth Catalog founder Stewart Brand, this event transformed an abandoned Army camp into temporary world headquarters for the Hacker Ethic. Not at all coincidentally, the event dovetailed with the publication of this book, and a good number of the characters in its pages turned up, in many cases to meet for the first time. First-generation MIT hackers like Richard Greenblatt hung out with Homebrew luminaries like Lee Felsenstein and Stephen Wozniak and game czars Ken Williams, Jerry Jewell, and Doug Carlston. The brash wizards of the new Macintosh computer met up with people who hacked Spacewar. Everybody slept in bunk beds, washed dishes and bussed tables, and slept minimally. For a few hours the electricity went out, and people gabbed by lantern light. When the power was restored, the rush to the computer room where one could show off his hacks was something probably not seen in this country since the last buffalo stampede.
I remember thinking, "These be the real hackers." I was in a state of high anxiety, perched among one hundred fifty potential nit-picking critics who had been issued copies of my first book. Those included in the text immediately found their names in the index and proceeded to vet passages for accuracy and technological correctness. Those not in the index sulked, and to this day whenever they encounter me, in person or in the ether of cyberspace, they complain. Ultimately, the experience was exhilarating. The Hacker Conference, which would become an annual event, turned out to be the kickoff for a spirited and public debate, continued to this day, about the future of hacking and the Hacker Ethic as defined in this book.
The term "hacker" has always been bedeviled by discussion. When I was writing this book, the term was still fairly obscure. In fact, some months before publication, my editor told me that people in Double-day's sales force requested a title change "Who knows what a hacker is?" they asked. Fortunately, we stuck with the original, and by the mid-eighties the term had become rooted in the vernacular.
Unfortunately for many true hackers, however, the popularization of the term was a disaster. Why? The word hacker had acquired a specific and negative connotation. The trouble began with some well-publicized arrests of teenagers who electronically ventured into forbidden digital grounds, like government computer systems. It was understandable that the journalists covering these stories would refer to the young perps as hackers after all, that's what the kids called themselves. But the word quickly became synonymous with "digital trespasser."
In the pages of national magazines, in television dramas and movies, in novels both pulp and prestige, a stereotype emerged: the hacker, an antisocial geek whose identifying attribute is the ability to sit in front of a keyboard and conjure up a criminal kind of magic. In these depictions, anything connected to a machine of any sort, from a nuclear missile to a garage door, is easily controlled by the hacker's bony fingers, tapping away on the keyboard of a cheap PC or a workstation. According to this definition a hacker is at best benign, an innocent who doesn't realize his tme powers. At worst, he is a terrorist. In the past few years, with the emergence of computer viruses, the hacker has been literally transformed into a virulent force.
True, some of the most righteous hackers in history have been known to sneer at details such as property rights or the legal code in order to pursue the Hands-On Imperative. And pranks have always been part of hacking. But the inference that such high jinks were the essence of hacking was not just wrong, it was offensive to true hackers, whose work had changed the world, and whose methods could change the way one viewed the world. To read of talentless junior high school students logging on to computer bulletin boards, downloading system passwords or credit bureau codes, and using them to promote digital mayhem and have the media call them hackers... well, it was just too much for people who considered themselves the real thing. They went apoplectic. The hacker community still seethes at the public burning it received in 1988 at Hacker Conference 5.0, when a reporting crew from CBS News showed up ostensibly to do a story on the glory of canonical hackers but instead ran a piece loaded with security specialists warning of the Hacker Menace. To this day, I think that Dan Rather would be well advised to avoid attending future Hacker Conferences.
But in the past few years, I think the tide has turned. More and more people have learned about the spirit of true hacking as described in these pages. Not only are the technically literate aware of hacker ideas and ideals, but they appreciate them and realize, as Brand implied, that they are something to nurture.
Several things have contributed to this transformation. First was the computer revolution itself. As the number of people using computers grew from hundreds of thousands to hundreds of millions, the protean magic of the machine spread its implicit message, and those inclined to explore its powers, naturally sought out their antecedents.
Second was the Net. Millions of people are linked together on computer networks, with the bulk of serious hackers joining the ten million people on the confederation called the Internet. It's a pipeline connecting people to each other, facilitating collaborative projects. And it's also a hotbed of conferencing and conversation, a surprising amount of it dealing with issues arising from the Hacker Ethic and its conflicts with finances and the Real World.
Finally, true hackers became cool. Under the rubric of "cyberpunk," a term appropriated from the futuristic noir novels of smart new science fiction writers like William Gibson, Bruce Sterling, and Rudy Rucker, a new cultural movement emerged in the early 1990s. When the flagship publication of the movement, Mondo 2000 (a name change from Reality Hackers) began to elucidate cyberpunk principles, it turned out that the majority of them originated in the Hacker Ethic. The implicit beliefs of MIT's Tech Model Railroad Club (Information Should Be Free, Access to Computers Should Be Unlimited and Total, Mistrust Authority...) have been shuffled to the top of the stack.
By the time cyberpunk hit the Zeitgeist, the media was ready to embrace a broader, more positive view of hacking. There were entire publications whose point of view ran parallel to hacker principles: Mondo 2000, and Wired, and loads of fanzines with names like Intertek and Doing Boing. There was an active computer trade press written by journalists who knew that their industry owed its existence to hackers. Even more significant, the concepts of hackerism were embraced by journalists at the same traditional publications whose cluelessness had tainted hackerism to begin with.
Once people understood what motivated hackers, it was possible to use those ideas as a measure to examine the values of Silicon Valley. At Apple Computer in particular the hacker ideals were considered crucial to the company's well-being ... its very soul. Even more straitlaced companies came to realize that if they were to lead in their fields, the energy, vision, and problem-solving perseverance of hackers were required. In turn, it would be required of the companies to loosen their rules, to accommodate the freewheeling hacker style.
Best of all, these ideas began to flow beyond the computer industry and into the culture at large. As I learned while writing Hackers, the ideals of my subject could apply to almost any activity one pursued with passion. Burrell Smith, the designer of the Macintosh computer, said it as well as anyone in one of the sessions at the first Hacker Conference:
"Hackers can do almost anything and be a hacker. You can be a hacker carpenter. It's not necessarily high tech. I think it has to do with craftsmanship and caring about what you're doing."
Finally, an update of a few principal characters in Hackers, a decade later.
Bill Gosper is a consultant living in Silicon Valley. He still hacks, pursuing the secrets of mathematics, fractals, and the game of Life, while making a living as a consultant. He is also still a bachelor, explaining to an interviewer in the book More Mathematical People that having children, or even a mate, would be problematic in that "no matter how conscious an effort I made to give kids the attention that they deserve, they would sense the computer was winning out."
Richard Greenblatt's Lisp Machines company got swallowed in the corporate maw. After working as a consultant, he now runs his own small company, devoted to making medical devices that combine voice information and data over telephone lines. He thinks a lot about the future of hacking, and mes the day when commercialization overwhelmed the kind of projects routinely undertaken (with government funding) at MIT in the golden days. But, he says, "the good news is that the cost of this stuff is falling so rapidly that it's possible to do things as a quote-unquote hobby It's possible to do serious work on your own."
Unlike some of his fellow personal computer pioneers from the Homebrew era. Lee Felsenstein never became wealthy. Though he enjoyed fame within the techno-culture, his own enterprises, conducted through his struggling Golemics company, remained marginal. Recently, however, he landed a dream job as a leading engineer at Interval, a well-funded new Silicon Valley company devoted to concocting the next generation of technical wizardry. As he approaches fifty, Lee's personal life is more settled he's had several serious relationships and is currently living with a woman he met through the Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link computer network. He remains passionately committed to social change through computers. He has long been circulating the idea of forming a sort of digital Boy Scouts (though not gender specific) called the Hacker's League. And he still believes that Community Memory, once it gets on the network, will have an impact on the world.
Ken Williams is still chairman of Sierra On-Line. The company has had its highs and lows, but like its successful competitor Broderbund and unlike the defunct Sirius, it is bigger than ever, employing around 700 people at its Oakhurst headquarters. Sierra went public in 1992; Ken's holdings make him many times a millionaire. Sierra also has invested millions of dollars in an interactive computer-game-playing network; AT&T has purchased twenty percent of the venture. Roberta Williams is Sierra's most popular game designer, acclaimed for her King's Quest series of 3-D graphic adventure games.
Ken Williams thinks that there's little room for the old hacker spirit at Sierra. "In the early days, one person, John Harris, could do a project," Ken says. "Now, our games have fifty or more names in the credit. We don't do any products without at least a million development budget. In King's Quest VI, there is a seven-hundred-page script, read by over fifty professional actors. It was the single largest voice-recording project ever done in Hollywood."
Ken Williams tells me that John Hams still lives in the Oakhurst area, operating a small business selling software to generate display screens for cable television operators. According to Williams, John Harris is still writing his software for the long discontinued Atari 800 computer.
As one might expect of the last true hacker, Richard Stallman has most emphatically remained true to the ideals of the MIT Artificial Intelligence lab. His company, the Free Software Foundation, is, according to Wired, "the world's only charitable organization with the mission of developing free software." Stallman has also been an instrumental force in the League for Software Freedom, a group reflecting his belief that proprietary software is a pox upon the digital landscape. In 1991, his efforts came to the attention of those in charge of parceling out the coveted McArthur Fellowship "genius grants." The last time I saw him, Stallman was organizing a demonstration against the Lotus Development Corporation. His protest regarded their software patents. He believed, and still does, that information should be free.
Steven Levy August 1993