Hackers Heroes of the Computer Revolution

By Phil Dinovo

The Hacker Ethic The Hacker Ethic was a sort of unspoken, unwritten code that Levy

describes his “true hackers” as following. The outline of the ethic according to Levy is as follows: 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. The two above are very much like the Open Source initiative which exists today.

Mistrust authority – Promote Decentralization. Hackers viewed any kind of bureaucracy as a “flawed system”.

Hackers should be judged by their hacking, not bogus criteria such as degrees, age, race, or position. Ex. A 12 year-old named Peter Deutsch was accepted by hackers who worked with the TX-0, but

not by ordinary graduate students. You can create art and beauty on a computer.

Art and beauty refers to the “elegance” of the code. The most “beautiful” code was that which was the most aesthetic, efficient, and used the least amount of space on the computer.

Computers can change your life for the better. From the text: “Like Aladdin’s lamp, you could get it to do your bidding.” Non-hackers did not

alwaysbuy into this belief. Bob Wagner for example designed a calculator program to run on the TX-0which he used for homework and subsequently received a 0 grade from his professor.

The True Hacker: Levy describes the “True Hacker” as hackers who followed or even helped established

the Hacker Ethic. Below are two significant examples of his “True Hackers”. Peter Samson is a main figure in the first section of the book. Starting school at MIT in 1958, he

quickly found and joined the Tech Model Railroad Club in the first week of school. In the first three days, he put 40 hours of work into helping the club. Some of his notable achievements as a member of the TMRC include: Designing the graphical interface for Spacewar!, one of the first ever 2D Computer Games.

Named the interface “Expensive Planetarium’ in reference to the ludicrous cost of the PDP-1.

Wrote the first FORTRAN programming language compiler for the PDP-6, which he helped create. Also created FORTRAN II, which introduced support for several new statements.

Wrote the TMRC dictionary. First Edition Richard Greenblatt joined the TMRC and MIT when Peter and the earlier participants were just

graduating. He there discovered Peter’s FORTRAN code which modeled the Railroad for the TX-0, and felt it needed to be rewritten for the PDP-1. In fact, he spent so much time on the PDP-1 that he failed out of MIT during his sophomore year. His achievements include: Writing MacHack, a program which defeated a human opponent (and skeptic of the

program) named Hubert Dreyfus. Co-Wrote the Incompatible Timesharing System, one of the first implementations of the

Timesharing concept.

Part One:True Hackers

Cambridge: The 50’s and 60’s

Part Two:Hardware Hackers

Northern California: The 70’s Hardware Hackers:

As computers became more and more concise and affordable, more and more people were able to buy them. This opened up the possibility of a new type of hacking that wasn’t as accessible for the original TMRC members working on computers the size of several refrigerators. This new hacking involved not only writing new code, but completely changing components of the computer, the hardware. Some important members of this generation of hackers include: The Homebrew Computer Club was formed as a community of hackers that would meet and discuss their

ongoing projects and utilized the Hacker Ethic to share information about these projects. A very influenced member of the HCC was Steven Wozniak (aka ‘Woz’). Woz, who worked for HP when he

joined the HCC. Steve was described as always sitting in the back of the meetings wearing jeans and sport shirts. Although he didn’t fit into the mix of the group, he had no problem following along with the technical information presented there. It was at an HCC meeting that he was given a box of several components that could be programmed to work with a Motorola 6800 board. After playing around with them for quite a long time, Woz discovered the MOS 6502 by HP board which although a bit more limited, was programmed in generally the same way and was significantly cheaper, $20 a board. He designed a new version of BASIC to correct the limited functionality of the board and he decided to use this microprocessor in his own computer.. He later showed his project to his friend, Steve Jobs, who worked at Atari. Jobs suggested they try to market the computer to hobbyists. Woz asked HP for permission to market the product with the 6502 processor, to which they agreed believing he would not be able to sell it. The two formed the company Apple (a name suggested by Jobs who had once worked in an orchard) and released the computer out of Steve’s garage. They sold the computer for $666.66 and it had decent underground success with hobbyists. After its release, Woz got to work on its successor, the Apple II. While the Apple I was nice for hackers, it lacked many things that would make it a decent personal computer, like a display. The Apple II was released in 1977 complete with a color display, keyboard, and options for I/O with floppy disks or cassettes. The computer received fantastic response and quickly became the most popular PC of its time.

Part Three:Game Hackers

The Sierras: The 80’s The last distinctive type of hacker that Levy details is the game hacker. These hackers were

mainly involved in the software aspect of hacking, but occasionally modified hardware to suit their needs. Some noteworthy game hackers are: Ken and Roberta Williams: The this couple founded the company On-line Systems in 1979.

It was later renamed to Sierra On-Line (after the Sierra Nevada foothills where Roberta’s family lived), which today is known as Sierra Entertainment. The company started off as an independent publisher of games that Ken and Roberta wrote at home for the Apple II. Their first game was entitled Mystery House, a text-adventure game which did feature minimal amounts of graphics. They made several thousand dollars a month selling the game, and proceeded to design another game called Wizard and the Princess which was released on floppy disks and made even more money than the first.

The Brotherhood: The term of this chapter actually refers to two thing: One, is the name of the game company Brøderbund, which is the Scandinavian word for brotherhood. The second refers to the kind of brotherhood that existed between the game software companies of the time. Although the companies were selling their code for money, something that the original true hackers may have disapproved of, they still were freely sharing information much in the way the HCC did.

“The Third Generation”: Since computers were so affordable at this point, many more people were able to access them, and therefore hack them. Many more “basement hackers” emerged from this generation who had a mindset similar to those of the original true hackers.

Epilogue:The Last of the True Hackers

Cambridge: 1983

Levy names Richard Stallman as the last True Hacker. Now, it is hard to accept this as being true since the book was released in 1984, so Richard Stallman’s achievements were only a year old when the book hit the shelves. To the contrary, what the book does not detail is what has happened due to Stallman’s efforts since then. Stallman’s achievement in 1983 was that of the GNU Project. The GNU Project, which is

still in full swing today, believes in a free software and information sharing initiative. It ties in very well to the Hacker Ethic, which is why he is known as the last “True Hacker”.

Works Cited Levy, Steven. Hackers : Heroes of the Computer Revolution. New York: Penguin Books,

Limited, 2002.