Levy_S-Hackers-Heroes-Computer-Revolution

create useful concepts and tools to benefit humanity. To the hackers, the systemwas an end in itself. Most hackers, after all, had been fascinated by systems sinceearly childhood. They had set aside almost everything else in life once theyrecognized that the ultimate tool in creating systems was the computer: not onlycould you use it to set up a fantastically complicated system, at once byzantine andelegantly efficient, but then, with a "Moby" operating system like ITS, that samecomputer could actually be the system. And the beauty of ITS was that it openeditself up, made it easy for you to write programs to fit within it, begged for newfeatures and bells and whistles. ITS was the hacker living room, and everyone waswelcome to do what he could to make himself comfortable, to find and decorate hisown little niche. ITS was the perfect system for building ... systems!It was an endlessly spiraling logical loop. As people used ITS, they might admirethis feature or that, but most likely they would think of ways to improve it. Thiswas only natural, because an important corollary of hackerism states that no systemor program is ever completed. You can always make it better. Systems are organic,living creations: if people stop working on them and improving them, they die.When you completed a systems program, be it a major effort like an assembler ordebugger or something quick and (you hoped) elegant, like an interface outputmultiplexor, you were simultaneously creating a tool, unveiling a creation, andfashioning something to advance the level of your own future hacking. It was aparticularly circular process, almost a spiritual one, in which the systemsprogrammer was a habitual user of the system he was improving. Many virtuososystems programs came out of remedies to annoying obstacles which hackers feltprevented them from optimum programming. (Real optimum programming, ofcourse, could only be accomplished when every obstacle between you and the purecomputer was eliminated an ideal that probably won't be fulfilled until hackers aresomehow biologically merged with computers.) The programs ITS hackers wrotehelped them to pro gram more easily, made programs run faster, and allowedprograms to gain from the power that comes from using more of the machine. Sonot only would a hacker get huge satisfaction from writing a brilliant systemsprogram a tool which everyone would use and admire but from then on he wouldbe that much further along in making the next systems program.To quote a progress report written by hacker Don Eastlake five years after ITS wasfirst running:The ITS system is not the result of a human wave or crash effort. Thesystem has been incrementally developed almost continuously sinceits inception. It is indeed true that large systems are never"finished"... In general, the ITS system can be said to have beendesigner implemented and user designed. The problem of unrealistic