Levy_S-Hackers-Heroes-Computer-Revolution

software design is greatly diminished when the designer is theimplementor. The implementor's ease in programming and pride inthe result is increased when he, in an essential sense, is the designer.Features are less likely to turn out to be of low utility if users aretheir designers and they are less likely to be difficult to use if theirdesigners are their users.The prose was dense, but the point was clear ITS was the strongest expression yetof the Hacker Ethic. Many thought that it should be a national standard for timesharingsystems everywhere. Let every computer system in the land spread thegospel, eliminating the odious concept of passwords, urging the unrestricted handsonpractice of system debugging, and demonstrating the synergistic power thatcomes from shared software, where programs belong not to the author but to allusers of the machine.In 1968, major computer institutions held a meeting at the University of Utah tocome up with a standard time-sharing system to be used on DEC'S latest machine,the PDP-10. The Ten would be very similar to the PDP-6, and one of the twooperating systems under consideration was the hackers' Incompatible Time-sharingSystem. The other was TENEX, a system written by Bolt Beranek and Newmanthat had not yet been implemented. Greenblatt and Knight represented MIT at theconference, and they presented an odd picture two hackers trying to persuade theassembled bureaucracies of a dozen large institutions to commit millions of dollarsof their equipment to a system that, for starters, had no built-in security.They failed.Knight would later say that it was political naivete which lost it for the MIThackers. He guessed that the fix was in even before the conference was called toorder a system based on the Hacker Ethic was too drastic a step for thoseinstitutions to take. But Greenblatt later insisted that "we could have carried the dayif [we'd] really wanted to." But "charging forward," as he put it, was moreimportant. It was simply not a priority for Greenblatt to spread the Hacker Ethicmuch beyond the boundaries of Cambridge. He considered it much more importantto focus on the society at Tech Square, the hacker Utopia which would stun theworld by applying the Hacker Ethic to create ever more perfect systems.