Levy_S-Hackers-Heroes-Computer-Revolution

Part TwoHardware HackersNorthern California:The Seventies8Revolt in 2100THE first public terminal of the Community Memory project was an ugly machine in a clutteredfoyer on the second floor of a beat-up building in the spaciest town in the United States of America:Berkeley, California. It was inevitable that computers would come to "the people" in Berkeley.Everything else did, from gourmet food to local government. And if, in August 1973, computerswere generally regarded as inhuman, unyielding, warmongering, and nonorganic, the imposition ofa terminal connected to one of those Orwellian monsters in a normally good-vibes zone like thefoyer outside Leopold's Records on Durant Avenue was not necessarily a threat to anyone's wellbeing.It was yet another kind of flow to go with.Outrageous, in a sense. Sort of a squashed piano, the height of a Fender Rhodes, with a typewriterkeyboard instead of a musical one. The keyboard was protected by a cardboard box casing, with aplate of glass set in its front. To touch the keys, you had to stick your hands through little holes, asif you were offering yourself for imprisonment in an electronic stockade. But the people standing bythe terminal were familiar Berkeley types, with long stringy hair, jeans, T-shirts, and a dementedgleam in their eyes that you would mistake for a drug reaction if you did not know them well. Thosewho did know them well realized that the group was high on technology. They were getting off likethey had never gotten off before, dealing the hacker dream as if it were the most potent strain ofsinsemilla in the Bay Area.The name of the group was Community Memory, and according to a handout they distributed, theterminal was "a communication system which allows people to make contact with each other on thebasis of mutually expressed interests, without having to cede judgement to third parties." The ideawas to speed the flow of information in a decentralized, non-bureaucratic system. An idea bornfrom computers, an idea executable only by computers, in this case a time-shared XDS-940