Levy_S-Hackers-Heroes-Computer-Revolution

Moore explicitly identified the purpose of the club as an information exchange.Like the unfettered flow of bits in an elegantly designed computer, informationshould pass freely among the participants in Homebrew. "More than any otherindividual, Fred Moore knew what sharing was all about," Gordon French laterrecalled. "That was one of the expressions he was always using sharing, sharing,sharing."But the majority of the club preferred a path that diverged from Fred Moore's.Fred was always harping on applications. Every so often in the early meetings hewould urge the members of this basically anarchistic group to get together and dosomething, though he was usually vague on what that something might be. Maybeusing computers to aid handicapped people, maybe compiling mailing lists fordraft resistance. Moore might have been correct in perceiving that the thrust of theclub was in some way political, but his view seemed at odds with the reality thathackers do not generally set about to create social change hackers act like hackers.Moore was less fascinated with the workings of computer systems than with theidea of bringing about a sharing, benevolent social system; he seemed to regardHomebrew not as a technical stronghold of people hungry for the pyramidbuildingpower of in-home computers, but as a cadre devoted to social change, likethe draft resistance or anti-nuke groups he'd been involved in. He would, suggestcake sales to raise funds for the group, or publish cute little poems in thenewsletter like "Don't complain or fuss / It is up to each of us / To make the Clubdo / What we want it to." Meanwhile, most of the club members would be turningto the back of the newsletter to study the schematics in the contribution called"Arbitrary Logic Function Generation Via Digital Multiplexers." That was the wayto change the world, and a lot more fun than a cake sale.Lee Felsenstein later reflected that he didn't think Moore "got his politics straight.At the surface level he remained at the point of the protest or the gesture of protest.But we were much more interested in what you might call the Propaganda of theDeed."So when an opening fortuitously appeared to make the meetings more compatiblewith the free-flowing hacker spirit Gordon French, doing consulting work for theSocial Security Administration, was temporarily called to Baltimore it was notMoore that some club members asked to moderate, but Lee Felsenstein. He turnedout to be an ideal choice, since he was as much a hardware hacker as any, but alsoa political computerist. He looked upon the call to moderate these meetings as asignificant elevation. He could now be the point man of the revolution on thehardware front, allowing the meetings to progress with just the right blend ofanarchism and direction, continuing his own guerrilla hardware design schemeswhich would lead to the triumph of the Tom Swift Terminal, and participating inthe resurrection of the dormant Community Memory concept a process which was