Levy_S-Hackers-Heroes-Computer-Revolution

Afterword: Ten Years After"I think that hackers dedicated, innovative, irreverent computer programmers arethe most interesting and effective body of intellectuals since the framers of the U.S.Constitution... No other group that I know of has set out to liberate a technologyand succeeded. They not only did so against the active disinterest of corporateAmerica, their success forced corporate America to adopt their style in the end. Inreorganizing the Information Age around the individual, via personal computers,the hackers may well have saved the American economy... The quietest of all the'60s sub-subcultures has emerged as the most innovative and powerful..."Stewart BrandFounder, Whole Earth CatalogIN November 1984, on the damp, windswept headlands north of San Francisco,one hundred fifty canonical programmers and techno-ninjas gathered for the firstHacker Conference. Originally conceived by Whole Earth Catalog founder StewartBrand, this event transformed an abandoned Army camp into temporary worldheadquarters for the Hacker Ethic. Not at all coincidentally, the event dovetailedwith the publication of this book, and a good number of the characters in its pagesturned up, in many cases to meet for the first time. First-generation MIT hackerslike Richard Greenblatt hung out with Homebrew luminaries like Lee Felsensteinand Stephen Wozniak and game czars Ken Williams, Jerry Jewell, and DougCarlston. The brash wizards of the new Macintosh computer met up with peoplewho hacked Spacewar. Everybody slept in bunk beds, washed dishes and bussedtables, and slept minimally. For a few hours the electricity went out, and peoplegabbed by lantern light. When the power was restored, the rush to the computerroom where one could show off his hacks was something probably not seen in thiscountry since the last buffalo stampede.I remember thinking, "These be the real hackers." I was in a state of high anxiety,perched among one hundred fifty potential nit-picking critics who had been issuedcopies of my first book. Those included in the text immediately found their namesin the index and proceeded to vet passages for accuracy and technologicalcorrectness. Those not in the index sulked, and to this day whenever theyencounter me, in person or in the ether of cyberspace, they complain. Ultimately,the experience was exhilarating. The Hacker Conference, which would become an