Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution

jamie dyer wrote of Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution, a book that I can remember reading years ago. The book does an excellent job of getting to the roots of said computer revolution, but also shows the human side to things. Read more about it below. Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution author Steven Levy pages Delt publisher 448 rating 9/10 reviewer jamiedyer ISBN 0385312105 summary Learn the roots of the revolution The Book A disclaimer. I love this book. It has its flaws, but it's an important piece of storytelling and history. It came out in 1984, back before the word "hacker" could start a flame war, and was re-issued in 1994. The people in the book are brilliant; some are dreamy-eyed utopians, some are pragmatic robber barons and some just want to hack. If nothing else, it illustrates that the current dramas being played out on slashdot, linuxtoday.com, USENET, etc. are not new ones. They go back to the beginnings of the computer industry, with many of the same personalities still involved.

A warning. I'm going to use the word "hacker" as it was originally used, i.e. NOT as the picture of a greasy haired little dope smoker trying to break into Spacely's Sprockets web server. It's a word that's sadly fallen out of favor, mostly due to lack of clue in the media.

"Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution" is broken into four parts. It starts with The Tech Model Railroad Club at MIT in the late 50's and chronicles Samson, Gosper, Deutsch, Greenblatt and company as they discover the IBM 704, the TX-0 and the PDP-*, moves to Northern California in the early 70's and the rise of Apple, zeroes in on Sierra On-Line and the increasing market share of game software in the third part and ends with a view of RMS in the epilogue. But all the parts are woven together to give a cogent overview of not only the building of the computer industry, but also demonstrates that the personalities and philosophies of the hackers involved are inextricably tied to their programs and the companies they founded and/or worked for. This book also chronicles something that's important and often lost in the shuffle as of late, The Hacker Ethic. It's defined thusly in the Jargon Dictionary:

Hacker Ethic, the n. 1. The belief that information-sharing is a powerful positive good, and that it is an ethical duty of hackers to share their expertise by writing free software and facilitating access to information and to computing resources wherever possible.

And laid out as such the in the book:

1. Access to computers should be unlimited and total.

2. Always yield to the Hands-On Imperative

   All information should be free.

   Mistrust authority--promote decentralization.

   Hackers should be judged by their hacking.

   You can create art and beauty on a computer.

   Computers can change your life for the better.

The Hacker Ethic abounds in this book, on both sides of the issue. When it comes down to it, the Hacker Ethic is what this book is about, and what all the sound and the fury currently sturming and dranging comes down to, in relation to software. What kills the ethic, it seems, is lots and lots of money and the corporate superstructure. The Homebrew Computer Club, which gave rise to many companies (biggest of the lot was Apple) is a perfect example of this. The freeflow of information was hampered when that information became a company secret. Regardless of what you think of him, Woz still pays lip service to the free exchange of information at the top of www.woz.org.

The beginning of the Greek melodrama that is now the Open/Closed Source debate is detailed quite well in this book. Some of the people in it have become more rich and famous, and some have become future Trivial Pursuit answers. But every single one helped shaped the modern computing experience to some extent.

Two little pieces of trivia from the book:

1. The original Ultima (for the Apple) was written by Lord British, real name Richard Garriot, whose father was Owen Garriot, one of the Skylab astronauts.

2. It's rumored that Gates and Allen wrote their first moneymaker, Altair BASIC, on a government funded computer ( and according to Bill Gates' Open Letter to Computer Hobbyists, it cost $40K. Wonder if they ever paid us back?:) ).

Why Should You Read This Book? Those that don't learn from history are condemned to repeat it, and each other.

I think Bob Young, Bill Gates, Larry Ellison, Linus Torvalds and YOU should read this book for one very good reason. Software and hardware make up a major part of many of our lives nowadays, and to just blunder along with no sense of the past is not only foolish, it's not very graceful. Those that have made the history need to remember it, and those that are just now coming up need to learn it. If the names Ted Nelson, Adam Osborne, LISP, Greenblatt, Gosper or Slug Russell mean anything to you, you'll dig this book. Hell, even if the names mean nothing to you, and you hang out on this website, you'd probably dig it anyway. This book details the beginnings of the coder/hacker culture that is coming to fruition now. The Linux community, and the Open Source/Free Software/Whatever The Hell It's Called This Week Movement can learn a lot from it.

Also, it's just a hell of a fun read.

Purchase this book at Amazon.

Comments

Re:Access to information

[sjames]

a good hack is anything interesting, or amusing, and above all clever.

A possable example is the hack to Xdoom to kill processes.

Free Software: Hacker's comeback

[Andy Tai]

Free Software is the revival of the original computing culture, where Software Sharing and Software Freedom were the basic way of life. But as more people got involved in computers, money and business movitvations took over, and the values of the original hackers were lost. People began to see software as commerical products and tools of exploitation, and software went proprietary.

One of the major figure responsible for the destruction of the original hackerdom was Bill Gates. When first version of his Basic was freely passed among hackers, Bill wrote an Open Letter, declaring Software should be proprietary, and asking hackers to pay license fees for each copy of his Microsoft Basic. As time went on, Bill Gates became the richest man on earth, building his fortunes on selling and manipulating proprietary software. Business became the way of life, backstabing is common, information fell under NDAs and patents and became the subjects of lawsuits, and The Dark Age was upon the computer world.

One of the last holdouts from the original hackerdom was Richard M. Stallman, or RMS, of the MIT AI Labs, who would stay to the True Way to the end. To keep the original vision alive, and to make Free Software against the tide of privatiziation, he founded the GNU Project and the Free Software Foundation in 1983. He declared that he would write a complete Unix-like operating system, composed of only Free Software, so he can share with other people who have the same dream. He began by writing free replacements of basic Unix utilities, and a free C compiler (gcc). Gradually the FSF provided most of the foundation for a Free Software/Open Source OS infrastructure. The GNU tools liberate hackers from dependence on proprietary development tools and provide the foundation which enables other Free Software projects to flourish. And by 1991, these tools enabled Linus Torvalds, a Finnish CS student, to develop the Linux kernal. This kernel filled in the last missing pieces of a totally Free OS, and by 1992 RMS's original aim was practically fulfilled.

While the proprietary software universe continued with rises and falls of companies, Bill Gates of Microsoft went on for world conquest. The Microsoft Empire destroyed or assimilated competitors, and by 1997 virtually no alternatives existed. People became subjects of Bill Gates, whose power reached far and wide. People looked toward the sky for hopes of liberation, but no one seemed answering the call.

However with the spread of the Internet, the Free Software community, composed of GNU, Linux, Apache, Perl, BSDs, etc., quietly continued to develop more Free source code and gathered strength. Finally in 1998, beginning with Netscape looking to Free Software for allies in resisting Microsoft, the New Hope is shown to the world. The vision of the original hackers, a world where the Software is By the People, Of the People and For the People, is coming into being. The Revenge against Bill Gates is in full swing. The war for liberation is intensifying!

Re:Access to information

[drox]

...if people are spoonfed knowledge early, they'll always expect it.

There's a big difference between educating someone and spoonfeeding them. Proper education ignites in the student a love of learning and a desire to learn more. Sure, the earliest steps are going to resemble spoonfeeding. That's only to make the inevitable missteps less painful. As the student begins to succeed, there is less need for spoonfeeding.

They won't gain critical thinking skills or the ability to learn the solution to their problems on their own.

Sure they will. Just not the first time. Very few take to computers like a duck to water. Most people (I'd guess even most slashdotters) need(ed) someone to show them a few basics early on. The critical thinking skills and the tenacity to struggle through when problems seem impossible come later.

The hairier the problem, the more satisfying it is to solve.

Re:If information should be free, then ...

[Chris Johnson]

Hey, I consider that book _art_. I own a paperback copy and it might be the one book I'd rescue from a burning house :)
The thing is as beautifully orchestrated as a fine novel- it's so much more than just information. Steven Levy absolutely rules :)

Seconded

[Chris Johnson]

Seconded- "Artifical Life" is terrific :) its scope isn't quite as broad as "Hackers", but its depth is just as impressive, and the great thing about it is how it gives you tons and tons of program ideas. I defy any hacker to read this book without being inspired to do _something_ :)

My heros page

[jonathanclark]

Thought I mention I have a page with pictures and brief bios of some of my favorite CS heros. (Turing, Shannon, Huffman, Whitefield, Miyamoto, RMS, and Ken Perlin). Click on my sig then [heros].

Re:Think man, think

[zantispam]

> Sure, I can read my sister's diary and no harm will come of it.

Great analogy, but a wrong one.

A cracker would break the lock to read the diary (for whatever reasons).

A hacker would figure out how the lock worked, pick it, and then notify his sister that her diary may be insecure. Moreover, this act would occur without the hacker caring about the contents of the diary, and possibly (in my case) going to great lengths to make sure that he didn't see a word.

WRT privacy of personal information, the hacker really only cares about his own. The cracker wants to did it up for personal reasons (blackmail, negotiations, espionage, etc.). The hacker (again, I'm going by my own morals here) would take care to avoid being in the situation that allows him to see the info.

As an example: if I break into your box because of some undocumented exploit, I'd verify the exploit and mail it to you, possibly with a patch. I would not go straight to /home/eroot/mail/archive and start reading your mail.

It is a very subtle and possibly subjective distinction, but it does need to be made.

Follow-up interviews with some people from Hackers

[Junks Jerzey]

Some of the people from the video game section of Hackers--most notably John Harris--were re-interviewed a few years ago for a book about video game history.

A damn good read, IMO.

Access to information

[Enoch Root]

Disclaimer: Yes, I know how I'm using hacker. Just assume hacker == cracker for this article.

Disclaimer++: I'm not flaming [cr|h]ackers nor am I denouncing the principles listed in the book's review. If anything, I'm curious to read the book. I'm outlining an apparent contradiction and trying to resolve it.

Access to computers should be unlimited and total.

I always thought that was something of a dychotomy. On one side, the hacker mindset is that all computer systems should be wide open. On the other hand, the hacker mistrusts organizations and governments.

And herein lies the contradiction: if it's alright to break into a system because you have the technical skill and invested efforts to do so, the hacker ethic says you can. Yet if a government breaks into your system, it's wrong and unethical, and a break of the sacrosanct privacy.

I think this ties in to the elitist approach to hacker standing: a hacker proves its worth by his hacks. The point being, if you have to use technical skill and cracking knowledge to get into a system, you can. If all that is being used is political weight to finance an intrusion campaign, then it's wrong, because no effort is spent on actually penetrating the system.

And so, the hacker maxim has to be revised: I think it should read, the level of information you are allowed to get is proportional to the skill you display.

And so we're back to an elitist system, where not much thought is given to equality, but where strength determines the level of freedom you have. I can't help but feel this is a wrong system, because it sounds like anarchy without concern for the other members of your society. The law of the jungle, if you will.

Anyone wish to contradict me? I'd love to know what you guys think.

"There is no surer way to ruin a good discussion than to contaminate it with the facts."

Re:Access to information

[eddy the lip]

The point being, if you have to use technical skill and cracking knowledge to get into a system, you can. If all that is being used is political weight to finance an intrusion campaign, then it's wrong, because no effort is spent on actually penetrating the system.

First, I have to agree that this philosophy does, pragmatically, lead to a form of anarchy. It works in well in small, contained environments where people basically have similar ethics (eg, the early MIT lab) and less well in large, morally heterogenious (sp? to early to spell) environments.

However, to a hacker (and I use this in the strict mucking-about-on-computers-'cause-it's-fun sense) the difference here is not so much the deed (getting into machines) as the reason (learning, challenge of the puzzle, etc). At one time, there was no money/notoriety/teenage testosterone boy ego type of advantage to hacking on systems. It was done for other reasons. It was assumed that if you had attained a high enough level of proficiency to get into things you weren't supposed to, you weren't motivated by these things because there were certainly better ways of attaining them.

Governments (and corp.s) obviously have other motivations. They are not interested in intellectual challenges. If they want into your system, it's not to see you did a cool hack. They want to know if you would think about blowing something up. They're actions are similar, they're motivations vastly different, and therefore their ethical stance very much at odds with the hacker ethos.

So, I wouldn't say that the hackers desire for total access is at odds (ethically) with the equally strong desire for privacy. It's just based on a (in my opinion) flawed assumption that increased ability is an indicator of higher ethical standards. When you inflate ability through artificial means (money, hiring someone else to do it, etc) you're committing a shady act before you even get anything.

It's really more of a technocratic elitism than anarchy. And just because I don't think it's necessarily a good basis for an ethical system, it's certainly debatable whether any other system is better.

whew.

Re:Access to information

[drox]

"Access to computers should be unlimited and total."

I always thought that was something of a dychotomy. On one side, the hacker mindset is that all computer systems should be wide open. On the other hand, the hacker mistrusts organizations and governments.

That part of the hacker ethic is certainly showing its age today. In the early days there was less need for mistrust. Governments and organizations were, in those days, largely ignorant of hackers. Security on computer systems was less of a concern when the only ones who might be interested in the systems, how they worked, and what was stored on them were other hackers.

The ignorance worked both ways though - as the book indicates, the hacker pioneers themselves, immersed as they were in the deep structures of their beloved systems, were often ignorant of the interest that governments and organizations might indeed have. It just never occurred to most of them that security might be an issue. At least at first.

And so, the hacker maxim has to be revised: I think it should read, "the level of information you are allowed to get is proportional to the skill you display".

Maybe. In a way that's always been the case. When the skills in question are those used in gaining access to information, the level of information you are allowed to get is indeed proportional to the skill you display.

Sure, there are ignorant lusers with alarmingly high levels of access to information. But whose fault is that? They wouldn't have that kind of access if someone (someone who knows their sh1t) didn't give it to them. When ignorant people are granted access to computer systems there are two options. The easy one is to just give it to them without explaination and let them muddle through. This is a bad move in the short term, as they're still ignorant and now they have the power to damage things. The better way is to educate them. It's not as easy in the short term, but it pays off over time.

Hackers Part Deux?

[Dharma]

Seems to me the time is ripe for a book on the second wave of "Hackers". I've already got chapters laid out:

The Free Software Revolutionaries
---------------------------------
Linus Torvalds & Linux
Richard Stallman, Eric S. Raymond & GNU
Phil Zimmerman & PGP

The Internet Hackers
--------------------
Tim Berners-Lee & the WWW
Scott Andreesen & Netscape
James Gosling, Sun & Java

More Game Hackers
----------------
John Carmack, John Romero & Id

The Where Are They Now Files
----------------------------
Gate$ & Jobs

Any names I forgot?

There *is* Glory in Software Engineering

[RNG]

Hackers (the book) simply rules. If you are into the whole OpenSource/GNU mindset, you should really read this book. If nothing else, it will trace back some of the historial roots of the whole hacking scene which in turn serves as a good example of the openness which ruled at MIT labs (and of course other places) in the beginning of the computer age, when computers were huge monstrosities which were rarely seen by normal mortals.

The other thing which I remember from reading Hackers, was a sort of vague feeling (which I've since refined a bit) of being a disciple of an art rather than just a programmer. The way I look at this (for myself) is, that yes, I'm payed by my employer, but my ultimate allegiance is to the field of computers, not to any particular manifestation of it (such as a company). As such the field (art) itself means much more to me than any one company and Linux (to me) is the/an embodyment of this spirit ... by engineers, for engineers, from each according to his interestes and possibilities. It is this purity of vision/interest that I miss in most people I meet in the field ...

This book drives home the fact the openness of information (or source code for us geeks) is a good thing, a concept that a few years ago seemed to wither away and which has now been (due to the success of Linux) thrust again into the public's view. If you want a good read of where much of this comes from, read Hackers ...

Re:Cycles

[Foogle]

Well take a step back and look at what you're describing from outside the Open Source community. People have been doing free software for a long time (just like in the book). The open source movement doesn't just look like that -- it is that; people never stopped sharing their source.

Now, yes, there's been a lot more free software available lately, but if you look at it in the larger picture, most companies are still closed source. There are only a handful of companies that even consider free software and there are still a large percentage that probably don't even see it on their radar. They know what Linux is, of course, but the concept as a whole isn't something they even care about.

So "hacking" and the free software movement really isn't much different now than it was back then - it's just a different environment. The "next cycle"? Hell, it might be that everyone jumps on the OpenSource bandwagon, but I doubt it. It's just not worth it to most companies and whether you like it or not, programmers would make less money.

-----------

"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."

Another good one by Steven Levy

[drox]

If you like Steven Levy's writing in Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution, you might check out his Artificial Life as well. It's very different, but still quite good. And it's got pictures! Maybe we can get a book review of it here someday (hint-hint!).

Cycles

[akiy]

Coincidentally, this is one of the books I brought over here to (re)read for my (business) trip here in London this week. It's a good book. I wonder who of the principal characters in the book (outside of the "big name" people) are still alive and what they're doing these days...

It's interesting how the whole open source movement these days really does subscribe to Levy's description of the "Golden Age" of hacking. People get to see the source code of other people's work, modify it so that it's "better," then rerelease it back for everyone else's "consumption." It's kind of like the TMRC, only a much wider group of hackers (ie the whole world) is now involved. It's like it's just another cycle in the history of hacking, just on a much larger scale than ever.

Anyone have any ideas on what the next "cycle" might be?

The differences between hackers and government.

[guardian-ct]

A single person will have great difficulty stopping an entire government from doing whatever it likes.

A government can, with relative ease, stop an individual from doing something the government doesn't like. Part of that ability to stop comes from the government's ability to monitor the actions of all citizens in order to catch the ones that are doing things the government doesn't like.

The level of enforcement authority is the main difference between an individual hacker, and the government.

Whether or not the elitist system is bad, we already have one. The level of information you are allowed to get is currently proportional to the amount of money (or power) you have to spend on information retrieval. It's not anarchy, yet, due to the fact that there are government controls on who can (theoretically, at least) gain access to more specific information. However, I would guess that the Pres. of the US, and other world leaders, have more access to information about an individual (should they care to ask), than I would have about the President.

Figuring out how to balance the needs of the country for security from criminals, with the needs of the country for security from governments, is a hard problem, at least from the government's point of view.

From my point of view, it's easy. "I'm not a criminal, so leave me alone." Not everyone has this view, and it is a somewhat dangerous position to actually have implemented. If I'm being entirely left alone by the government, then some criminal may just attack me (since the gov. isn't watching me). I am willing to take that risk. Many people are not, and they probably shouldn't be forced to take that risk.

Security *IS* Stability

[Effugas]

Watching the development of Samba, I'm struck by the degree to which system stability and system security are related.

If you ever want to find a program that's easy to crash, look for one that's been designed without any security in mind. Similarly, if you wish to locate the most stable, trustable system, look for those where security is a critical specification to which every design pattern must adhere to.

This isn't that hard to understand. Software that's not designed to accept data streams that lack "sanity"(translation: Data formatted according to the protocol specification) from external procedures, processes, or network connections is doomed to, on occasion, accidentally recieve such "contraband" information and crash and burn from the time-bomb buried within.

Often, such missing sanity checks are the result of the following "famous last words" from a software developer: "That'll never happen--the code would never do that."

Not only can it happen, not only will it happen eventually, but because of those who would exploit such weaknesses--be they joyriders, or worse--it will happen to such a degree that customers will be harmed, and code will need to be patched and deployed long after it was written.

The same kind of bean counters that decide it's cheaper to let 100K people die from an exploding gas tank and settle each of those lawsuits than fix a problem that's embedded in a few million vehicles also work at computer companies. If it wasn't for those who would discover and address the flaws in the infrastructure of our increasingly critical(and simultaneously fragile and surprisingly resilient) technological lifestyle, the computer industry's accountants could honestly claim it would be much less expensive for customers to crash(making them more likely to upgrade anyway!) then for the company to build security/stability into their code.

There are some, of course, who criticize the willingness of hackers to release vulnerability information publically, primarily because the information can then be used (and abused) by the cracker set. There are two responses to this:

1) Software companies have a miserable record responding to anything but crisis. If I close my eyes and imagine a half million people like me(only much more experienced in whatever field they're specialized in), I completely understand. Regardless, it bothers me to know that, from what I've seen, security/stability patches are almost never issued unless there is an active exploit being used. It is a common theme for example code to be released with the disclaimer "I sent this to Microsoft a month ago and they never responded." I personally discovered a reasonably troublesome flaw in the Windows 9x TCP/IP stack--the most I've ever gotten back from Microsoft is a third hand message through a PR Flack that--you guessed it--"This is hardly ever a problem." And, of course--no fix.

I'd like to say YMMV(Your Mileage May Vary), but I doubt it. As for my second response...

2) I'll take some kid playing around with his first script long before I want to be attacked by either a competitor or (shudder) a hostile foreign government. Competing corporations(*ahem* I'll avoid getting Gibsonian for this one post) and hostile governments are quite unlikely to divulge their discoveries regarding infrastructural weaknesses, but the Hacker Ethic demands that Hackers do. Furthermore, it assigns significant prestige to those who not only describe flaws but provide effective solutions to them as well. It is these solutions that are the "carrot" delivered to server administrators in an honest attempt to strengthen the stability/security of the overall infrastructure, while the crackers of the world essentially form a constant, low-level "stick" that reminds administrators of the damage a full-scale, corporate or military infrastructure attack can levy.

Mandating security by governmental fiat is essentially ineffective, though there is no small irony as to the inititals of the Internal Security Service such a mandate would create. (For those who don't know, ISS is one of the more respected groups of security professionals.)

The continual, open dialog of hackers, however, is responsible for the fact that we actually do have a pretty extensive Certificate Authority architecture backing online Credit Card Transactions. Without hackers raising the red flag, businesses would have ignored the risk so as to increase online purchasing at lower initial investments, media would have ignored the faults so as to not upset the advertisers, and government would have stayed out of the way so as to not lose any votes from Big Business. (Granted, it's likely the Hackers got so much press in the mid-90's because preventing people from feeling secure inputting CC#'s online benefited certain uberconglomerate interests that weren't ready to go online just yet and had a large stake in people actually *gasp* going to a store/mall. But the same guys who spoke about what you shouldn't do online also emphasized the SSL solution to transactional privacy, thus training millions of people to look for the lock before sending in their card #. That the SSL system is actually reasonably air-tight considering its ambition is genuinely impressive.)

I have, of course, spoken of only one subset of hackers--the network security gurus that I worship and hope to one day be among. Each of the many flavors--and yes, they all blend together in one form or another--of hackers bring something to the table that, yes, is of significant social import.

It'll be interesting when the sociologists turn around and start analyzing the scene in earnest...

Yours Truly,

Dan Kaminsky
DoxPara Research
http://www.doxpara.com

read Ch. 1,2 online

[Skweetis]

Chapters 1 & 2 can be read here.

Hacker ethics and RMS' 1983 biography

[Jonas �berg]

I'm not convinced that there are such a thing as a hacker ethics, but once you've gotten past that notion, I found the book a very good read.
I should probably also note that RMS recently published his 1983 biography on his home page. It's somewhat related to the chapter on him in the book since it was written just the year before the book was published, and, I think, just before the idea of GNU came into light.