Hackers

by Steven Levy

  It seemed to be working. As an indication of how captivating the machines could be, one reporter doing a story on PCC came in around five-thirty one day, and the workers sat him down at a teletype terminal running a game called Star Trek. “The next thing I remember,” the reporter wrote in a letter to PCC, “is that somebody tapped me on the shoulder at 12:30 A.M. the next morning and told me it was time to go home.” After a couple of days of hanging out at PCC, the reporter concluded, “I still have nothing to tell an editor beyond that I spent a total of twenty-eight hours so far just playing games on these seductive machines.”

  Every Wednesday night PCC had its potluck dinners. After a typically disorganized PCC staff meeting—Bob, with ideas zipping into his head like Spacewar torpedoes, could not easily follow an agenda—long tables would be covered with cloths, and gradually the room would fill up with a virtual who’s who of alternative computing in Northern California.

  Of the distinguished visitors dropping in, none was so welcome as Ted Nelson. Nelson was the self-published author of Computer Lib, the epic of the computer revolution, the bible of the hacker dream. He was stubborn enough to publish it when no one else seemed to think it was a good idea.

  Ted Nelson had a self-diagnosed ailment of being years ahead of his time. Son of actress Celeste Holm and director Ralph Nelson (”Lilies of the Field“), product of private schools, student at fancy liberal arts colleges, Nelson was an admittedly irascible perfectionist, his main talent that of an “innovator.” He wrote a rock musical—in 1957. He worked for John Lilly on the Dolphin project, and did some film work. But his head was, he later explained, helplessly “swimming in ideas” until he came in contact with a computer and learned some programming.

  That was in 1960. For the next fourteen years he would bounce from one job to another. He would walk out of his office in a job at a high-tech corporation and see “the incredible bleakness of the place in these corridors.” He began to see how the IBM batch-process mentality had blinded people to the magnificent possibilities of computers. His observations about this went universally unheeded. Would no one listen?

  Finally, out of anger and desperation, he decided to write a “counterculture computer book.” No publisher was interested, certainly not with his demands on the format—a layout similar to the Whole Earth Catalog or the PCC, but even looser, with oversized pages loaded with print so small you could hardly read it, along with scribbled notations, and manically amateurish drawings. The book was in two parts: one was called “Computer Lib,” the computer world according to Ted Nelson; and the other, “Dream Machines,” the computer future according to Ted Nelson. Shelling out two thousand dollars out of pocket—“a lot to me,” he would say later—he printed a few hundred copies of what was a virtual handbook to the Hacker Ethic. The opening pages shouted with urgency, as he bemoaned the generally bad image of computers (he blamed this on the lies that the powerful told about computers, lies he called "Cybercrud“) and proclaimed in capital letters that THE PUBLIC DOES NOT HAVE TO TAKE WHAT IS DISHED OUT. He brazenly declared himself a computer fan, and said:

  I have an axe to grind. I want to see computers useful to individuals, and the sooner the better, without necessary complication or human servility being required. Anyone who agrees with these principles is on my side. And anyone who does not, is not.

  THIS BOOK IS FOR PERSONAL FREEDOM.

  AND AGAINST RESTRICTION AND COERCION . . .

  A chant you can take to the streets:

  COMPUTER POWER TO THE PEOPLE!

  DOWN WITH CYBERCRUD!

  “Computers are where it’s at,” Nelson’s book said, and though it sold slowly, it sold, eventually going through several printings. More important, it had its cult following. At PCC, Computer Lib was one more reason to believe it would soon be no secret that computers were magic. And Ted Nelson was treated like royalty at potluck dinners.

  But people were not coming to potluck dinners to see the wizards of the computer revolution: they were there because they were interested in computers. Some were middle-aged, hard-core hardware hackers, some were grammar-school kids who had been lured by the computers, some were long-haired teen-age boys who liked to hack the PCC PDP-8, some were educators, some were just plain hackers. As always, planners like Bob Albrecht would talk about the issues of computing, while the hackers concentrated on swapping technical data or complained about Albrecht’s predilection for BASIC, which hackers considered a “fascist” language because its limited structure did not encourage maximum access to the machine and decreased a programmer’s power. It would not take many hours before the hackers slipped away to the clattering terminals, leaving the activists engaged in heated conversation about this development or that. And always, there would be Bob Albrecht. Glowing in the rapid progress of the great computer dream, he would be at the back of the room, moving with the climactic iterations of Greek folk dance, whether there was music or whether there was not.

  • • • • • • • •

  In that charged atmosphere of messianic purpose, the Community Memory people unreservedly threw themselves into bringing their project online. Efrem Lipkin revised a large program that would be the basic interface with the users, and Lee set about fixing a Model 33 teletype donated by the Tymshare Company. It had seen thousands of hours of use and been given to CM as junk. Because of its fragility, someone would have to tend to it constantly; it would often jam up, or the damper would get gummy, or it wouldn’t hit a carriage return before printing the next line. Later in the experiment, CM would get a Hazeltine 1500 terminal with a CRT which was a little more reliable, but someone from the collective still had to be there in case of a problem. The idea was for Lee to eventually develop a new kind of terminal to keep the project going, and he was already beginning to hatch ideas for that hardware project.

  But that was for later. First they had to get CM on the streets. After weeks of activity, Efrem and Lee and the others set up the Model 33 and its cardboard box shell—protecting against coffee spills and marijuana ashes—at Leopold’s Records. They’d drawn up posters instructing people how to use the system, bright-colored posters with psychedelic rabbits and wavy lines. They envisioned people making hard connections for things like jobs, places to live, rides, and barter. It was simple enough so that anyone could use it—just use the commands ADD or FIND. The system was an affectionate variation of the hacker dream, and they found compatible sentiment in a poem which inspired them to bestow a special name on Community Memory’s parent company: “Loving Grace Cybernetics.” The poem was by Richard Brautigan:

  I like to think (and

  the sooner the better!)

  of a cybernetic meadow

  where mammals and computers

  live together in mutually

  programming harmony

  like pure water

  touching clear sky

  I like to think

  (right now, please!)

  of a cybernetic forest

  filled with pines and electronics

  where deer stroll peacefully

  past computers

  as if they were flowers

  with spinning blossoms.

  I like to think

  (it has to be!)

  of a cybernetic ecology

  where we are free of our labors

  and joined back to nature,

  returned to our mammal

  brothers and sisters,

  and all watched over

  by machines of loving grace.

  —ALL WATCHED OVER BY MACHINES OF LOVING GRACE

  That was no mere terminal in Leopold’s—it was an instrument of Loving Grace! It was to shepherd the ignorant flock into a grazing meadow fertilized by the benevolent Hacker Ethic, shielded from the stifling influence of bureaucracy. But some within Community Memory had doubts. Even greater than Lee’s nagging doubts of the terminal’s durability was his fear that people would react with hostility to the idea of a computer invading the sacred
space of a Berkeley record store; his worst fears saw the Community Memory “barkers” who tended the terminal forced to protect the hardware bodily against a vicious mob of hippie Luddites.

  Unfounded fears. From the first day of the experiment, people reacted warmly to the terminal. They were curious to try it out, and racked their brains to think of something to put on the system. In the Berkeley Barb a week after the experiment began, Lee wrote that during the Model 33 teletype terminal’s first five days at Leopold’s, it was in use 1,434 minutes, accepting 151 new items, and printing out 188 sessions, thirty-two percent of which represented successful searches. And the violence level was nonexistent: Lee reported “one hundred percent smiles.”

  Word spread, and soon people came seeking important connections. If you typed in FIND HEALTH CLINICS, for instance, you would get information on any of eight, from the Haight-Ashbury Medical Research Clinic to the George Jackson People’s Free Clinic. A request for BAGELS—someone asking where in the Bay Area one could find good New York-style bagels—got four responses: three of them naming retail outlets, another one from a person named Michael who gave his phone number and offered to show the inquirer how to make his or her own bagels. People found chess partners, study partners, and sex partners for boa constrictors. Passed tips on restaurants and record albums. Offered services like babysitting, hauling, typing, tarot reading, plumbing, pantomime, and photography (“MELLOW DUDE SEEKS FOLKS INTO NON-EXPLOITABLE PHOTOGRAPHY/MODELING/BOTH . . . OM SHANTI”).

  A strange phenomenon occurred. As the project progressed, users began venturing into uncharted applications. As the Community Memory people looked over the days’ new additions they found some items which could fit into no category at all . . . even the keywords entered at the bottom of the item were puzzling. There were messages like, “YOU ARE YOUR OWN BEST FRIEND,” followed by keywords FRIEND, LOVER, DOG, YOU, WE, US, THANK YOU. There were messages like, “ALIEN FROM ANOTHER PLANET NEEDS COMPETENT PHYSICIST TO COMPLETE REPAIRS ON SPACECRAFT. THOSE WITHOUT KNOWLEDGE OF GEOMAGNETIC INDUCTION NEED NOT APPLY.” There were messages like, “MY GOD WHY HAVE YOU FORSAKEN ME.” There were messages that gave cryptic quotes from Ginsberg, The Grateful Dead, Arlo Guthrie, and Shakespeare. And there were messages from Doctor Benway and the mysterious Interzone.

  Doctor Benway, the Naked Lunch character, was “a manipulator and coordinator of symbol systems, an expert on all phases of interrogation, brainwashing, and control.” No matter. Whoever this demented user was, he began arranging the storage bits inside the XDS-940 into frazzled screeds, flip commentaries of the times spiked with unspeakable visions, calls to armed revolution, and dire predictions of big-brotherism—predictions rendered ironically by the use of 1984-style computer technology in a radical and creative fashion. “Benway here,” he’d announce himself in a typical entry, “just a daytripper in the sands of this fecund database.” Benway was not the only one who took on weird personas—as hackers had already discovered, the computer was a limitless extension of one’s own imagination, a nonjudgmental mirror in which you could frame any kind of self-portraiture you desired. No matter what you wrote, the only fingerprints your message bore were those of your imagination. The fact that nonhackers were getting off on these ideas indicated that the very presence of computers in accessible places might be a spur for social change, a chance to see the possibilities offered by new technology.

  Lee would later call it “an epiphany, an eye-opener. It was like my experience with the Free Speech Movement and People’s Park. My God! I didn’t know people could do this!”

  Jude Milhon developed online personalities, wrote poems. “It was great fun,” she’d later recall. “Your dreams incarnate.” One CM regular swapped electronic missives with Benway, elaborating on the Naked Lunch theme to create a computer “Interzone,” in honor of the decadent flesh market of the soul created by Burroughs. At first Benway’s messages indicated surprise at this variation; then, almost as if realizing the democratic possibilities of the medium, he gave his blessing. “Certain nefarious pirates have spoken of cloning the Benway Logo . . . go right ahead . . . it’s public domain,” he wrote.

  Jude Milhon met Benway. He was, as she described him, “very shy—but capable of functioning in the world of Community Memory.”

  The group flourished for a year and a half, moving the terminal at one point from Leopold’s to the Whole Earth Access Store, and placing a second terminal at a public library in San Francisco’s Mission District. But the terminals kept breaking down, and it became clear that more reliable equipment was essential. A whole new system was needed, since CM could only go so far with the Hulking Giant XDS-940, and in any case the relationship between CM and Resource One (its funding source) was breaking down. But there was no system waiting in the wings, and Community Memory, low in funds and technology, and quickly burning up the store of personal energy of its people, needed something soon.

  Finally, in 1975, a burned-out group of Community Memory idealists sat down to decide whether to continue the project. It had been an exhilarating and exhausting year. The project “showed what could be done. It showed the way,” Lee would later claim. But Lee and the others considered it “too risky” to continue the project in its present state. They had too much invested, technically and emotionally, to see the project peter out through a series of frustrated defections and random system crashes. The consensus was to submerge the experiment into a state of temporary remission. Still, it was a traumatic decision. “We were just developing when it got cut off,” Jude Milhon later said, “[Our relationship to] Community Memory was like Romeo to Juliet—our other halfsoul. Then all of a sudden—CHOP—it’s gone. Nipped in early flower.”

  Efrem Lipkin went off and tried once more to think of a way he could get out of computers. Others got involved in various other projects, some technical, some social. But nobody, least of all Lee Felsenstein, gave up the dream.

  Chapter 9. Every Man a God

  In June 1974, Lee Felsenstein moved into a one-room apartment over a garage in Berkeley. It didn’t have much in the way of amenities—not even a thermostat—but it only cost $185 a month, and Lee could fit a workbench in the corner and call it home. He preferred low overhead, portability, utility in a place.

  Felsenstein had a specific design project in mind. A computer terminal built on the Community Memory concept. Lee abhorred terminals built to be utterly secure in the face of careless users, black boxes that belch information and are otherwise opaque in their construction. He believed that the people should have a glimpse of what makes the machine go, and the user should be urged to interact in the process. Anything as flexible as computers should inspire people to engage in equally flexible activity. Lee considered the computer itself a model for activism and hoped the proliferation of computers to people would, in effect, spread the Hacker Ethic throughout society, giving the people power not only over machines but over political oppressors.

  Lee Felsenstein’s father had sent him a book by Ivan Illich titled Tools for Conviviality, and Illich’s contentions bore out Lee’s views (“To me, the best teachers tell me what I know is already right,” Lee would later explain). Illich professed that hardware should be designed not only for the people’s ease, but with the long-term view of the eventual symbiosis between the user and the tool. This inspired Felsenstein to conceive of a tool that would embody the thoughts of Illich, Bucky Fuller, Karl Marx, and Robert Heinlein. It would be a terminal for the people. Lee dubbed it the Tom Swift Terminal, “in honor of the American folk hero most likely to be found tampering with the equipment.” It would be Lee Felsenstein bringing the hacker dream to life.

  Meanwhile, he would live off income from freelance engineering contracts. One place he sought work was Systems Concepts, the small company which employed MIT veterans Stew Nelson (the phone wizard and coding genius) and TMRC and TX-0 alumnus Peter Samson. Felsenstein was leery of anything to do with MIT; typical of hardware hackers, he was offended at what he consider
ed the excessive purity of those hackers, particularly their insouciance when it came to spreading the technology among the “losers.” “Anyone who’s been around artificial intelligence is likely to be a hopeless case,” he’d later explain. “They’re so far removed from reality that they cannot deal with the real world. When they start saying, ‘Well, essentially all you need to do is dot dot dot,’ I just glaze over and say, ‘OK, buddy, but that’s the easy part. Where we do our work is the rest of that.’”

  His suspicions were confirmed when he met diminutive but strong-willed Stew Nelson. Almost instantly, they were involved in a disagreement, an arcane technical dispute which Lee later termed an “I’m-smarter-than-you-are, typical hacker dispute.” Stew was insisting that you could pull off a certain hardware trick, while Lee, whose engineering style was shaped by his early childhood paranoia that things might not work, said he wouldn’t risk it. Sitting in the big, wooden, warehouse-like structure that housed Systems Concepts, Lee felt that these guys were not as interested in getting computer technology out to the people as they were in elegant, mind-blowing computer pyrotechnics. To Lee, they were technological Jesuits. He was unconcerned about the high magic they could produce and the exalted pantheon of canonical wizards they revered. What about the people?

  So when Stew Nelson, the archetypal MIT hacker type, gave Felsenstein the equivalent of an audition, a quick design test for a hardware product, Lee did not play the game. He couldn’t care less about producing the technological bon mot that Stew was looking for. Lee walked out.