Hackers

by Steven Levy

  Several things have contributed to this transformation. First was the computer revolution itself. As the number of people using computers grew from hundreds of thousands to hundreds of millions, the protean magic of the machine spread its implicit message, and those inclined to explore its powers, naturally sought out their antecedents.

  Second was the Net. Millions of people are linked together on computer networks, with the bulk of serious hackers joining the ten million people on the confederation called the Internet. It’s a pipeline connecting people to each other, facilitating collaborative projects. And it’s also a hotbed of conferencing and conversation, a surprising amount of it dealing with issues arising from the Hacker Ethic and its conflicts with finances and the real world.

  Finally, true hackers became cool. Under the rubric of “cyberpunk,” a term appropriated from the futuristic noir novels of smart new science fiction writers like William Gibson, Bruce Sterling, and Rudy Rucker, a new cultural movement emerged in the early 1990s. When the flagship publication of the movement, Mondo 2000 (a name change from Reality Hackers) began to elucidate cyberpunk principles, it turned out that the majority of them originated in the Hacker Ethic. The implicit beliefs of MIT’s Tech Model Railroad Club (Information Should Be Free, Access to Computers Should Be Unlimited and Total, Mistrust Authority . . .) have been shuffled to the top of the stack.

  By the time cyberpunk hit the zeitgeist, the media was ready to embrace a broader, more positive view of hacking. There were entire publications whose point of view ran parallel to hacker principles: Mondo 2000, and Wired, and loads of fanzines with names like Intertek and Boing Boing. There was an active computer trade press written by journalists who knew that their industry owed its existence to hackers. Even more significant, the concepts of hackerism were embraced by journalists at the same traditional publications whose cluelessness had tainted hackerism to begin with.

  Once people understood what motivated hackers, it was possible to use those ideas as a measure to examine the values of Silicon Valley. At Apple Computer in particular, the hacker ideals were considered crucial to the company’s well-being . . . its very soul. Even more straitlaced companies came to realize that if they were to lead in their fields, the energy, vision, and problem-solving perseverance of hackers were required. In turn, it would be required of the companies to loosen their rules, to accommodate the freewheeling hacker style.

  Best of all, these ideas began to flow beyond the computer industry and into the culture at large. As I learned while writing Hackers, the ideals of my subject could apply to almost any activity one pursued with passion. Burrell Smith, the designer of the Macintosh computer, said it as well as anyone in one of the sessions at the first Hacker Conference: “Hackers can do almost anything and be a hacker. You can be a hacker carpenter. It’s not necessarily high tech. I think it has to do with craftsmanship and caring about what you’re doing.”

  Finally, an update of a few principal characters in Hackers, a decade later.

  Bill Gosper is a consultant living in Silicon Valley. He still hacks, pursuing the secrets of mathematics, fractals, and the game of LIFE, while making a living as a consultant. He is also still a bachelor, explaining to an interviewer in the book More Mathematical People that having children, or even a mate, would be problematic in that “no matter how conscious an effort I made to give kids the attention that they deserve, they would sense the computer was winning out.”

  Richard Greenblatt’s LISP Machines company got swallowed in the corporate maw. After working as a consultant, he now runs his own small company, devoted to making medical devices that combine voice information and data over telephone lines. He thinks a lot about the future of hacking, and rues the day when commercialization overwhelmed the kind of projects routinely undertaken (with government funding) at MIT in the golden days. But, he says, “the good news is that the cost of this stuff is falling so rapidly that it’s possible to do things as a quote-unquote hobby. It’s possible to do serious work on your own.”

  • • • • • • • •

  Unlike some of his fellow personal computer pioneers from the Homebrew era, Lee Felsenstein never became wealthy. Though he enjoyed fame within the techno-culture, his own enterprises, conducted through his struggling Golemics company, remained marginal. Recently, however, he landed a dream job as a leading engineer at Interval, a well-funded new Silicon Valley company devoted to concocting the next generation of technical wizardry. As he approaches fifty, Lee’s personal life is more settled—he’s had several serious relationships and is currently living with a woman he met through the Whole Earth ‘Lectronic Link computer network. He remains passionately committed to social change through computers. He has long been circulating the idea of forming a sort of digital Boy Scouts (though not gender specific) called the Hacker’s League. And he still believes that Community Memory, once it gets on the network, will have an impact on the world.

  • • • • • • • •

  Ken Williams is still chairman of Sierra On-Line. The company has had its highs and lows, but like its successful competitor Brøderbund and unlike the defunct Sirius, it is bigger than ever, employing around 700 people at its Oakhurst headquarters. Sierra went public in 1992; Ken’s holdings make him many times a millionaire. Sierra also has invested millions of dollars in an interactive computer-game-playing network; AT&T has purchased twenty percent of the venture. Roberta Williams is Sierra’s most popular game designer, acclaimed for her King’s Quest series of 3-D graphic adventure games.

  Ken Williams thinks that there’s little room for the old hacker spirit at Sierra. “In the early days, one person, John Harris, could do a project,” Ken says. “Now, our games have fifty or more names in the credit. We don’t do any products without at least a million development budget. In King’s Quest VI, there is a seven-hundred-page script, read by over fifty professional actors. It was the single largest voice-recording project ever done in Hollywood.”

  Ken Williams tells me that John Harris still lives in the Oakhurst area, operating a small business selling software to generate display screens for cable television operators. According to Williams, John Harris is still writing his software for the long discontinued Atari 800 computer.

  • • • • • • • •

  As one might expect of the last true hacker, Richard Stallman has most emphatically remained true to the ideals of the MIT Artificial Intelligence lab. His company, the Free Software Foundation, is, according to Wired, “the world’s only charitable organization with the mission of developing free software.” Stallman has also been an instrumental force in the League for Software Freedom, a group reflecting his belief that proprietary software is a pox upon the digital landscape. In 1991, his efforts came to the attention of those in charge of parceling out the coveted McArthur Fellowship “genius grants.” The last time I saw him, Stallman was organizing a demonstration against the Lotus Development Corporation. His protest regarded their software patents. He believed, and still does, that information should be free.

  —Steven Levy August 1993

  Appendix C. Afterword: 2010

  “It’s funny,” says Bill Gates. “When I was young, I didn’t know any old people. When we did the microprocessor revolution, there was nobody old, nobody. They didn’t make us meet with journalists who were old people. I didn’t deal with people in their 30s. Now there’s people in their 50s and 60s. And now I’m old and I have to put up with it. It’s weird how old this industry has become. When I was young I met with you, and now I’m old, I meet with you. Jesus!”

  The Microsoft cofounder and I, a couple of fifty-something codgers, are following up on the interview I conducted for Hackers with a tousle-headed Gates more than a quarter century ago. I was trying to capture what I thought was the red-hot core of the then-burgeoning computer revolution—the scarily obsessive, absurdly brainy, and endlessly inventive people known as hackers. Gates was only beginning to reap the rewards of his deal to supply
his DOS operating system to IBM, which would position Microsoft to dominate PC desktops for decades. His name was not yet a household word. Word was not yet a household word. I would subsequently interview Gates many times, but that first interview was special. I saw his passion for computers as a matter of historical import. Gates found my interest in things like his “Letter to Hobbyists” as an intriguing novelty. But by then I was convinced that my project was indeed a record of a movement that would affect everybody.

  My editor had urged me to be ambitious, and for my first book, I did shoot high, making the case that the brilliant programmers who discovered worlds in the computer were the key players in a sweeping digital transformation. This big-think approach wasn’t my original intent. When I embarked on my project, I thought of hackers as little more than an interesting subculture. But as my research progressed, I discovered their playfulness, as well as their blithe disregard of what others said couldn’t be done, led to the breakthroughs that determined how billions of people used computers. The MIT hackers helped hatch video games and word processing. The Homebrew Computer Club alchemized the hard math of Moore’s Law into something that wound up on all our desktops, in spite of the prevailing wisdom that no one would ever need or want a personal computer. And most of these hackers did it simply for the joy of pulling off an awesome trick.

  Behind the inventiveness, I discovered something even more marvelous—real hackers, no matter when or where they arose, shared a set of values that turned out to be a credo for the information age. I attempted to codify this unspoken code into a series of principles I called The Hacker Ethic. I hoped that these ideas—particularly the hacker belief that “Information Should Be Free”—would make people view hackers in a different light.

  Though the book initially landed with somewhat of a thud (the New York Times called it “a monstrously overblown magazine story”), it eventually found its audience, beyond even my over-heated expectations. Through chance encounters, email, and tweets, people constantly tell me that reading Hackers inspired them in their careers or their thinking. Thumbing through a book about Doom creator John Carmack, I learned that reading Hackers assured the geeky teenager that he was not alone in the world. When I recently interviewed Ben Fried, Google’s Chief Information Officer, he showed up with a dog-eared copy of Hackers for me to sign. “I wouldn’t be here today if I hadn’t read this,” he told me. I hear that dozens of times a year and never tire of it.

  Just as satisfying is the fact that the issues raised by the book have become some of the central controversies of the information age. On the week of the book’s publication, many of my subjects, (along with other remarkable hackers I hadn’t included), met in Marin County, California, for the first Hackers Conference. It was there that Stewart Brand, hacker godfather and Whole Earth Catalog editor, hacked the “Information Should Be Free” principle. It’s worth citing his comment, uttered off the cuff at a session I hosted called “The Future of the Hacker Ethic,” because it’s so often misquoted. “On one hand, information wants to be expensive, because it’s so valuable,” Brand said. “The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other.”

  A quarter-century later, Brand’s rephrasing is so familiar that it’s become an adjective (critics talk about the “information-wants-to-be-free crowd”). But the entire quotation neatly encapsulates the tension that has defined the hacker movement over the last quarter-century—an often heated battle between geeky idealism and cold-hearted commerce. Hackers want information to be free—not necessarily free as in beer, but free as in freedom, to quote Richard Stallman. Thankfully, Stallman’s fear that he would become like Ishi, the Last Yahi was not realized.

  The world of hackers has seen seismic changes since I wrote Hackers on an Apple II computer with WordStar. (I could only fit a half of a chapter on the floppy disks used back then.) Almost no one knew what a hacker was—some of the salespeople at the original publisher, Doubleday, urged that the book’s title be changed because of its obscurity. The Internet was a little-known network linking a few computers in government and academia. People who spent a lot of time with a computer were considered antisocial and somewhat unfit for conversation. And some of the ideas behind the peculiar set of values in The Hacker Ethic now seem so obvious that new readers may wonder why I even bothered writing them down. (“You can create art and beauty on a computer”? Duh.)

  With Hackers reaching its 25th anniversary, I set out to look once more on hackerism, by revisiting some of the people I met while researching the book. My visits also included some who didn’t make it the first time around, mainly because they had yet to make their marks in hackerdom. Part of my quest was to see what it meant to be a hacker in 2010. But another motivation was simply to reconnect with those frozen in the strange caesura that occurs when portraits are locked in print. As with Bill Murray’s road trip to visit old girlfriends in the movie Broken Flowers, I hoped to extract some meaning from seeing what had happened to my subjects, hoping that they would cast light on what has happened to hacking, and maybe give a glimpse to how hacking has changed the world—and vice versa.

  I could only visit a small sample, but in their examples I found a reflection of how the tech world has developed over the past twenty-five years. While the hacker movement has triumphed, not all the people who created it enjoyed the same fate. Like Gates, some of the people in Hackers are now rich, famous, and powerful. They thrived in the movement’s transition from insular subculture to multibillion-dollar industry, even if it meant in some ways veering from the Hacker True Way. Others, unwilling or unable to adapt to a world that had discovered and exploited their passion—or just plain unlucky—toiled in obscurity and fought to stave off bitterness. I also saw the emergence of a new wave: the present-day heirs to the hacker legacy who grew up in a world where commerce and hacker were never seen as opposing values. They are molding the future of the movement.

  • • • • • • • •

  Real hackers don’t take vacations. And judging by those standards, Bill Gates is no longer a real hacker.

  Gates himself admits as much. “I believe in intensity, and I have to totally agree, by objective measures my intensity in my teens and twenties was more extreme,” he says. “In my twenties, I just worked. Now I go home for dinner. When you choose to get married and have kids, if you’re going to do it well, you are going to give up some of the fanaticism.” Indeed, looking back, Gates says that the key years in his hackerhood came even earlier, as a teenager in the Lakeside School. “The hard core years, the most fanatical years, are thirteen to sixteen,” he says.

  “So you were over the hill by the time you got to Harvard?” I ask.

  “In terms of programming twenty-four hours a day? Oh yeah,” he says. “Certainly by the time I was seventeen, my software mind had been shaped.”

  I wonder how a kid today, when computers are ubiquitous and easy to control, could make a similar impact. Could there be a Bill Gates today? “Well, there certainly isn’t the opportunity to bring computers to the masses,” he says. The big bang of the computer revolution has already been heard. However, he says, “There’s bigger bangs.” Somewhere, Gates believes, there could be some genius who, starting from a blank set of paper, will create an entire industry. When I suggest that blank pieces of paper are hard to find, he brushes me off. “There’s tons,” he says. “In robotics. In AI. In DNA programming. And five or six things I can’t even name because I’m not young. We’ve got one hundred thirty-five million people born every year—we don’t need a high percentage. You don’t even need one a year. And so you can be extremely picky.”

  He still seemed plenty intense when I met him as a twenty-seven-year-old: brash but reluctant to make direct eye contact. For half the interview, he stared at a computer screen, testing software that used one of t
hose new-fangled mouses. But he engaged fully with my questions, rattling off his highly opinionated view of some of the people he worked with—and against—in the early days of the PC. That intensity would inform his work and his company, helping him to turn Microsoft into the world’s premier software company and make him, for a time, the richest human being in the world. Gates’s faith in hacking underscored all of his work, right down to his staffing decisions. “If you want to hire an engineer,” he says, “look at the guy’s code. That’s all. If he hasn’t written a lot of code, don’t hire him.”

  I revisit the incident of his 1976 “Open Letter to Hobbyists.” “I raised it in the sense of, ‘Geez, if people paid more for software, I’d be able to hire more people,’” he says now.

  Could he have imagined that those issues would still be around so many years later? The answer was yes, and his explanation is a mini-history lesson of intellectual property law, reaching back to Adam Smith’s theories and the unauthorized and unpaid reprinting of Benjamin Franklin’s writings by European publishers. “Benjamin Franklin was so ripped off,” Gates says. “He could have written exactly what I wrote. ‘That damned printing press!’" Gates thinks that we’re in for a long period of testing new business models to find the right balance between rights holders and readers in the digital age. And, to my ear at least, he seems to harbor some satisfaction that it’s now the journalists whining about the same thing he whined about in his letter. “Maybe magazine writers will still get paid twenty years from now,” he says. “Or maybe you’ll have to cut hair during the day and just write articles at night. Who knows?”

  Gates had to stray from the hacker’s rigid moral code to become a mainstream success. All Steve Wozniak had to do was don a pair of dancing shoes. While Woz remains a hacker legend, he has also become an unlikely pop-culture icon, turning up on the hit show Dancing with the Stars. When I met up with him for a twenty-five-year reinterview, he’d just been reunited with other contestants for a season finale. “I was dancing against Jerry Springer and Cloris Leachman,” he says, over chips and salsa at a Mexican restaurant in Fremont, California. His early elimination in no way dampened his spirits. Very little dampens Woz’s spirits, even the fact that reality TV celebrity is overshadowing his genuine accomplishments in tech history. “People come up to me and say, ‘Omigod, I saw you on Dancing with the Stars!’ I have to say, ‘Well, I did computers, too.’”