by Adam Fisher
Bruce Horn: Computing could have been this incredible tool for everybody. That was the vision of people like Doug Engelbart, Alan Kay… people like that. They were all basically trying to make the world a better place through computing. And personal computing is the most powerful way to extend an individual’s human abilities. That’s the bottom line. So for example, one of the things that Doug always said is “boosting mankind’s capability for coping with complex urgent problems.” That was the point of his work, his life’s work.
Andy Hertzfeld: We couldn’t be in the world we are living in today with Doug Engelbart’s approach. Doug Engelbart did not care about making his software accessible. He really couldn’t care less. Doug didn’t care about it being easy to learn or really that easy to use. He cared about what you could do with it: “increasing human potential.” It couldn’t work for ordinary people, because ordinary people have very low tolerance for complexity. Steve saw that as much as anyone. He had such a passion for simplicity. And he’s right. If you want it to be mainstream it’s got to be as simple as possible. You never could have gotten to a billion people using it if you had a learning curve that took weeks. So you know both ideas are right. It’s a balance.
Dan Ingalls: I look at it as a great collaboration. It may not have been planned that way, but that’s how it happened.
Alvy Ray Smith: Everybody says, “Steve Jobs ripped off Xerox PARC.” He didn’t. Bill Gates did. He took Simonyi, who didn’t just know the look of the Alto, he knew how it worked. And Simonyi came up there and wrote Word and Excel based on stuff he had done at Xerox PARC. That was the end. That was the real taking of the guts of the place.
Jim Clark: SUN Microsystems were really the ones who copied Xerox PARC. They made a workstation that would do what the Xerox Alto would do—a bitmapped graphical workstation.
Chuck Thacker: There aren’t a whole lot of good ideas in the world, really. I mean the fact that the graphical user interface that we got together at PARC has lasted for as long as it has is to me quite amazing. Why haven’t we been able to do better?
Bruce Horn: I think that there is another computer revolution to be had and we haven’t had it yet, and a bunch of us are very sad about that and trying to figure out ways to make it happen. But there’s just so much momentum and so much money and so much investment. If you think about Windows and all the people who have to do Windows support and so on, there’s this huge financial infrastructure to keep it the way it is. And you know society doesn’t like to tolerate risk. And anything that allows you to have access to the internals of the computers is risky. So it’s very difficult to give people a canvas, a computing canvas on which to paint.
Alan Kay: Computing is terrible. People think—falsely—that there’s been something like Darwinian processes generating the present. So therefore what we have now must be better than anything that had been done before. And they don’t realize that Darwinian processes, as any biologist will tell you, have nothing to do with optimization. They have to do with fitness. If you have a stupid environment you are going to get a stupid fit.
Bruce Horn: I thought that computers would be hugely flexible and we could be able to do everything and it would be the most mind-blowing experience ever. And instead we froze all of our thinking. We froze all the software and made it kind of industrial and mass-marketed. Computing went in the wrong direction: Computing went to the direction of commercialism and cookie-cutter.
Jaron Lanier: My whole field has created shit. And it’s like we’ve thrust all of humanity into this endless life of tedium, and it’s not how it was supposed to be. The way we’ve designed the tools requires that people comply totally with an infinite number of arbitrary actions. We really have turned humanity into lab rats that are trained to run mazes. I really think on just the most fundamental level we are approaching digital technology in the wrong way.
Andy van Dam: Ask yourself, what have we got today? We’ve got Microsoft Word and we’ve got PowerPoint and we’ve got Illustrator and we’ve got Photoshop. There’s more functionality and, for my taste, an easier-to-understand user interface than what we had before. But they don’t work together. They don’t play nice together. And most of the time, what you’ve got is an import/export capability, based on bitmaps: the lowest common denominator—dead bits, in effect. What I’m still looking for is a reintegration of these various components so that we can go back to the future and have that broad vision at our fingertips. I don’t see how we are going to get there, frankly. Live bits—where everything interoperates—we’ve lost that.
Bruce Horn: We’re waiting for the right thing to happen to have the same type of mind-blowing experience that we were able to show the Apple people at PARC. There’s some work being done, but it’s very tough. And, yeah, I feel somewhat responsible. On the other hand, if somebody like Alan Kay couldn’t make it happen, how can I make it happen?
BOOK TWO
THE HACKER ETHIC
We are as gods and might as well get good at it.
—STEWART BRAND
What Information Wants
Heroes of the computer revolution
By the mideighties, the technologists who were creating the future in Silicon Valley started to see themselves as more than simply engineers. Alvy Ray Smith and his midnight crew at Xerox PARC, the game makers at Atari, and the Macintosh team at Apple all became convinced that they were pioneers in a new expressive medium. They felt like designers, authors, even artists—and they wanted to be recognized (and compensated!) as such. But while the engineers fought their individual battles for money and credit, it took a writer from New York City to realize that this new class of creatives added up to a bona fide culture complete with its own lore, jokes, and ethic. Steven Levy made the argument in a popular ethnography entitled Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution, and the weekend-long book party for its release was the first Hackers Conference. At the confab, the hackers of Silicon Valley (and beyond) met each other for the first time and awoke to the fact that they had nearly everything in common.
Steven Levy: When I first started writing about technology, I did a story for Rolling Stone about hackers at Stanford, but it turned out to be totally different than what I thought it was going to be. I thought I was writing about kids in college that were computer addicts. But I picked up on all the excitement involved in the personal computer revolution. So after that Rolling Stone story I wanted to write more about it and got a book contract for Hackers. Originally, it was with one publisher, but my editor went to Doubleday and I went with him. Doubleday was also doing the Whole Earth Software Catalog.
Kevin Kelly: Nobody was reviewing software then. It was considered completely nerdy, insignificant, hard to review: “Software” was floppy disks being sold in little baggies produced in people’s bedrooms. What was good? What wasn’t good? Nobody had any idea. So Stewart’s idea was Well, this is going to be big: Let’s start reviewing this and make a guide to it. We’ll have a Whole Earth Software Catalog.
Steven Levy: The publisher spent $1.3 million for it. It was the most that was ever spent at the time for a softbound book.
Fred Davis: The Whole Earth Software Catalog would be the digital follow-on to the Whole Earth Catalog and this would be a mega-blockbuster. That was what we all hoped.
Kevin Kelly: When they started to hire for the Whole Earth Software Catalog, Stewart wrote me an e-mail and asked me if I’d come out and work for them. I like to say that I was the first person hired online. This was early ’84. A lot of people were hired.
Fred Davis: I was young and wet behind the ears, just excited to have a chance to work for one of my heroes reviewing products.
Fabrice Florin: I edited the video section. I was a budding television producer at the time.
Steven Levy: I became the games editor of the Whole Earth Software Catalog and, you know, played volleyball at Gate 5 Road and got to know Stewart, who’s like one of the most amazing people on the planet. That was great. So I was
connected with those people. And when I finished my book I showed it to Kevin and Stewart—and they really liked it.
Kevin Kelly: I read Hackers and I was blown away, because I knew nothing of this world. It was all new. I mean new for me, because of course Stewart had written about the hackers in ’72—he had been tracking this a whole decade earlier.
Stewart Brand: When I submitted that article to Rolling Stone in ’72, Jann Wenner said, “This is going to set in motion a whole lot of reporting about these computer hackers and all of this,” and I thought he was right about that. But it turned out there was a ten-year hiatus between when I did that article and when Hackers came out, so the lifetimes that I experienced around computers made it seem always very slow and kind of boring and frustrating.
Kevin Kelly: For me there was this new interest in this culture that was emerging around the programmers. I was talking to Stewart about the fact that there were three generations of hackers and they hadn’t met—they themselves didn’t know about each other.
Stewart Brand: And Kevin said, “What if we can get those three generations together?”
Kevin Kelly: And the one genius of Stewart’s is that he will often take an idea and, unlike me, he’ll actually try and do something about it. He said, “We’re going to do this.” And he just kicked into his make-stuff-happen mode.
Steven Levy: They had a series of meetings with an advisory committee on who to invite. I was on the East Coast, so I didn’t go to a lot of them, but I went to some. Andy Hertzfeld was on the committee, I remember.
Andy Hertzfeld: So I got a phone call from Stewart Brand, and once a week for seven weeks we drove up to Sausalito. There were like seven hackers he got to design the Hackers Conference.
Stewart Brand: We got a pretty good influx of folks. There was Ted Nelson, obviously. Lee Felsenstein, the sort-of master of ceremonies for the Homebrew meetings, which I had never gone to. But his reputation was good.
Lee Felsenstein: By that time, Homebrew had ossified. It wasn’t new people coming anymore. There was the same old faces. I called it “the old farts society.” We had the meetings for the Hackers Conference at the tugboat that Stewart Brand lived on in Sausalito. The meetings were mostly where we threw out names of who else ought to be invited.
Andy Hertzfeld: My main contribution was just corralling the Apple crowd. I made sure all the key Mac people were there.
Lee Felsenstein: The launch of the Mac had been in January. And the conference was in November of 1984.
Steven Levy: It was on the weekend that was literally the publication date of my book, so it was like a giant book party. At that point you could sometimes get a copy of the New York Times Book Review a little early. I just spotted one for the first time in the airport bookstore while I was flying out there, and so I picked it up and there was a tiny little capsule review of Hackers. It wasn’t a full review. They trashed the book and said that it wasn’t a real book, just an overblown magazine article. I was superdepressed on the flight. It was just awful. I just wrote my first book, and it’s dead. I’m ruined, I thought.
Kevin Kelly: We had the conference at Fort Cronkhite in southern Marin. It was barracks, really primitive barracks.
Steven Levy: It was at this old army camp in the Headlands. A beautiful place, Fort Cronkhite.
Kevin Kelly: And so some of the people who we invited came. The number 114 sticks in my mind. I think that was maybe the number of people that finally were there. They were all hackers to varying degrees. I think there was only one or two women. Maybe three or four. All the rest were guys.
David Levitt: The Hackers Conference tried not to be a boys’ club, but they did not try that hard.
Steven Levy: When I got out there my spirits soared. All those people were there and what they shared was that personality which I wrote about in the book. So it was like a living proof that what I wrote about was really there—no matter what happened to the book. It was the most amazing book party.
Captain Crunch: Wozniak was there. Stewart Brand was there; Ted Nelson was there. A lot of the BASIC people from Homebrew were there. A lot of the founding fathers were there, definitely: a lot of the old-school hackers.
John Markoff: I was there, hanging out.
Fabrice Florin: You really had all the players all in one place. It was a big deal.
Michael Naimark: I remember thinking to myself that this was a moment, a really significant event.
Lee Felsenstein: It really was a gathering of the illuminati. The important thing was that all the illuminati had never before gotten in a room at the same time.
Ted Nelson: It was the Woodstock of the computer elite!
Steven Levy: It was like a secret culture until then. So now you would say, “Boy, what would the ideal computer conference be? Who would be there?” And you would say, “Oh, you’d have Mark Zuckerberg and Larry Page…” Well, this was like that—but they were people you never heard of. But they were the people who really were driving things: the secret inventors of our culture. They were all there. None of them were really famous. Even Steve Wozniak, everyone knows him now, but he wasn’t so famous then. He was just getting to be known a little bit, maybe through the US Festival and some other things. But basically back then no one knew or cared to know who these people were. We just introduced ourselves the first night.
Fabrice Florin: It started in the evening, everybody coming in. It rained a lot. It was gray skies, which was good, because we just needed to be inside.
Lee Felsenstein: That’s a hacker thing, too.
Fabrice Florin: We all gathered in one large room and we formed a circle. Everybody started talking about who they were and what they were doing. So there was a lot of palpable excitement in the room that these people were meeting for the first time.
Steven Levy: This was the moment where the consciousness of that time really became something that you could pick up on. Just like in the gay movement where there was a time when people just felt incredibly alone, that there was no one else like them. There was this consciousness that came out there: Oh, this is who I am!
Kevin Kelly: Back then you had hippies and you had preppies. The nerds were just so off the radar that encountering them was exhilarating because you realized, Oh, these are my people.
Steven Levy: I think it’s fantastic that now in high schools people can be themselves whether they are gay or a hacker, right?
Lee Felsenstein: It was really a very inspiring kind of occasion—that sort of general inspiration: Hey, we are here. We can get together. We can do things together. We are interesting people!
Steven Levy: The other thing was the laughter. Every session was joyous. People were really funny. There was so much laughter throughout. I don’t think I’ve ever been to a conference where people laughed more.
Captain Crunch: Wozniak was pulling pranks on me. He’d go into my room and hide my stash behind some computer somewhere and I’d have to go looking for it.
Kevin Kelly: There was also that nerd humor. Now we all recognize it: Reddit, xkcd, The Big Bang Theory. That was it. Now this is sort of mainstream but at that time, it wasn’t.
Steven Levy: It was a shared humor out of a shared experience there. And even though some people had never met each other, it was like you were part of a crew that had worked together for years and years. It was like inside jokes with people you’d never met before. They were also just genuinely funny.
Fabrice Florin: So, a lot of discussions that first night.
Steven Levy: It was sort of a surprise to me how amazingly it was set up. They knew because they had hackers on that committee that we were going to go all night and that we were going to need to have the machines on. Though the power did go out.
Captain Crunch: People were kind of speculating that Woz had something to do with the power being cut off.
Steven Levy: It went dark. But they kept going. They just kept talking. They were all in the same head. It was like this incredible energy. They had so
much to talk about. They were just like talking to each other, they hardly noticed. Then the power came back and there was all this excitement again.
Fabrice Florin: I remember having basically a lot of interesting conversations, including the one with Bill Atkinson. Bill was one of the designers of the Macintosh. He had an idea at the time which he hadn’t coded yet, but he was thinking about it. It was quite revolutionary.
Kevin Kelly: Bill was noodling with the idea of hypertexting but didn’t have anything to demo at that point. He was talking about his ideas.
Fabrice Florin: Bill described this vision for enabling people to browse through nodes of information and jump from one node of information to another so they could learn by association, through serendipity, and be able to click on hyperlinks and just jump from one piece of information to another. It was based on the same concepts of hypertext that Ted Nelson and Doug Engelbart had been talking about for decades before. We all sit on the shoulders of giants. We’re all inspired by these ideas.
Bill Atkinson: I viewed what was later called HyperCard as being a software erector set—where you could plug together prefab pieces and make your own software.
Kristina Woolsey: It was basically a way to take your personal documents and link them together. Just remember, when the Macintosh came out, it had an object on it that no one had ever seen. Nineteen eighty-four is when the mouse was something you could buy on a machine. And the mouse and linking go together. If you have a pointing device, linking is a natural piece. You can click on this, click on that. Fundamentally the mouse and linking are the same.
Bill Atkinson: Looking back, I sort of see that HyperCard was kind of like the first glimmer of a web browser—but chained to a hard drive.
Fabrice Florin: Then immediately after the group discussion people went downstairs. We had lots of tables and computers. It started looking more like a hackathon, which back then was a novel concept. It probably came out of this Hackers Conference. But essentially you had all of the tables and you had the Mac designers showing off their latest stuff. Andy was showing his latest hack.