Forty years ago, the word “hacker” was little known. Its march from obscurity to newspaper headlines owes a great deal to tech journalist Steven Levy, who in 1984 defied the advice of his publisher to call his first book Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution. Hackers were a subculture of computer enthusiasts for whom programming was a vocation and playing around with computers constituted a lifestyle. Levy locates the origins of Hacker Culture among MIT undergraduates of the late-1950s and 1960s, before tracing its development through the Californian personal computer movement of the 1970s and the home videogame industry of the early 1980s.
The original hackers were neither destructive nor dedicated to the pilfering of proprietary data, unlike the online vandals and criminals who later appropriated the word, but they were quite literally antisocial. Levy describes their lack of respect for any rules or conventions that might limit their access to technology or prevent them from reconfiguring systems. They are seen by-passing locked doors, reprogramming elevators, and appropriating tools.
Not all observers of hacker culture were so accepting. Levy rejected MIT professor Joseph Weizenbaum’s portrayal of the institute’s “computer bums” (a term borrowed from [Stuart] Brand), which recalled the sordid opium dens found in Victorian novels: “bright, young men of disheveled appearance, often with sunken glowing eyes, can be seen sitting at computer consoles, their arms tensed and waiting to fire their fingers,…
MIT professor Sherry Turkle presented an equally biting picture of MIT’s hacker culture in her ethnographic study The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit, another classic study of early computer use.16 As a humanist joining MIT’s faculty she had “immersed herself in a world that was altogether strange to me.” Turkle spent most of the book exploring the cognitive possibilities computing opened for education and personal development. Yet she used the hackers primarily as a cautionary illustration of what happens when human development goes wrong.
—CACM, “When Hackers Were Heroes“
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