Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution

Steven Levy’s 1984 book is the standard account of how computing culture formed, told through the people who built it for the love of it. Its use of “hacker” is the original one: someone who explores what a computer can do, with no connection to breaking into systems.

What it’s about

Levy divides the story into three generations. The first is the group of students in the 1950s and 60s at MIT, around the Tech Model Railroad Club, who took over the lab’s early computers and invented much of programming culture as they went, including the game Spacewar!. The second is the hardware hackers of the 1970s in California, including the Homebrew Computer Club, who helped turn the microcomputer from a kit into a product. The third is the game makers of the early 1980s, who turned the home computer into a business.

Running through all three is what Levy calls the Hacker Ethic, a loose set of beliefs: that access to computers should be unlimited, that information should be free, that authority should be distrusted, and that you judge people by their hacking and not by their credentials. Whether you find that inspiring or naive, it shaped how an entire industry thought about itself, and echoes of it show up in the open-source movement a decade later.

Why it belongs on coldboot

It is the human background to almost everything here. The Emacs article and the Linux article are both stories about hacker culture, and this book explains where that culture came from.

Keep in mind

Levy wrote it in 1984, close to the events, and it is deliberately admiring. It tells you what hackers believed about themselves. For a more critical view, read it alongside later histories. Later editions add afterwords from Levy.

Edition linked: 25th Anniversary Edition (O’Reilly, 2010).