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Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution - 25th Anniversary Edition

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This book is a history of the beginning, growth and rise of the use of computers by people outside of the big businesses and governments that worked to create them in proprietary silos. This 25th anniversary edition of Steven Levy's classic book retains its detailed and interesting chronicle of the events that brought computing power to the masses. It also records some of the problems, pitfalls, and failures along the way. Here you will find many names that computer lovers are sure to recognize from Bill Gates to Richard Stallman as well as many that are not as well known, but that deserve to have their victories recorded also.

I greatly appreciate that this book exists. To be honest, it wasn't always a fun read. That isn't a commentary on the quality of the writing, but rather on the ups and downs of the narrative. There were times when I found myself wishing I was there in the middle of the action and other times when I had difficulty knowing who to root for. There were still other moments when I found myself cringing as I read about events long past, wishing that different decisions had been made or disappointed at the actions and attitudes of geniuses.

I'm not going to spoil the book for anyone interested by giving out specific details. All I'll say here is that the story begins with a bunch of model railroaders who love technology and who fall in love with a computer they discover they may access freely in an out of the way room in a building at MIT in the late 1950s. They took their love of piecing together technological gadgets in imaginative and creative ways (hacks) and applied it to this new tool / toy. The story follows their exploits and adventures through the 1960s en route to a second wave of hackers in Northern California in the 1970s who take the love home, creating machines on a smaller budget that could be used by ordinary people. Hot on their heels were another group of Californians who led a third wave, hacking software to do things never before dreamed of and leading the way to the commercialization of the computer. The book ends with a series of afterwards, one written when the book was first published in 1983, another written 10 years later, and another just added to this newly published edition. Each adds details and commentary to the history that were not known at the time of the original interviews and research.

If the history of hacking, free and open source software and the attitudes embodied in the current movement interest you, you will appreciate this book greatly.

To find out how you got to where you're at, you often have to look at where you came from. In the world of computers, that means going back to the late 1950's to observe the mindset and personalities that shaped the growth of the personal computer. Steven Levy has what could be considered the best analysis of those individuals in his book Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution - 25th Anniversary Edition. Yes, it's been 25 years since since this book was first published in 1985. But it's as relevant now as it was then. I read this book quite some time ago and enjoyed it immensely. My enjoyment with rereading it hasn't diminished.

Contents:
Part 1 - True Hackers - Cambridge - The Fifties and Sixties: The Tech Model Railroad Club; The Hacker Ethic; Spacewar; Greenblatt and Gosper; The Midnight Computer Wiring Society; Winners and Losers; Life
Part 2 - Hardware Hackers - Northern California - The Seventies: Revolt in 2100; Every Man a God; The Homebrew Computer Club; Tiny BASIC; Woz; Secrets
Part 3 - Game Hackers - The Sierras - The Eighties: The Wizard and the Princess; The Brotherhood; The Third Generation; Summer Camp; Frogger; Applefest; Wizard vs. Wizards
Part 4 - The Last of the True Hackers - Cambridge - 1983: The Last of the True Hackers; Afterword - Ten Years Later; Afterword - 2010
Notes; Acknowledgments; About the Author

When you walk into a Best Buy or any other retailer today, you simply pick up the computer you want, head home, plug it in, and away you go. But when you go back to the beginning, you start to understand just how amazing these things are. Levy steps into the inner sanctums of the large mainframe computers, devices that cost millions of dollars and allowed few the privilege of touching them. But there were some who immediately understood the power and the vision, and they weren't going to be denied the opportunity to play, learn, and push the limits. Hackers goes from those who spent time re-engineering model railroad layouts to those who took that same drive to the world of bits and bytes. Everything was a challenge, what with virtually no memory and nothing much in the way of input/output devices. But even though their efforts weren't always appreciated or welcome, these hackers continued to lead the way to discover what *was* possible. As the mainframes continued to shrink, more and more individuals focused on what could be done if you put the CPU and memory together with a keyboard and screen. The Homebrew Computer Club was the birthplace of people like Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, who went on to form Apple and create the history of the personal computer. Levy also digs into the birth of the fast-paced world of computer gaming, when companies like Atari, Apple, Sierra, and others wrote computer games to push the boundaries of the ever-more-powerful personal computers, while also making the programmers literal superstars and millionaires. For those who had the right skills and the drive to learn, there was seemingly nothing they couldn't accomplish.

What makes the book shine, over and above the historical narrative, is the commentary and analysis of the hacker code and mentality. At the start, there was little financial gain to be found by writing code and building new devices to hook onto the computer. As such, the creed was that everything was open and information was to be shared. But as time progressed and companies started to form around software and hardware, it became harder to maintain that pure approach, and information started to become proprietary. Things once open and free came with price tags. People like Richard Stallman, the last "true hacker", railed against this "perversion" (as he still does today), but few follow him at the level of fanaticism he demands. But understanding his mindset helps to understand the philosophy behind open source software, where software is still free as in beer and free as in speech.

If you haven't read Hackers, either in the original or new edition, I would recommend it. It's a fascinating read.

I am grateful for O'Reilly's Twenty-Fifth Anniversary Edition of This Classic Work. While several books have been written through the years giving partial biographies of the pioneers and leaders of Computer Software Development, none other than this classic gives a fully developed creative and fun picture of lives and adventures of these programming pioneers. Among the important and extremely entertaining stories Steven Levy capably tells are the adventures of the MIT Tech Model Railroad Club and there adventures with early Minicomputers including the development of the pioneering Space War game, the Meetings of the Homebrew Computer Club that led to the Altair and Apple early home computers, and Richard Stallman's war to free software from the development of EMACS and LISP Machines through the initiation of the GNU Movement.

This is a biography of technical savants by a popular technical journalist told in stories as intriguing as the best of fiction. This Twenty-Fifth Anniversary Edition is noteworthy both for bringing to the fore a disappearing classic of the software revolution and in providing interesting but brief followup's on the subsequent interests and careers of these savants and hackers through the present days. It importantly corrects the misuse and denigration of the idea of what a hack is in the popular press and brings us forward to the days of the Makers and Hackerspaces.

--Ira Laefsky MSE/MBA
IT Consultant & HCI Researcher

This book was amazing. What started out as a look into an interesting subculture has contributed to the modern technological society as a whole -- and managed to be a very good read in the process. Steven Levy's book is probably more important and fascinating to read now than it was when he first wrote it in 1984, because of the flourishing of the hacker culture since that time.

This book has inspired me to enjoy science fiction because of its subjects' adoration for Asimov and Heinlein, to build robots because of its descriptions of the pioneers of artificial intelligence, to study electrical engineering in college, to take a C++ class and do well in it even though I'm admittedly bad at programming, to play Apple II games like the Oregon Trail and miss Sierra On-Line (the best gaming company of the 1990s), and so on.

Basically, this book is the groundwork for insight into how to live a modern life, or one geared towards the future.

I never re-read books, but I look forward to re-reading this one after a few more years of diving deeper into the subjects contained within these chapters.

PS: The 25th Anniversary Edition adds 16 pages in an Afterword, updating the reader on the lives of the characters in this book. This addition is every bit as inspiring as the original book, and I'm glad I picked it up at my local bookstore.

This is an updated version of the original Hackers By Steven Levy first published 25 years ago. There is a 14 page afterword that updates stories about Bill Gates, Stewart Brand, Steve Wozniak, Andy Hertzfeld, Richard Greenblatt, Richard Stallman, Lee Felsenstein, Paul Graham, and introduces Mark Zuckerberg.

The book is valuable as an introduction to those who made the personal computer "revolution" an exciting place to be in the 80s and 90s. But if you read one of the earlier editions, there is not a great deal of additional information in this book.

Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution - 25th Anniversary Edition Steven Levy
The book provides an interesting view of the history and growth of computers, seeing through the eyes of the hackers; the somewhat elusive group of people that have never cared much for contention, have pushed the limits of both computing hardware and software, and have at the same time engage in headed and headstrong arguments about computers, hardware and software.
The book discusses three main groups of hackers, representing the early era's of modern computing. The first were the group of mainframe hackers bases at MIT in the 50's an 60's, using computing time on the hulking mainframes, trying to get the monolithic batch-processing machines to bend to their will.
The second group were the so-called hardware hackers; a group of hardware junkies at Berkeley, figuring out how to assemble pieces hardware to create their own working computers in the 70's. This was the days of Alteir, the beginning of Intel and Steve Wozniak (who created the original Apple and Apple II).
The final group focuses largely on computer games; an industry which sprung up in the 80's with the proliferation of arcade games, and the mass movement of computers into people's homes.
While the book is not specifically written for computer junkies, it is far more interesting for the hackers (or at least want-to-be hackers) out there. Somebody without a passionate interest in computers or programming would probably get a little board with the level of detail.
However, for those like me who work the field, it is a fascinating story of some eccentric people that literally shaped the computing world as we know it today. While there is a strong focus on the development of Apple, and the gaming world for the Apple (at least in the second half), there is very little mention of the IBM/Microsoft route, and the development of applications and games for the so-called PC world. This almost reflects the modern Apple/PC divide.
While at times I find the book little verbose, it is nonetheless a fascinating story. The edition I read was a 25'th anniversary edition of the book, which was originally published in 1985, a testimony to the longevity of the book. Well worth reading.

I have to admit that while reading about the first generation hackers at MIT in the 50's and early 60's, I had forgotten that the book was originally published in the early 80's. As the narrative advanced toward the late sixties and some of the next generation of hackers with access to DECs PDP machines, I was anticipating reading about the guys at Bell Labs who wrote UNIX and C on PDP hardware. But that story never emerged. I was still perplexed about this, reading about the Altair and the early Apple computers in 70's. Then I realized this was published in 1983, and thought, well UNIX was still fairly obscure at the time. The K&R C book was published in 1978, however.

I still can't reconcile a book about the history of Hacking (in the original sense of the word and not the current usage applied to malicious criminals) that doesn't cover in any detail the evolution of UNIX/Linux and the Internet. The ARPANet is mentioned in passing. I skipped most of the sections on the Sierra Online people, because that story wasn't compelling to me. (I can see how others who are passionate about game hacking would be interested in that section).

I can't imagine what else could have been a bigger influence on hacking than the emergence of the Internet and the ability to run your own copy of an OS that also powers this massive network of networks. Freely sharing your ideas, code and information with others anywhere in the world is the main theme of this book and the Internet made that possible. Granted in 1983, this was not yet possible for most people hacking on the early PCs and Apples. And yet, this author almost completely ignores this area of computing. It would be like writing the history of the US auto industry and spending more time discussing Studebaker than Ford. (No offense to Studebaker, but come on).

The best parts of the book are the stories of the ingenious ways the MIT guys hacked on massive hardware with less computing power than a $10 pocket calculator.

I love this book, and would normally give it five-stars, but I am very disappointed that the table of contents is completely messed up on the Kindle--it only displays one or two lines per page, which makes it unusable. Considering how this edition of the book is being marketed as eBook friendly, it seems like someone at the publishing company would have caught this problem since the formatting errors are visible as soon as the book is opened for the first time.

Update Aug. '11: I recently installed Kindle for Mac, and the same Table of Content formatting errors show up there as well, not just on my Kindle. These formatting errors makes the ToC 21-pages long, instead of what should probably be about 2-pages.

For anyone who works in the computer field or has interest in technology, you need this book! It's one of those top 5 or 10 books I always suggest people get because it covers some history of computing that's generally overlooked. Also Steven Levy is a wonderful writer and really knows how to tell the story.

Very interesting book that covers the golden era's of the computer revolution. Part One was my preferred, sometimes I felt myself in the same room of the PDP-1, drinking Coke and eating Chinese food. It's impressive how those MIT hackers passed their basic needs to second plan, hacking was the principal. Part Two talks about the implantation of the personal computer, with the revolution of the hardware hackers, with the Apple II and Atari leading the crowds. Steve Wozniak was a star hero at this one. I was excited about Part Three, being myself a fan of Space Quest, I was curious about the Sierra On-Line story and his big mentor, Ken Williams. This part talks about the gaming revolution that happened in the early 80's and the big bucks that guys like Ken Williams made with that. Part Four talks about the fight that Richard Stallman had that leaded to the today's open-source.
I was also surprised with the fact that a book like these didn't even mention about Kernighan or Richie and the development of C and UNIX.
Some people can be fooled (as I was) with the title of this book, Hackers, should point today to something different, maybe some guys or groups, trying to enter in private systems, exploiting some software and stuff like that. But after reading all this book, I understood that this is more the history of the computer/programming revolution instead of some story of a script kiddie trying to crack something. This book was published in 1983, so the hacking scene has we know today, was unlikely to be known at that era.
I've learned a lot with this book, not technical stuff, but historical meanings. This book made me like even more of this digital world.