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Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution 1st Edition
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This 25th anniversary edition of Steven Levy's classic book traces the exploits of the computer revolution's original hackers -- those brilliant and eccentric nerds from the late 1950s through the early '80s who took risks, bent the rules, and pushed the world in a radical new direction. With updated material from noteworthy hackers such as Bill Gates, Mark Zukerberg, Richard Stallman, and Steve Wozniak, Hackers is a fascinating story that begins in early computer research labs and leads to the first home computers.
Levy profiles the imaginative brainiacs who found clever and unorthodox solutions to computer engineering problems. They had a shared sense of values, known as "the hacker ethic," that still thrives today. Hackers captures a seminal period in recent history when underground activities blazed a trail for today's digital world, from MIT students finagling access to clunky computer-card machines to the DIY culture that spawned the Altair and the Apple II.
Amazon.com Exclusive: The Rant Heard Round the World
By Steven Levy
Author Steven Levy When I began researching Hackers--so many years ago that it’s scary--I thought I’d largely be chronicling the foibles of a sociologically weird cohort who escaped normal human interaction by retreating to the sterile confines of computers labs. Instead, I discovered a fascinating, funny cohort who wound up transforming human interaction, spreading a culture that affects our views about everything from politics to entertainment to business. The stories of those amazing people and what they did is the backbone of Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution.
But when I revisited the book recently to prepare the 25th Anniversary Edition of my first book, it was clear that I had luckily stumbled on the origin of a computer (and Internet) related controversy that still permeates the digital discussion. Throughout the book I write about something I called The Hacker Ethic, my interpretation of several principles implicitly shared by true hackers, no matter whether they were among the early pioneers from MIT’s Tech Model Railroad Club (the Mesopotamia of hacker culture), the hardware hackers of Silicon Valley’s Homebrew Computer Club (who invented the PC industry), or the slick kid programmers of commercial game software. One of those principles was “Information Should Be Free.” This wasn’t a justification of stealing, but an expression of the yearning to know more so one could hack more. The programs that early MIT hackers wrote for big computers were stored on paper tapes. The hackers would keep the tapes in a drawer by the computer so anyone could run the program, change it, and then cut a new tape for the next person to improve. The idea of ownership was alien.
This idea came under stress with the advent of personal computers. The Homebrew Club was made of fanatic engineers, along with a few social activists who were thrilled at the democratic possibilities of PCs. The first home computer they could get their hands on was 1975’s Altair, which came in a kit that required a fairly hairy assembly process. (Its inventor was Ed Roberts, an underappreciated pioneer who died earlier this year.) No software came with it. So it was a big deal when 19-year-old Harvard undergrad Bill Gates and his partner Paul Allen wrote a BASIC computer language for it. The Homebrew people were delighted with Altair BASIC, but unhappy that Gates and Allen charged real money for it. Some Homebrew people felt that their need for it outweighed their ability to pay. And after one of them got hold of a “borrowed” tape with the program, he showed up at a meeting with a box of copies (because it is so easy to make perfect copies in the digital age), and proceeded to distribute them to anyone who wanted one, gratis.
This didn’t sit well with Bill Gates, who wrote what was to become a famous “Letter to Hobbyists,” basically accusing them of stealing his property. It was the computer-age equivalent to Luther posting the Ninety-Five Theses on the Castle Church. Gate’s complaints would reverberate well into the Internet age, and variations on the controversy persist. Years later, when another undergrad named Shawn Fanning wrote a program called Napster that kicked off massive piracy of song files over the Internet, we saw a bloodier replay of the flap. Today, issues of cost, copying and control still rage--note Viacom’s continuing lawsuit against YouTube and Google. And in my own business—journalism--availability of free news is threatening more traditional, expensive new-gathering. Related issues that also spring from controversies in Hackers are debates over the “walled gardens” of Facebook and Apple’s iPad.
I ended the original Hackers with a portrait of Richard Stallman, an MIT hacker dedicated to the principle of free software. I recently revisited him while gathering new material for the 25th Anniversary Edition of Hackers, he was more hard core than ever. He even eschewed the Open Source movement for being insufficiently noncommercial.
When I spoke to Gates for the update, I asked him about his 1976 letter and the subsequent intellectual property wars. “Don’t call it war,” he said. “Thank God we have an incentive system. Striking the right balance of how this should work, you know, there's going to be tons of exploration.” Then he applied the controversy to my own situation as a journalism. “Things are in a crazy way for music and movies and books,” he said. “Maybe magazine writers will still get paid 20 years from now. Who knows? Maybe you'll have to cut hair during the day and just write articles at night.”
So Amazon.com readers, it’s up to you. Those who have not read Hackers,, have fun and be amazed at the tales of those who changed the world and had a hell of time doing it. Those who have previously read and loved Hackers, replace your beat-up copies, or the ones you loaned out and never got back, with this beautiful 25th Anniversary Edition from O’Reilly with new material about my subsequent visits with Gates, Stallman, and younger hacker figures like Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook. If you don’t I may have to buy a scissors--and the next bad haircut could be yours!
- ISBN-101449388396
- ISBN-13978-1449388393
- Edition1st
- PublisherO'Reilly Media
- Publication dateJune 29, 2010
- LanguageEnglish
- Dimensions5.5 x 1.2 x 8.5 inches
- Print length520 pages
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| Hacker Culture A to Z | Hackers | Hackers & Painters | |
| From O'Reilly Media | A Fun Guide to the Fundamentals of Cybersecurity and Hacking | Heroes of the Computer Revolution | Big Ideas from the Computer Age |
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Product details
- Publisher : O'Reilly Media; 1st edition (June 29, 2010)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 520 pages
- ISBN-10 : 1449388396
- ISBN-13 : 978-1449388393
- Item Weight : 1.4 pounds
- Dimensions : 5.5 x 1.2 x 8.5 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #67,970 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #17 in Computing Industry History
- #37 in Computer Hacking
- #77 in Software Development (Books)
- Customer Reviews:
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About the author

Levy is editor at large at Wired. Previous positions include editor in chief at Backchannel; and chief technology writer and a senior editor for Newsweek. In early 2020, his book "Facebook: The Inside Story" will appear, the product of over three years studying the company, which granted unprecedented access to its employees and executives. Levy has written previous seven books and has had articles published in Harper's, Macworld, The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, Premiere, and Rolling Stone. Steven has won several awards during his 30+ years of writing about technology, including Hackers, which PC Magazine named the best Sci-Tech book written in the last twenty years and, Crypto, which won the grand eBook prize at the 2001 Frankfurt Book festival. "In the Plex," the definitive book on Google, was named the Best Business Book of 2011 on both Amazon and Audible.
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The new edition has more chapter divisions from the first edition's three sections. Annually for the past 25+ years, several hundred geeks gather to continue the ideas in this book. The book has changed the world in subtle not well documented attempts: Cloud 9, Interval Research, Foo Camp, etc. The general non-computing public will never hear of these. Thousands of others in some know will lust for invitations to be "flies on the wall."
Important things Steven got right missed by others: while the Apollo 17 story is all well and good, Steven picked up on the contrast between Northern and Southern California. Why did Lee's Homebrew Computer Club "succeed" while the Southern California Computer Society (SCCS) fail? This was an important lesson (I grew up in So Cal and attended the anniversary of the founding of Homebrew (HCC). More engineers up North and fewer better marketeers up North. It's a lesson from aerospace bureaucracy. Even Markoff's What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry book (good in it's own right) missed the chance to elaborate on this. This is missed by every analysis of Silicon Valley. It's even missing on wikipedia. A lot of water has passed under the bridge and this edition has 2 additional afterwards by Steven. Brand also had a short documentary (30 min) made PBS.
Steven did miss 1..2 important points. Markoff has slightly more of the experimental drug culture. The one big subtopic local to the SF Bay area which was raised by the Conference of our same name are the small but significant percentage (typically cited at about 10% as a handle) of gay and Lesbian attendees working in the computer industry. They find political/jock-ular attempts to move the computer industry else where laughable for this reason (they would want me to note this). The culture of the MIT student selection process is also left out. Honor systems had a greater influence because of this.
Steven is not a programmer. He's a journalist. He's got colleagues whom other former roommates of mine married. He did not expect this story to have the legs it has. He gets things mostly right, so read some of the other books besides his and John: Fire in the Valley: The Making of The Personal Computer (Second Edition) , Accidental Empires: How the Boys of Silicon Valley Make Their Millions, Battle Foreign Competition, and Still Can't Get a Date , Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins Of The Internet , Nerds 2.0.1 , The Dream Machine: J.C.R. Licklider and the Revolution That Made Computing Personal , Triumph of the Nerds , Triumph of the Nerds , and likely many, many other books and dissertations.
They are likely all flawed in some way or another. Bob Taylor thinks Mitch Waldthrop got history right in The Dream Machine. Some people equate Hackers (the book) to Kidder's The Soul of A New Machine . Kidder has 2..3 good points, but Data General and the MV/8000 are gone. Levy's book is head and shoulders Kidder's book.
I would hate to see some Intro to computing class force students to read this book. It's not for every one, it's flawed, it's geeky. But Levy's book contains little gems that many people outside computing will never understand about hacker culture.
A hacker is by definition in this book someone who is passionate almost beyond physical and mental limits about something, in this case machines (specifically computers). One can feel the nascent stages of the eerie marriage of carbon-based intelligence and silicone-based intelligence that is now seen as a likely, even certain for some, probability.
There are two requisites to enjoy this work as I did:
1.It will help immensely if you are a hacker, or at least a programmer, or perhaps even an experienced software user. Many of the acronyms are explained, but many are not (HTML, BASIC for example). Actually, to explain Hyper Text Markup Language or Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code and give examples is not in the province of this work. But it really does help to have done some HTML or other programming. (I have 25 years of programming experience, mostly in x-base.)
2.You will enjoy it much more if you were around for the personal computer revolution as I was. My first programming was on an Apple IIe. I remember Woz, Jobs, Gates and others of the 80's. That helps a lot in making the book meaningful and enjoyable.
If you meet those requirements, you will enjoy this book, though it will not be one you just can't put down. At almost 500 pages, you have to take it in small chunks.
If you know next to nothing about computers, but are a hacker at heart, you will probably like this book too. Just go on-line and look up things like CPU's, registers, accumulators, BASIC and other terms that may not be familiar.
A great companion to this book would be: Cyber War, by Richard A Clarke. This work discusses the modern-day bad-guy hackers who have hacked into such things as major US power grids and even weapon systems. It is a very scary warning about the power of the computer and hackers to win a war with cyber weapons.
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The author provides details of how many of the pioneers of modern computing honed their skills; the relationships between the various people and also tries to give an insight into their thinking. It's clear that in many cases, no-one was particularly driven to go down a particular route, they were just trying to see what they could do. It's equally clear that some of the development was as the result of external forces from people that probably knew little if anything about the potential of the coming computer revolution.
The book can seem a bit lengthy; the author has tried to highlight the activities a very large number of people that were active through the first few decades of the modern computing era. But it is a very worthwhile read.
Das ist aber nicht nur stellenweise extrem witzig (bzw. skurril bis besorgniserregend :), sondern auch heute noch eine für alle an Softwareentwicklung Beteiligten höchst interessante Lektüre. Für Entwickler sowieso. Gut, "Hacken" als Paradigma ist heute nicht mehr allzu hoch angesehen -- aber ich habe keinen einzigen guten Programmierer kennengelernt, der der Hackerphilosophie nicht starke Sympathien entgegenbringt und der nicht auch, wenn's drauf ankam, hacken konnte. Doch auch und gerade Managern kann ich dieses Buch nur ans Herz legen -- wer ein effizientes Softwareprojekt effektiv leiten will, der ist gut beraten, die Hackerphilosophie zu kennen und im Umgang mit Programmierern zu beachten. Und die wird in keinem anderen Buch so authentisch, anschaulich und greifbar beschrieben.
Kurz und gut, mit diesem Buch können alle ganzheitlich an Software Interessierten das Angenehme mit dem Nützlichen verbinden. Es eignet sich ausgezeichnet als unterhaltsame, unanstrengende Bettlektüre, bei der man ganz nebenbei viel über die Geschichte von Software sowie der Mentalität ihrer Entwickler erfährt. Eine seltene Synthese!








