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Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution Hardcover – January 1, 1984

by Steven Levy (Author)

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Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution

Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution
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Hackers: the undisputed masters of code who more than anyone are responsible for making computers widely available, splendidly useful, and fun. They are an astonishingly unique new breed of american hero, and Steven Levy has talked to the wildest brains among them to present the inside story of the computer revolution. What drove Ricky Greenblatt, Bill Gosper, and their friends to seize control of the multimillion-dollar computers at MIT in the fifties and sixties, so they could not only use them night after night but create, explore, and play on them? What drove Lee Felsenstein and his California hardware cohorts in the seventies to liberate the genie in the machine and give it to the people? What drove superstar game designer John Harris from the software company he had enriched in the Sierras in the eighties? It was a set of shared ideas and a vision they held in common – the Hacker Ethic. The Hacker Ethic was an idealistic and obsessive standard that led to weird lifestyles, to hilarious clashes with bureaucracies, and even to potential illegalities: in their urge to explore computers, hackers don’t necessarily care whose computer is being explored. But their hands-on, anti-authority Ethic, along with their technical brilliance, enabled them to triumph – as they do in scene after scene of this twenty-five-year epic of young American wizardry.

Print length

458 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Anchor Press/Doubleday
Publication date

January 1, 1984
ISBN-10

0385191952
ISBN-13

978-0385191951
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A well-written account of computer pioneers - just make sure you're interested in this stuff

Reviewed in the United States on February 27, 2008

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As the description mentions, Steven Levy's "Hackers" is not about computer criminals, but refers to the more traditional definition of "someone who delights in having an intimate understanding of the internal workings of a computer and computer network." I purchased this book because I was intrigued with Sierra On-Line, and was interested in learning more about some of the founding software companies and people who became rich from the computer boom of the early 80s. Having just finished Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins Of The Internet about the creation of the Internet, and being bored out of my mind with it, I was hoping "Hackers" would be a little more exciting. Unfortunately, the first half of the book mirrors "Wizards" in a lot of ways and discusses much of the same content. What's more, before purchasing, I had no idea this book was published in 1984 and that it would naturally only discuss computers up to the early 80s.

"Hackers" is divided into three parts:

1. True Hackers - 1946 - mid 70s. This section focuses on the early computer pioneers at MIT, such as the Tech Model Railroad Club, the Lincoln Laboratory, and experimenting with large mainframes such as the PDP-1 and TX-0. It describes in detail how they would spend hours punching in code for these computers to come up with the simplest hacks. I struggled to get through this section. It was so incredibly detailed and filled with minutiae that it took me two months and several breaks to get through the 200+ pages. Some of it was interesting, but there was just so much information I didn't need to know or care about.

2. Hardware Hackers - Mid 70s - 1980. All about the Homebrew Computer Club and the development of early personal computers, focusing on the Altair 8800, TRS-80, development of BASIC, and Stephen Wozniak's creation of the Apple and Apple II Personal Computers. This section was definitely more lively than the first, but there is still nothing that couldn't have been summed up in a 4 or 5 page magazine article or a visit to Wikipedia.

3. Game Hackers - Late 70s - 1982. This section is largely about the development of the game company Sierra On-Line, although the first few chapters spend a lot of time discussing early game development. This section was the most interesting in the book, especially to gain some insight into the culture that existed in the gamin industry back in its development, but not as exciting as I thought it was going to be. Since the book was published in 1984, there is no mention of the incredibly popular King's Quest series that launched Sierra to the top of the industry.

The main underlying theme of this book is the "hacker ethic," characterized by open access to computers (no passwords), mistrust of authority, computers are beneficial to changing people's lives, and all information should be free. It is very heavily discussed throughout the book and it's implications on the industry and the people in it. If this were a thesis paper about the hacker ethic I would have given Mr. Levy an A+ for staying so on focus. Unfortunately, it's not a thesis paper. If you are purchasing this book for entertainment purposes, make sure you are REALLY interested in early hacker culture. I thought I was but the book was just too dry for me. Not to mention it was hard to keep up with the hundreds of people introduced in the book. On the plus side, it is exceptionally well-researched and hardly seems dated at all. Until I got to the last few chapters, I had no idea the book was over twenty years old.

Edit: 5/16/11 - Revising my rating on this product to reflect the material rather than my expectations. I still feel like it's too old to reflect what we now know about the "computer revolution" and can use some updating, and that the book needs to be edited more to remove parts of it that slow down the flow and do not contribute to the narrative.

4 people found this helpful

Well, not quite heros in my book, but good friends

Reviewed in the United States on February 14, 2011

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Steven's book has become a social phenomena in its own right. One moment, I am reading this book in the 80s and the next I am on a porch having a nice quiet conservation with Rick Greenblatt ("An honor to meet you"). Following that I'm on the Steering Committee for the Conference started by Stewart Brand. Stewart deserves a lot of credit, but Steven (whom I've met but don't know quite as well, since I am into high end computing not microcomputing but with some experience on Xerox workstations {life changing}). I shared an office with Jack Dennis the year prior while Jack was on sabbatical in California (we were both tea drinkers in a sea of coffee drinkers). I had not realized that he was into model trains. So I give copies of this book to East Coast friends trying to understand Santa Clara Valley. So I have lived a lot of the periphery of this book.

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.

5 people found this helpful

A book that lets people know what the term Hacker really means

Reviewed in the United States on June 3, 2022

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Starts with the early days when all you had was 8k of memory and you had to write most of your own programs in BASIC. The free flow of information was the by word until the money boys like Gates corrupted the system. I'm not a Gates Hater, even though a lot of his business tactics were heavy handed. He did force the industry into a form of standardization.

Top reviews from other countries

Mole

This is where it started

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on January 9, 2011

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If you work within the field of computing and have an interest in how and why things have developed the way they have, then this book is one that you really should get. In this context, "Hacker" is not a perjorative term; it does not refer to the people that set out to maliciously damage systems, but rather to those that tried to understand how and why things work they way they do, by deconstructing them, and then trying to make them work more efficiently.

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.

2 people found this helpful

A. I. Mackenzie

Excellent computing history

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on January 28, 2016

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This is now a classic, I read it in the early nineties first and this is an updated version.
It follows various eras of computing the early pioneers in the fifties labs (Cambridge, Boston), the Homebrew era in Northern California and finally home games programming in the 80s. My favourite era is the homebrew one that led to Apple computers.
The writing is consistently entertaining and there's a lot of historical detail. I reread this on my kindle recently and enjoyed it the second time.

One person found this helpful

la Plume de ma Tante

An extraordinary account of the growth of the home computer.

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on January 8, 2014

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If you thought the term 'Hackers' had anything to do with computers you were mis-informed - but they invented the entire industry, bootstrapping it from skills learned from people running the early mainframe computers while on the search for components for their giant train set. Amazingly detailed, Steven Levy has lived and worked among the generation of geeks who became the household names from Microsoft and Apple, the games houses and software companies that are now world wide big business. And with the development of the Raspberry Pi it might be starting all over again!!

Chris Smith

Entertaining and Informative

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on October 10, 2013

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This is a great book for anybody interested in computers, very interesting and eye opening content. I'm an IT consultant and programmer so this book was brilliant for me.

Boso

How Computers developed from the middle of the 20th century to what they are now

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on June 28, 2017

Verified Purchase

Best non fiction story you will buy relating to computers.

One person found this helpful

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