This book was first published in 1984. An edition containing an afterword appeared in 1984, and the reviewed (2010) edition ends with quotes from Gates, Wozniak, Zuckerberg, and Stallman. It is a paean to a time past and to a cast of characters who lived in that time, and who the author, Steven Levy, senior writer for Wired magazine, singled out for attention as being important to the development of the computer industry in that time. At around 500 pages, with roughly ten words per line and 35 lines per page, the book asks much of the reader, and offers in return a broad, though not terribly deep, entree into critical aspects of the lives of these people, their travails, and their achievements.
The book covers the period from the late 1950s to the early 1980s. The characters in question are predominantly young men, mostly antisocial or otherwise ill at ease in dominant society (at least as described by the author). Some of them tended to pay little or no attention to personal hygiene, “proper” behavior, property rights, the law, academic rules and regulations, or women.
Most of them, however, possessed highly logic-based thought patterns. The genus into which we would place them in modern terminology is that of “geek,” and the species of geek that they occupy is “nerd” (due to their disinterest in acculturating into dominant society). Within that species, they would reside in the subspecies “computer hacker,” and in some cases also “phone hacker,” for classification purposes.
These young people, some of whom were barely in their teens, gravitated to centers of computer competency on opposite coasts of the US: MIT and Stanford. Some of them were students, and some just hangers-on, allowed to work on their own programming projects and to engage in minor mischief. One of the more interesting sociological aspects of the book is the difference between the ethos of the MIT hackers of the 1960s, who seem to have viewed hacking (an invented synonym for “coding” or “programming”) as an end in itself, and the Silicon Valley youngsters, who came to the fore in the late 1970s and the early 1980s, who saw hacking as a means to an end: a way to get rich quick.
Through the stories of the hackers, we watch the computer industry move through the massive transition from punch-card input to the use of input devices allowing for direct communication between human and machine, and from mainframes sequestered in their climate-controlled environments to minicomputers, to personal computers on desktops, in homes, and in libraries. We witness the clumsy birth of the personal computer. We watch the hackers grow up and grow old, a few reaching dot-com heights of wealth on the way, and others falling by the wayside.
In most tales based on following individuals’ lives during periods of societal change, an evil typically lurks in the background. In this book, the enemy is IBM. Levy goes out of his way, briefly but repeatedly, to criticize “evil IBM,” IBM’s employees, employees of IBM’s customers who tended to the IBM computers that their employers had bought, and large computers in general. Those references are just salvos fired for effect to separate the “good guy” hackers (some of whom were no angels themselves) from the “bad guys” (IBM and other suppliers of mainframes). It seemed to me, though, that the nature of the supposed evil done by mainframers, whatever the author thought it to have been, should either have been fleshed out or omitted.
Full disclosure and a detour: During much of the era covered by this book, I was a lawyer for IBM. In connection with one legal matter, the IBM “hackers” taught me how to code in machine language. It was a skill that was difficult to apply, and easy to forget. Levy’s hackers tended to code in assembly language or higher-level languages.
In this book, Levy announces a concept that is supposedly central to the hacker way of life: the “Hacker Ethic” (H.E.). The H.E. is a somewhat slippery concept that I wasn’t able to grasp very firmly. One of its principles is that “information wants to be free,” which, at its limit, would allow anyone anywhere to take from anyone any information he or she wanted to have. Outside of libraries, phone directories, and the Free Software Foundation, I am hard pressed to come up with a large-scale proof of that tenet. Certainly, the hackers introduced in Levy’s book did not adhere strictly to it. Our economy operates principally on the opposite premise: that information of value belongs to its creator.
Because of my extended immersion in the computer industry, I found the substance of this book (except for the ever-shifting Hacker Ethic) easy to follow and pleasant to read, despite Levy’s delivery, which is a bit precious for my taste. Your results may vary.
