Discussion Questions:
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What are the defining characteristics of hacker society?
How relevant are the different aspects of the Hacker Ethic (chapter 2 of Levy)
to today’s computer enthusiasts.
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What was it about MIT that allowed the hackers to thrive
there? What, if anything, changed from Levy’s MIT in the early 1960s to
Turkel’s in the early 1980s?
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Discuss the non-computer technologies, systems and
activities that the hackers embraced? What elements do they have in common
with computer technology? Are there any other activities which encourage
similar traits?
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The hackers were driven by an assumption that direct
access to computers could make the world better. For them this may have been
true, but how widely shared were their interests? What would have to change
for the computer to be a mass-market item?
Key Points to Revise
 | Relationship between hackers and earlier/non-computer technologies. |
| Distinguishing features of hacker culture. |
| Main achievements of MIT hackers. |
Additional Resources:
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If you’re curious about the origins of timesharing, a major
MIT story, then see chapter 6 of Hackers. (In fact, I should probably have set
chapter 6 instead of chapter 4).
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There is a site devoted to SpaceWar --
http://www.wheels.org/spacewar/. Its most interesting feature is a scan of a
famous 1972 Rolling Stone article by Stuart Brand.
The article introduced a mass audience to hacker culture and to the
then-novel concept of personal computing.
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You can play the original spacewar in your web
browser! In
a clever but useless feat of programming, a Java program plugs itself into your
browser. The Java runs an emulator for a PDP-1. The PDP-1 runs the spacewar
program. (More on emulators later)
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The MIT group played an enormous role in the development of
the culture and vocabulary of the broader hacker community, and hence of the
pre-commerical internet. This is most clearly documented in The New Hacker’s
Dictionary and its on-line version, the Jargon File – an updated version of
a document originally produced at MIT. Read it at
www.tuxedo.org/~esr/jargon. Its editor, Eric S. Raymond, is himself a major
figure in the current free software movement and we will be considering him (and
the movement’s links to the original MIT hackers) later in the course.
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