Amazing, inspiring, informative. A mandatory read for anyone who loves what they do, even if not necessarily tech related. ( )

History, myth, manifesto and an almost universal touchstone for hackers (software engineer kind not trenchcoat wearing blue haired credit card stealing criminals).

It's really sad to read the 25th anniversary edition with the 2010 addendum to see it go from homebrew computer club to facebook. I wish the addendum was more upbeat but I guess it faithfully represents the reality. The consumers remained just that and the software running on their devices is made by corporations like Microsoft. The revolution happened differently to how the original hackers imagined it would but it's not over yet. It lives on in FSF and open source software. ( )

good start but stopped after 2/3. ( )

This is a book for those interested in the early years of computer development. I enjoyed taking a trip down memory lane to that time when computers were largely over-sized pet rocks. What makes the book work, in one respect, is Levy's explanation of the MIT students' obsession with out-doing one another when writing codes for programs. Hackers covers a good swath of the early development of computers and serves well as a testament to a new breed of logical thinkers -thinkers with a tool to help them unlock their abilities beyond the theoretical. ( )

One of my absolute favorite tech-related books of all time. Read it a half-dozen times, at least.

It's somewhat better-written than most of Levy's books (like the painful "In the Plex"), though it bears the same biases that his other work does. I don't know if it's a long-form journalist tendency, but Levy's books and articles all seem to be written as if they're telling The Whole Story, though they are heavily skewed by the people who were most willing to be interviewed extensively. Any writer has to work with the material he can uncover, but it would be nice if it were a little more openly acknowledged that a lot of the story told as history is really personal recollection on the part of a participant who *might* still have an axe to grind.

But this one is so, SO good in spite of all of that, and what a golden and glorious age it covers! ( )

Being younger than the original edition of this book, I never lived through the personal computer revolution. For someone like me this book therefore provides a valuable history lesson in the development of the hacker culture which emerged not long after the computers were conceived. In essence it is the story of evolution of computing leading to the emergence of PCs, told through stories of the leaders in this field. It is well-written and I found the pacing well suited to the material.

The stories contained here would be inspirational for anyone dealing with computing today - the levels of enthusiasm, creativity and devotion of the protagonists as described in the book are quite frankly infectious. The dangers of computer obsession and the industry are also well conveyed.

I would have been interested in reading more updated material in the 25th anniversary edition about the recent developments in computing. ( )

Hackers: The First Computer Revolution.

_*_

Note: There are a lot of players in this story, its history, so I'm not going to go into detail about the who's who that plays a part. Its probably pretty safe to say that if someone had some kind of major to moderate role during this time and was at MIT or at the companies that popped up later, then they are at least mentioned in here somewhere, at some point. It's also important to remember that this was written over twenty years ago so one has to keep that in mind also that there may be information that was found after this was written that changes the stories a little or in some cases a lot.

_*_

This is the story of the first computer revolution. From the strictly controlled first IBM Computers to computer revolution of the 80's.

The story starts off with some of the early players at MIT and follows their early exploits as they fall in love with, and in some cases become obsessed with, the emerging field of computer science. The second part of the book, from the mid 1960's to the end of the 1970's, follows some of the original players and introduces more as people begin to figure out that they may be able to make some money on these clunky boxes if they can figure out how to get people to use them. The third section of the book is set in the beginning of the 1980's to the mid 1980's. This part of the book covers the rise of the software companies such as Apple, Microsoft, and Sierra-Online.

_*__*_

Overall I really liked how this book was written and I really learned a lot about how computers moved from being hulking giants that only a few people had permission to use to begin able sit in a family room and where people could play games on them. The author also does a really good job of showing how the hacker ethic sounds good and all, but it is very hard to reconcile it to the realities of business and making money. While some of the people involved found away to at least stick to a version of it, others chose to embrace the ways of what they started out fighting against. The most obvious example of this from the book is Sierra-Online as the creators move from their humble beginnings to making millions of dollars from their computer games.

It's also important to remember that this book was written in the mid 1980's so you might get a few laughs from some of the software companies saying that they are fast, nimble, and never going to be like those huge corporations that they defected from. In fact one of them today is considered to be everything that is wrong with the video game industry. It's interesting how history seems to repeat itself. Which is the other thing that I found while reading this book. Quite a bit of it reminded me of what is happening today with the splintering of the PC market, the rise of the indies and every one trying to come up with what is going to be the next big thing for the next twenty years.

This is definitely a good read though if your interested at all in the history of the industry or how it all got started. Give it a read and you won't be disappointed. m.a.c ( )

A hacker is someone who loves to program or who enjoys playful cleverness, or a combination of the two. - From Wikipedia.

Di questi hacker parla il saggio di Levy, non di quelli a cui si pensa subito quando si sente il termine. Il libro segue l'evoluzione di questi hackers assieme all'evoluzione dei computer, il tutto a partire dal MIT per poi passare ad altri istituti, ai videogames e alla nascita di Apple.
Gli hacker del libro sono programmatori talentuosi, dei ragazzi illuminati dalla consapevolezza delle potenzialità delle macchine che nessun altro riusciva a capire, sono anche appassionati (negli anni '50 per poter aver accesso ai computer vivevano di notte) e innovativi.
E' un buon libro, ricco di dettagli, anche se forse troppi.

---
It's this kind of people the book is about, not the ones one thinks about hearing the term "hackers".
The book follows the evolution of the former kind of hackers with the one of the computer, from the MIT and other universities, to videogames and the creation of Apple.
The hackers are skilled programmers, clever guys who understood the machine potential, they were found of machines (in the '50 to have access to computer they lived at night) and innovators.
It's a good book, rich of details (sometimes maybe too much).
( )

I'm still sort of processing this book a week later. All the status updates I posted are notes I wrote on paper while I was reading, alas I ran out of scraps while sick in bed, somewhere around pg 350. (the goodreads entry says this has more pages than the copy I have, btw.)

Note: this is a really long and somewhat rambling review.

A few themes stick out, notably West coast vs East coast. No, seriously. The first section is all MIT hackers, the other two are west coast focused (hippie hackers and the gaming biz). Shockingly, the hippie hacker community actually manage to get more shit done.

My pet theory is that it relates to engagement with the rest of the world. Those MIT guys really got to lock themselves away from everything, and they really liked it that way. (There's some interesting moments of cognitive dissonance of the radical openness within the lab vs the military funding for the lab.) Which meant they were doing fascinating crazy stuff, but it didn't necessarily have any effect on the masses. Whereas the hippies -- or at least some of the influential folks in that scene -- actually cared about the rest of the world. And of course the gamers were out to make money. So they were the ones who got computing and the hacker ethos out into the world.

Another thing that I kept running into: I'd be excited about the hackers' excitement, totally understanding that sense of flow...and then: ugh, thoroughly unpleasant people. Not just unpleasant individuals, but a repellent culture. I found that most true of the MIT hackers and the gamers, FWIW.

Possibly related: the overwhelming maleness of the hacker culture throughout the entire book. A lack of balance?

Also possibly related: a quote about Stallman (p 438) - "He recognized that his personality was unyielding to the give-and-take of common human interaction." (That line? Made me bust up laughing.)

Another somewhat random observation: baby boomers. Didn't occur to me until reading the last afterword, and the conversation between Levy & Gates, that all these hackers were boomers. I'd never really thought about the hacker ethos/community as also being a creation of that generation. Huh.

What does all this mean to the things I've ranted about on my blog? (I had that in the back of my head while I was reading, based on an email conversation with the person who sent me the book.) I'm still not sure. It does make the underlying ethos of Facebook make more sense, although not any less repellent. In fact, maybe it's more so, because there's a historical thread connecting it to guys crawling through the ceiling to steal keys out of desks. (WTF? That still blows my mind.) And thus, a lack of learning how the rest of the world perceives reality.

And for the gender thing? I see it even more, and I keep wondering how much of our current situation is "inevitable" given the history, what would have happened if the history had been different, etc. It also contexualizes the history of sexism in computing against the history of sexism in general (wait, did that sentence make any sense?) - the whole damn world was sexist then. My mother was one of three women in her high school trig class, and IIRC she was the only one who finished. Whereas when I took higher math in high school, I'd say the class was split more like 50/50. So the idea of the MIT hackers that there's some biological difference that kept women out of their world is nuts. Their world -- despite its lack of football -- was hyper-masculine, disconnected from anything that wasn't the guys and the machines. The story of the woman whose program got screwed up because of an unauthorized upgrade by hackers -- and she was doing something "real" -- made a impression on me as far as that's concerned. But that impression of hackerdom being a male province only fed on itself, so that women who were interested in computers were an oddity. (For example, what happened to the "housewives" who disappeared into the community center computer? Why weren't they able to become part of the hacker community?)

As I said, I'm still processing.

And that said, it was a well-written book; fantastic story-telling. The follow-ups were interesting as well, given that the book ends basically with a reference to the movie Wargames. Good stuff, overall, and definitely recommended. ( )

This is the 25th Anniversary Edition of this venerable book, and well worth reading again! We just celebrated the 30th anniversary of the IBM Personal PC and this book is all about the people whose work led up to that amazing piece of machinery. It's good, sometimes, to go back to your roots. ( )

Excellent - Levy writes in an easy manner and clearly invested allot of time understanding the hacker scene and considering its implications. ( )

I originally read Hackers when it was new, as I'd already been reading Levy's computer explorations elsewhere. Rereading it was great fun.

Steven Levy pretty much framed the way we remember the early personal computing days with this book. This is a collection of stories--three main ones, and a host of smaller tales within the large ones. The main stories cover the MIT hackers of the 60s and 70s, the Bay Area folks revolving around the Homebrew club who perfected the modern personal computer, and Sierra Online's birth as an important gaming company. The smaller stories are mainly about individuals and events. Over the course of the book the emphasis changes from truly personal hacking to the ways hackers interacted with the development of their obsession into an important industry. This journey into business defines the book.

Then the first appendix circles back to MIT, and Richard Stallman, and the nature and culture of hacking. Two other appendices, written for the tenth and twenty-fifth anniversary editions, do some updating--and muse, once again, about the nature, costs, and benefits of the changes the main book sketches.

Levy managed to identify many the key figures in the computing revolution while that revolution was occurring, and they make appearances in the story. But most of the book's characters are minor actors on the world's stage, and could be seen as representative types were they not so clearly individuals. We see, again and again, youngsters (almost always boys) mastering machines (or code, or both), then trying to master themselves. The outcomes vary enormously.

Levy might have written a different book--perhaps Berkeley rather than MIT, ARPANET instead of Homebrew, Peachtree might replace Sierra--and reached similar conclusions. I knew midwestern PDP-7 hackers every bit as obsessed as any described here, and they'd have made fine fodder for Levy's musings. And he'd have found hackers in IBM, had he looked. But Levy's story works, and we've largely internalized it.

Terrific book. Well worth your time, if you've not read it.

Late note 8/22/10: Freiberger and Swaine's Fire in the Valley approximates the alternative book I describe a couple paragraphs up, at least in part. Both books are worth reading; in fact, I'd call them both essential to understanding this industry's roots.

This review has also been published on a dabbler's journal. ( )

An lively and detailed account of the early years of the computer revolution told from the perspective of the ambitious, sleep-deprived nerds who helped make it happen. Levy seems to have conducted extensive interviews with many of his story's leading protagonists, which allows him to capture their quirkiest aspects and probe their often complicated personal lives. He's also good about making the world of computing seem accessible to lay readers who do not have any previous knowledge of computer science. "Hackers" is reminiscent of a rock documentary in which tech geeks have replaced lead guitarists. Businesses are started in garages, unbelievably talented amateur engineers "hack," or improvise and code, into the wee hours of the morning, creativity explodes, and fortunes get made. Some of these poindexters even manage to get laid. Levy makes the technical feats that early computer fans achieved seem impressive and their boundless enthusiasm infectious, and it's amazing to realize that the computing power of yesterday's "supercomputers" is now available in today's pocket-size devices. Reading stories of how the home computer users of the late seventies tore their fingers to shreds on the Altair's switches made me more grateful than ever for my idiot-proof Mac Mini.

Sadly, the author's tone also contributes to the novel's biggest failing. Levy has well-defined ideas about how computer technology should be advanced. He's all for collaboration and "open source" sharing and dislikes bureaucracy and standardization. When many of the companies he chronicles go big and adapt standard corporate structures, his regret, and even disapproval, is palpable. Still, it's hard to imagine that the computer revolution could have grown beyond a small circle of enthusiasts without a large injection of capital and the introduction of standard, user-friendly machines aimed at the non-egghead. While Levy sometimes pauses to acknowledge this, his book sometimes threatens to turn into more of a screed than a history. At four hundred and fifty pages, "Hackers" could also be said to run a bit long, but it provides up-close reportage on an exciting and transformative time that readers are unlikely to find elsewhere. ( )

Wonderfully written and engaging history of the important people, events and developments that have shaped the information technology landscape we now take for granted. ( )

The only thing that is missing in this wonderful book is the UNIX era, which constitutes a story by itself. I was really disappointed to see that UNIX is mentioned in only one or two pages (and nothing is mentioned about UNIX and C hackers). Other than that, I think it paints a very vivid and humane picture of a very special period of the history of computing.

I would also recommend it to people who are not technical so that they can understand the mindset and psychology of hackers better. The distinction between the styles of serious business computing and passionate, obsessive, creative and innovative hacking pushing the boundaries is also made very clear in the book. That distinction still exists today, even though the flagship of modern hacking GNU/Linux is becoming more and more of a business commodity rather than a risky playground for trying out really groundbreaking ideas. I also recommend the book to programmers, hackers and technical managers so that they know more about the past of their field. The roads taken and the roads not takes.

I must admit that I learned much more about the history of Homebrew Computer Club and game hacking from this book, wish it contained more stories about Commodore, ZX Spectrum and Amiga.

So grab some Chinese food, set up your hacking environment, put this book on your desk and give it a go! :) ( )

An interesting look at the early hackers & computers. Especially for those in the computer field, it's a fun look at history. Well written & engaging. ( )

This book chronicles the history of hackers, computer programmers, computer hardware engineers, and hobbyists. It also shows the rise of these strange types as the hardware became smaller and more accessible to the general public.

The book is very well written and focuses on the stories of key persons. It is easy to relate to them and the book reveals the hidden drama, goals and ideals of computer programmers/hackers. The book gives more depth to the computer industry.

Especially interesting were the later sections where the computer game industry was discussed. That's when computers really became popular and it was interesting to see how people tried to commericialize them, such as by turning programmers into factory line workers, or by having a tv show about video game playing, or movie/game tie-ins.

Levy is a fantastic writer and really brings out the human element. I've read the book 3 times and I think I'll always be able to re-read it without feeling bored. ( )

Steven Levy's classic book explains why the misuse of the word "hackers" to describe computer criminals does a terrible disservice to many important shapers of the digital revolution. Levy follows members of an MIT model railroad club--a group of brilliant budding electrical engineers and computer innovators--from the late 1950s to the mid-1980s. These eccentric characters used the term "hack" to describe a clever way of improving the electronic system that ran their massive railroad. And as they started designing clever ways to improve computer systems, "hack" moved over with them. These maverick characters were often fanatics who did not always restrict themselves to the letter of the law and who devoted themselves to what became known as "The Hacker Ethic." The book traces the history of hackers, from finagling access to clunky computer-card-punching machines to uncovering the inner secrets of what would become the Internet. This story of brilliant, eccentric, flawed, and often funny people devoted to their dream of a better world will appeal to a wide audience. ( )

This book traces the early development of computer programming from the MIT days to the 1990's. Levy researched the MIT model railroad club that became the first group of "hackers" working on an early computer in the middle of the night. Unfortunately, this book also serves as evidence of how women were kept out of computing, or, if they engaged in it, are generally ignored. Levy is only interested in the guys, and dismisses women out-of-hand (the quote is: "it's a hardware problem" in reference to women and computing). Thinking about this book always gives me a stomach ache.

I read this as a kid and it really inspired me. I reread it recently. It stands up. ( )