Unlike Kidder, Levy had to make people reconsider what they thought they already knew. By 1984, in contrast, the computer geek was a prominent part of popular culture. Kidder's assumed readers had never seen a minicomputer, still less designed one. 32–37), but a lot had changed during the interval. Hackers was published only three years after Tracy Kidder's The Soul of a New Machine, explored in my last column (January 2021, p. (The most common current meaning of hacker, online thieves and vandals, was not established until a few years later).

Levy locates the origins of hacker culture among MIT undergraduates of the late-1950s and 1960s, before tracing its development through the Californian personal computer movement of the 1970s and the home videogame industry of the early 1980s.

11 Hackers were a subculture of computer enthusiasts for whom programming was a vocation and playing around with computers constituted a lifestyle. Its march from obscurity to newspaper headlines owes a great deal to tech journalist Steven Levy, who in 1984 defied the advice of his publisher to call his first book Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution. This book is not just for geeks - it's for everyone interested in origins of the computer revolution.Credit: Andrij Borys Associates, Shutterstockįorty years ago, the word 'hacker' was little known. 'Hacker' is often a derogatory term today, but 40 years ago, it referred to people who found clever and unorthodox solutions to computer engineering problems - a practice that became known as 'the hacker ethic.' In this book, Levy takes you from the true hackers of MIT's Tech Model Railroad Club to the DIY culture that spawned the first personal computers - the Altair and the Apple II - and finally to the gaming culture of the early '80s.įrom students finagling access to clunky computer-card machines to engineers uncovering the secrets of what would become the Internet, Hackers captures a seminal period in history when underground activities blazed a trail for today's digital world.

It's a fascinating story of brilliant and eccentric nerds such as Steve Wozniak, Ken Williams, and John Draper who took risks, bent the rules, and took the world in a radical new direction. Hackers traces the exploits of innovators from the research labs in the late 1950s to the rise of the home computer in the mid-1980s. Steven Levy's classic book about the original hackers of the computer revolution is now available in a special 25th anniversary edition, with updated material from noteworthy hackers such as Bill Gates, Mark Zukerberg, Richard Stallman, and Tim O'Reilly.

Heroes of the computer revolution