Category: Net Culture

A Brief History of Hackerdom

A Brief History of Hackerdom.

Prologue: The Real Programmers

In the beginning, there were Real Programmers.

That’s not what they called themselves. They didn’t call themselves `hackers’, either, or anything in particular; the sobriquet `Real Programmer’ wasn’t coined until after 1980, retrospectively by one of their own. But from 1945 onward, the technology of computing attracted many of the world’s brightest and most creative minds. From Eckert and Mauchly’s first ENIAC computer onward there was a more or less continuous and self-conscious technical culture of enthusiast programmers, people who built and played with software for fun.

The Real Programmers typically came out of engineering or physics backgrounds. They were often amateur-radio hobbyists. They wore white socks and polyester shirts and ties and thick glasses and coded in machine language and assembler and FORTRAN and half a dozen ancient languages now forgotten.

From the end of World War II to the early 1970s, in the great days of batch processing and the “big iron” mainframes, the Real Programmers were the dominant technical culture in computing. A few pieces of revered hacker folklore date from this era, including various lists of Murphy’s Laws and the mock-German “Blinkenlights” poster that still graces many computer rooms.

Some people who grew up in the `Real Programmer’ culture remained active into the 1990s and even past the turn of the 21st century. Seymour Cray, designer of the Cray line of supercomputers, was among the greatest. He is said once to have toggled an entire operating system of his own design into a computer of his own design through its front-panel switches. In octal. Without an error. And it worked. Real Programmer macho supremo.

The `Real Programmer’ culture, though, was heavily associated with batch (and especially batch scientific) computing. It was eventually eclipsed by the rise of interactive computing, the universities, and the networks. These gave birth to another engineering tradition that, eventually, would evolve into today’s open-source hacker culture.

A Brief History of Hackerdom

A Brief History of Hackerdom.

Abstract

I explore the origins of the hacker culture, including prehistory among the Real Programmers, the glory days of the MIT hackers, and how the early ARPAnet nurtured the first network nation. I describe the early rise and eventual stagnation of Unix, the new hope from Finland, and how `the last true hacker’ became the next generation’s patriarch. I sketch the way Linux and the mainstreaming of the Internet brought the hacker culture from the fringes of public consciousness to its current prominence.

When Nerds Collide — Medium

When Nerds Collide — Medium.

You might not consider hackers to be a tribe apart, but I guarantee you that many — if not most — hackers themselves do. Eric S. Raymond’s “A Brief History of Hackerdom,” whose first draft dates to 1992, contains a litany of descriptions that speak to this:

They wore white socks and polyester shirts and ties and thick glasses and coded in machine language and assembler and FORTRAN and half a dozen ancient languages now forgotten .…

The mainstream of hackerdom, (dis)organized around the Internet and by now largely identified with the Unix technical culture, didn’t care about the commercial services. These hackers wanted better tools and more Internet ….

[I]nstead of remaining in isolated small groups each developing their own ephemeral local cultures, they discovered (or re-invented) themselves as a networked tribe.

As We May Think – The Atlantic

As We May Think – The Atlantic.

In 1945 the computing pioneer wrote “As We May Think” the essay that essentially predicted the Internet. Bush envisioned a desklike device he called a memex that would display documents and pictures on a screen and let you create hyperlinks among them.

What really intrigued Bush was that you could share your “trail”—the steps that took you from one document to another. This would be different, he noted, than sharing the results of your research. You’d also be sharing the process, a glimpse into the normally invisible life of a mind at work. Bush imagined a class of superusers called trail blazers: “The inheritance from the master becomes, not only his additions to the world’s record, but for his disciples the entire scaffolding by which they were erected,” he wrote.