I was never a lone hacker, but one of many. Despite stories you may have read about anti-social nerds glued permanently to display screens, totally addicted to the computer, hackers have (human) friends too. Through timesharing (where many people use one computer) and networking (where many computers are connected together), the computer makes possible a new form of human communication, better than the telephone and the postal system put together. You can send a message by electronic mail and get a reply within two minutes, or you can just link two terminals together and have a conversation. This sort of thing used to be a near-exclusive province of hackers, but is nowadays quite commonplace through commercial services such as Compuserve and GEnie.

Speaking of nerds: a hacker doesn't have to be a nerd (but it helps). More important, it is certainly not true that all nerds are hackers! Too many nerds are just nerds. But I must mention one more story from my days at MIT. When the famous National Lampoon "Are You a Nerd?" poster first came out in the mid-1970s, a secretary at MIT bought a copy to post outside her office door so everyone at the laboratory could enjoy the joke (which we did, immensely). As she was taping it up, I happened to be leaving for dinner, briefcase in hand. I glanced at the poster, then put on my glasses (heavy black frames I still wear them), hiked up my polyester slacks an extra half-inch, and assumed The Pose (booger and all). I matched about 80% of the itemized points: button-down shirt with loose collar, six pens in my shirt pocket, same haircut too bad I had left my slide rule at home. The poor secretary turned beet-red and protested, "N-no! I didn't mean you!" I just chuckled and told her that the poster artist had obviously done a remarkably good job. (Being a nerd isn't all bad sometimes it can turn a girl's head. Once, when I was fifteen, I was strolling across Copley Square in downtown Boston and passed three bubblegum teenyboppers. I just barely caught one of them exclaiming to her friends, "Wow! Did you see all those pens?")

Perhaps one reason for the nerd-hacker connection is that the truly dedicated hacker does little else but eat, sleep, and hack. Hackers often work strange hours that put them out of synch with normal humanity. Some hackers just get up at dinnertime and go to bed after breakfast, or perhaps get up at noon and sack out at 4 A.M. (See the terms phase and night mode for more information on hackers' sleeping schedules.) Before computers were inexpensive enough to be 'personal', they had to be shared, either by taking turns or by what is called timesharing (where the computer is programmed to take turns at split-second speeds). Either way, there was heavier demand for the computer during the day than at night, because