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I am a hacker of a later generation than Guy Steele and the coauthors of the first edition, and my history is different from theirs in a way that illuminates the major changes that have taken place in hackerdom since that edition was published in 1983. This revised and massively expanded edition is a response to those changes, so I think a bit of my history might illuminate its whys and wherefores. |
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Back around 1968, I was one of the first few hundred people in the world to play a video game. I was about twelve years old, and my father (an executive for UNIVAC and himself formerly one of the very first programmers back in the days of the great electromechanical dinosaurs of the 1950s) sat me down in front of an $8 million mainframe and showed me how. The program was a demo for the UNISCOPE 3000, which many have called the first commercial video terminal. By pressing keys on the keyboard, you could drop a bomb from a little vector-graphic bomber at a stick-figure freighter sailing serenely across the cartoon sea at the bottom of the tube. If you hit (which wasn't trivial, because the bomb followed a proper parabolic trajectory) the machine would oblige with a lovely little explosion, after which the ship would break up and sink majestically beneath the waves. |
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I was fascinated even more so after they showed me the keys that allowed one to vary the speed of the bomber, the speed of the ship, and the height and angle of the bomber's passes. I quickly mastered hitting the ship and lost interest in the default settings; I spent the rest of my time there experimenting with various extreme combinations of the simulation parameters hacking at the program, trying to see what I could make it do. I remember being disappointed at the realization that the ship would break up in exactly the same way regardless of where the bomb hit. |
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It took me ten years to realize it, but that experience set my feet on the road to hackerdom. In 1972, I played BASIC games on some amazingly clunky ASR-33 teletypes hooked up to the old Dartmouth Time-Sharing System; I'll never forget the uniquely satisfying tchoonk those stiff keys made, and the musty smell and feel of the yellow paper they spooled on the carriage in huge rolls. I hadn't learned how to program yet, but DTSS included some rudimentary email/talk mode facilities and I had my first exposure to the odd and wonderful world of on-line communication there. |
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