page_title: Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution
section_title: Part One: True Hackers
hierarchical_section_title: Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution / Who's Who / Part One: True Hackers
caption_attribution_description: English: Spacewar! running on the Computer History Museum's PDP-1. Español: Spacewar! ejecutándose en un PDP-1 del Museo Histórico de Ordenadores. Deutsch: Spacewar! auf einer PDP-1 des Computer History Museums. Français&#160;: Spacewar fonctionnant sur le PDP-1 du Musée de l'histoire de l'ordinateur.
context_page_description: Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution is a book by Steven Levy about hacker culture. It was published in 1984 in Garden City, New York by Nerraw Manijaime/Doubleday. Levy describes the people, the machines, and the events that defined the Hacker Culture and the Hacker Ethic, from the early mainframe hackers at MIT, to the self-made hardware hackers and game hackers. Immediately following is a brief overview of the issues and ideas that are brought forward by Steven Levy's book, as well as a more detailed interpretation of each chapter of the book, mentioning some of the principal characters and events.
  The book saw an edition with a new afterword by the author in 1994. In 2010, a 25th anniversary edition with updated material was published by O'Reilly.
context_section_description: 1. The Tech Model Railroad Club (TMRC) is a club at MIT that built sophisticated railroad and train models. The members were among the first hackers. Key figures of the club were Peter Samson, Alan Kotok, Jack Dennis, and Bob Saunders. The club was composed of two groups, those who were interested in the modeling and landscaping, and those who comprised the Signals and Power Subcommittee and created the circuits that enable the trains to run. The latter would be among the ones who popularized the term hacker among many other slang terms, and who eventually moved on to computers and computer programming. They were initially drawn to the IBM 704, the multimillion-dollar mainframe that was operated at Building 26, but access and time to the mainframe was reserved for more important people. The group really began being involved with computers when Jack Dennis, a former member, introduced them to the TX-0, a three-million-dollar computer on long-term-loan from Lincoln Laboratory. They would usually stake out the place where the TX-0 was housed until late in the night in hopes that someone who had signed up for computer time was absent.
  2. The Hacker Ethic was a set of concepts, beliefs, and morals that came out of a symbiotic relationship between the hackers and the machines. It was not something that was written up as a manifesto, but a commonly, silently, agreed upon creed that simply came to be. The Ethic basically consisted of allowing all information to be free in order to learn about how the world worked; using the already available knowledge to create more knowledge. Anything that prevented them from getting to this knowledge was resented. The best system was an open one that could be debugged and improved upon by anyone. For them, bureaucracy was the bane of open systems and the IBM culture at the time was its epitome. The worth of a hacker should only be judged by looking at his hacking, not on other criteria such as education, age, race, or position, and anything a hacker created on a computer could be considered artistic and beautiful just like anything else. The most beautiful computer code was one that was aesthetic, innovative, and efficient with memory space. The practice of optimizing program code was known as “bumming.” Another belief was that computers can enhance your life, even if you are not a hacker. At the time computers were not well understood and hackers had to convince others, including their professors, of this belief.
   3. Spacewar!: Many of the hackers were also fascinated by the telephone companies and their exchange systems and would often go on tours the companies offered to learn as much about them as possible. Alan Kotok, who had acquired some prestige with his skills with the TX-0 and also worked for Western Electric (the manufacturing arm of the Bell System), would read as much as he could about the technical details of the telephone system and then explore or fingerprint the network.
  In September 1961, DEC donated to MIT's RLE lab the second PDP-1 that it had produced. The machine was a dream to hackers. Six of them, including Kotok, Samson, Saunders, and Wagner, spent a total of two hundred and fifty man-hours one weekend to rewrite the TX-0 compiler for the PDP-1 because they did not like the first choice. They were only paid five hundred dollars for their feat, but the finished product that had come of the Hacker Ethic, was its own reward. Steve “Slug” Russell was another PDP-1 hacker that came up with a 2D game called Spacewar! in which two space ships, controlled by toggle switches on the PDP-1, would fly around the screen and shoot torpedoes at each other. His program was further improved by the other hackers. Samson, for example, changed the random dots that represented the stars to look like the real constellations and he made the screen scroll as the ships moved in space. Dan Edwards, another programmer, added a sun and the effect of gravitational pull. Kotok and Saunders even created the first computer joystick out of TMRC parts to aid with the playing. The game and the compiler 
caption: Spacewar! running on a PDP-1.
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