Can computers change people’s lives for the better? Can hackers act “heroic?” Can computer science be something more than a job or means to its own end? Steven Levy seems to think all of these things, as do the 1970s Hardware Hackers of Northern California.
I hope computers, and the people who use them, can present a social value. If they can’t then there really isn’t any point to them, and we’re all just playing with calculators too difficult for the average human to use. I want to believe that computers and computer science can improve lives, that there’s some point to all of those lines of code I curse at in a dark room at 2:00AM. Maybe it’s just wishful thinking, maybe I need the field I chose to be special because I chose it, but I think computers changed my life for the better, and could do that for someone else. These chapters resonated with me because the Hardware Hackers are trying to prove the mantra of computers for everyone that I want to believe in. And they’re good at it.
When Levy presented his Hacker Ethos, Levy states that “Computers can change your life for the better,” and it isn’t until this section that an argument for this has been depicted. The MIT hackers were closed-off from society, they treated their code as a pure art form, and while they developed several improvements to the way software is written and computers can be used, MIT Hackerism never produced anything that a non-hacker would find significant. Levy immediately presents Lee Felsenstein, an electronics wizard who used his tools to advance activist movements. He very expressly sets out to put his electronics craft to use producing and maintaining tools for demonstrators. As incidental as Felsenstein’s technical skills may be to his activism, this is certainly the closest Levy has come to demonstrating the sixth point of his ethos since he introduced it over 100 pages ago.
An even more obvious example of computers impacting lives comes when Felsenstein, and later Efrem Lipkin, become members of Common Memory, a group that existed to build public interest and knowledge on computers. While Common Memory is not a force to be reckoned with when developing computer applications (the strongest technology demonstrated is a flexowriter that can do high school math problems), it represents a different take on the Hacker Ethos, less competitive, more focused on sharing information.
The truly strong demonstrations of computers changing lives come to with the Homebrew hackers’ club. This groups of hackers works with electronics to build machines that are, by nature of their origin, much more suited to individual ownership than the massive counting machines that software clubs have been playing with up to this point.
We see the first microcomputers developed, allowing computers to approach the tools of the people that the Hacker Ethos attempts to display.
Again, it’s striking how much more collaborative the California Hardware hackers are, both with each other and with other people. I’m left to wonder if this is a property of this hacking club that distinguishes it from MIT hackers, or a consequence of the need for physical pieces. The network necessary to acquire components (a complete knowledge of all the parts that have to be bought and them disposed of before the hackers can get them).
After enjoying the romanticism of the hardware hackers, reading Bill Gates’ open letter to the Free Software people made me kind of angry. That he could say Free Software is “unsustainable” or claim it isn’t capable of investing the time and effort to complete a large project. “What hobbyist can put 3 years into his product… and then distribute it for free.” I think that attitude that we need proprietary software is kind of lame. Yes, if you build a product, and want to secure it so other people can’t distribute it and change it and then sell it, then go ahead. But if hobbyists need a thing, they make it. Then they share it, so it gets better. In my limited time in computing I have found computer nerds for every level of system hierarchy and free projects for every piece of software on my computer above the firmware (and a long list of reasons that the firmware can’t be written). To be honest I’m always surprised to hear the horror stories of how Open Source came close to dying. It was hacker ethics that pushed computers into the hands of the general public, and a big enough group of hackers (and the Homebrew hub proves that hacking groups can become big). I’ll admit that paid products will always be able to find a place in the time/space tradeoff, but the Free Software people are willing to do it on their own. They don’t need anyone else to hack and improve world-altering code.
Decryptic 