Let Us Now Praise Famous Hackers

By Philip Elmer-DeWitt

A new view of some much maligned electronic pioneers

Legend at M.I.T. has it that one night in the mid-'50s some students paid a clandestine visit to Cambridge's Kendall Square subway station, where they quietly spread grease all over the tracks. The next morning, the first train that pulled into the station hit the grease and skidded right through the other side, taking its passengers to an unscheduled stop in the middle of a darkened tunnel. When the motorman backed up to see what had happened, the train slid through the station in the other direction as well. The ensuing snarl is supposed to have tied up transit officials and straphangers for hours.

For several generations of M.I.T. engineers, the subway prank was known as the ultimate "hack," the rare practical joke clever and elegant enough to be worthy of one of the world's most prestigious technical schools. Today the best and the brightest technology students are more likely to be found hanging around a computer system than a subway system. But they still call themselves hackers, and although they insist they have been misunderstood, their relationship with the public is once again on the skids.

Last year's hit movie War-Games and a series of well-publicized computer break-ins have created an image of a teen-age computer hacker that is giving the term a bad name. Many people now think of hackers as pests or perhaps even criminals. But the hackers them selves claim they are getting a bum rap from movies and newspapers. Says Bill Burns, an industrial psychologist and part-time hacker: "We are the victims of a major press screw-up."

Hackers, as most computer experts use the term, are distinguished not by their mischievousness but by their persistence and skill. Some of the key breakthroughs in modern computer science, including the development of the personal computer, can be traced to these often fanatically dedicated people. Even today, men and women who are proud to call themselves hackers can be found in the research departments of almost any major computer firm, designing state-of-the-art machines and writing the software that runs on them.

Now some of the real computer whiz kids are finally getting their due. In a new book called Hackers (Doubleday; $17.95), Writer Steven Levy argues that these "science-mad people" are the true heroes of the computer revolution. He traces the history of hackers from M.I.T.'s Tech Model Railroad Club, their first mecca, to Silicon Valley's Homebrew Computer Club, an early microcomputer gathering spot, to a video-game factory in Coarsegold, Calif. Through it all he discerns a common thread: the unspoken assumption among crack computer programmers and engineers that they could straighten out the world by dint of their intelligence if they could only get their hands on the control box.

The overpowering urge to compute, as Levy describes it, has always seemed bizarre to outsiders. At M.I.T. and Stanford the true devotees would skip meals, drop classes and give up sleep and social lives to burrow deeper and deeper into their beloved electronic brains. Once they started on a project, they would regularly "wrap around," working day and night until, after 30 hours, they collapsed on the nearest cot or sofa. Programmers at Stanford's Artificial Intelligence Lab eventually discovered that the space between the roof and false ceiling made a comfortable sleeping hutch, and some of them lived there for months at a time.

Two weeks ago, 130 of America's most devoted hackers gathered in the barracks of a refurbished Army post in Sausalito, Calif., at the invitation of a group of computer experts headed by Stewart Brand, editor in chief of the Whole Earth Software Catalog. Brand's idea was to bring together, for the first time, people from several generations of hackers, and his guests included some of the brightest stars in computing: Ted Nelson, author of Computer Lib, a widely read handbook from the mid-1970s; Stephen Wozniak, who built the original Apple computer; Lee Felsenstein, designer of the Osborne 1; Richard Greenblatt, who developed the LISP machines used in artificial-intelligence research; and Burrell Smith, a one time Apple repairman who went on to build the Macintosh computer.

There were a fair share of shaggy beards, silver-winged baseball caps and even one turban, worn by a Montana-born programmer who now calls himself Sat Tara Singh Khalsa. But for the most part the hackers looked more like backpackers or professional musicians than any stereotype image of computer nerds. By day, they met for discussions and debates that included a face-off between Bonn Parker, a computer-crime expert, and John Draper, the legendary "Cap'n Crunch," who developed a system for making free phone calls by using the toy whistle from a breakfast-cereal box to imitate the tone used by AT&T for long-distance calls. At night the hackers clustered around a dazzling array of computer hardware that beeped and glowed until 4 o'clock each morning.

Most of the weekend conference, though, was spent trying to plot the future of hacking in an industry increasingly dominated by marketers and venture capitalists. Everyone present seemed to agree that commercialism had changed the nature of computing. What was less clear was what the new rules for hacking ought to be. Said Bill Atkinson, author of a flashy new program called MacPaint: "The question is, how do you spread excitement around?"

Many first-generation hackers, having struggled with the red tape that surrounded million-dollar systems in the early days of computing, tended to view such things as copy-protection schemes, which make it difficult to steal programs, as barriers to the free flow of information. Other hackers, however, protested that anyone who spends thousands of hours writing a program deserves to earn royalties on it. Said Robert Woodhead, co-author of a best-selling game called Wizardry: "My soul is in my product."

As the industry has matured, so have the Stephen Wozniak pioneers who helped build it. Most of the high priests of hacking have long ago grown out of the pranksterism associated with their name, and many feel it is time they set an example for the next generation of computer fans. "It's one thing for a high school kid to show off how he can dial the phone for free," says Brian Harvey, an M.I.T. hacker turned high school teacher. "It's quite another for an adult to go around encouraging schoolkids to steal."

-- By Philip Elmer-DeWitt