The roots of the hacker culture can be traced back to 1961, the
year MIT took delivery of its first PDP-1
minicomputer. The PDP-1 was one of the earliest interactive computers,
and (unlike other machines) of the day was inexpensive enough that time
on it did not have to be rigidly scheduled. It attracted a group of
curious students from the Tech Model Railroad Club who experimented
with it in a spirit of fun. Hackers: Heroes of the
Computer Revolution [Levy]
entertainingly describes the early days of the club. Their most
famous achievement was SPACEWAR, a game of dueling rocketships loosely
inspired by the Lensman space operas of
E.E. “Doc” Smith.[18]
Several of the TMRC experimenters later went on to become core
members of the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab, which in the 1960s and
1970s became one of the world centers of cutting-edge computer
science. They took some of TMRC's slang and in-jokes with them,
including a tradition of elaborate (but harmless) pranks called
“hacks”. The AI Lab programmers appear to have been
the first to describe themselves as “hackers”.
After 1969 the MIT AI Lab was connected, via the early ARPANET, to
other leading computer science research laboratories at Stanford, Bolt
Beranek & Newman, Carnegie-Mellon University and elsewhere.
Researchers and students got the first foretaste of the way fast
network access abolishes geography, often making it easier to
collaborate and form friendships with distant people on the net than
it would be to do likewise with colleagues closer-by but less
connected.
Software, ideas, slang, and a good deal of humor flowed over the
experimental ARPANET links. Something like a shared culture began to
form. One of its earliest and most enduring artifacts was the Jargon
File, a list of shared slang terms that originated at Stanford in 1973
and went through several revisions at MIT after 1976. Along the way
it accumulated slang from CMU, Yale, and other ARPANET sites.
Technically, the early hacker culture was largely hosted on
PDP-10 minicomputers. They
used a variety of operating systems that have since passed into
history: TOPS-10, TOPS-20, Multics, ITS, SAIL. They programmed in
assembler and dialects of Lisp. PDP-10 hackers took over running the ARPANET
itself because nobody else wanted the job. Later, they became the
founding cadre of the Internet Engineering Task Force
(IETF) and originated
the tradition of standardization through Requests For Comment
(RFCs).
Socially, they were young, exceptionally bright, almost entirely
male, dedicated to programming to the point of addiction, and tended
to have streaks of stubborn nonconformism — what years later
would be called ‘geeks’. They, too, tended to be shaggy
hippies and hippie-wannabes. They, too, had a vision of computers
as community-building devices. They read Robert Heinlein and
J.R.R.Tolkien, played in the Society for Creative Anachronism, and
tended to have a weakness for puns. Despite their quirks (or perhaps
because of them!) many of them were among the brightest programmers in
the world.
They were
not
Unix programmers. The early
Unix community was drawn largely from the same pool of geeks in
academia and government or commercial research laboratories, but the
two cultures differed in important ways. One that we've already
touched on is the weak networking of early Unix. There was
effectively no Unix-based ARPANET access until after 1980, and it
was uncommon for any individual to have a foot in both camps.
Collaborative development and the sharing of source code was a
valued tactic for Unix programmers. To the early ARPANET hackers, on
the other hand, it was more than a tactic: it was something
rather closer to a shared religion, partly arising from the academic
“publish or perish” imperative and (in its more extreme
versions) developing into an almost Chardinist idealism about
networked communities of minds. The most famous of these hackers,
Richard M. Stallman, became the ascetic saint of that
religion.
