Book review: Hackers, Heroes of the Computer Revolution

On Tuesday the Computer History Museum put the source code for MS-DOS 1.1 and 2.0 online, along with Word for Windows 1.1a, with Microsoft’s permission. You click through a license that says non-commercial use only, and you get a zip of 8086 assembly. I spent most of Tuesday evening scrolling through it like it was a family photo album. DOS was the first operating system I ever really knew. When I started programming at 13, it was all Clipper and Turbo C and writing TSRs that hooked interrupts they had no business hooking, and every crash was a reboot. Seeing where the INT 21h functions I used to call actually go is a strange kind of nostalgia.

It also sent me back to the bookshelf for Steven Levy’s Hackers, which I hadn’t opened in years. It seemed like the right week.

What it is

Levy published it in 1984 and it’s a history in three parts. The first is MIT in the late ’50s and ’60s: the Tech Model Railroad Club, the TX-0 and then the PDP-1, Spacewar!, and people like Richard Greenblatt and Bill Gosper keeping whatever hours the machine was free (Greenblatt on something like a 30-hour day). The second is the hardware hackers of the ’70s in California, the Altair, the Homebrew Computer Club, Lee Felsenstein moderating meetings, Steve Wozniak showing his friends there the Apple I. The third is the game companies of the early ’80s, mostly Ken and Roberta Williams and Sierra On-Line, and the young programmers who wrote Apple II games for them. There’s a short epilogue about Richard Stallman, “the last of the true hackers”, which has aged into something more interesting than Levy could have known when he wrote it (I’m going to leave it at that, since Stallman’s the one person in the book everyone already has an opinion on).

The book is also where the “hacker ethic” was first written down. Levy spells it out in a chapter of its own: access to computers should be unlimited and total, all information should be free, mistrust authority and promote decentralization, judge hackers by their hacking and not by degrees or age or position, you can create art and beauty on a computer, and computers can change your life for the better. He presents it as something the MIT people lived by without ever writing down, which is probably generous, but it’s a good list.

The first part is the best part

The MIT section is what I remember, and it’s still the best thing in the book. Levy is great on the texture of it: the sign-up sheets for machine time, the people who’d hang around overnight waiting for someone not to show, the way a program got better because the next person to come along would just start improving it, and nobody thought of it as theirs. There’s a whole culture of “the right thing” in there, of doing something in fewer instructions because that’s more beautiful, and if you ever spent an afternoon shaving bytes off a TSR to make it fit you’ll recognize it immediately.

I’m a little less charmed by it now than I was the first time. These are people who barely went to class, didn’t shower, and treated anyone who wasn’t one of them as a “loser” (Levy’s word, or theirs). The ethic is very much “judge people by their hacking”, but in practice the only people in the room are a small group of young men at MIT, and the book doesn’t really notice that. I don’t think it’s Levy’s job to fix that in 1984, but you notice it now, especially if you’ve spent any time trying to hire a team that doesn’t all look the same.

Bill Gates, then and now

The second part has the passage that sent me back to the book this week. In 1975 a paper tape of Microsoft’s Altair BASIC gets copied and handed out at a Homebrew meeting, and copies spread everywhere. Early in 1976 a twenty-year-old Bill Gates writes his “Open Letter to Hobbyists”, which says, among other things, “As the majority of hobbyists must be aware, most of you steal your software.” Levy treats this as the moment the hacker ethic collided with the idea of software as a product, and he’s clearly on the hobbyists’ side.

Reading that the same week Microsoft lets a museum give away the source to DOS is fun. I don’t want to make too much of it. DOS 2.0 is thirty years old and commercially worthless, and the license is still Microsoft’s terms, not the hacker ethic. But I’ve been in the Microsoft world for most of my career and an MVP since 2005, and I can count the times Microsoft has handed out source code to anyone who asked on one hand. ASP.NET MVC and Entity Framework going open source on CodePlex a couple of years ago was a start. I’d like to believe the people inside who pushed for this release had read Levy.

And to be fair to Gates, he wasn’t wrong that you can’t build a software company if nobody pays for software. The whole industry I’ve spent my career in sits on the far side of that argument. Levy’s book doesn’t really have an answer for it, other than wistfulness.

The third part

I skimmed the games section this time, honestly. Sierra’s story is interesting as business history, and there’s a good thread about a young programmer named John Harris and his fight to make a perfect port of Frogger, but it’s mostly about money and royalties and publishers, and Levy seems to know it’s a story of the ethic getting diluted. Of the three parts it’s the one that’s dated most.

Should you read it

Yes, if you write software and haven’t. It’s the origin story of a lot of what we take for granted, from the idea that code should be shared to the idea that a 17-year-old can be the best programmer in the building. It’s also a good corrective for anyone who thinks the culture they work in was handed down from somewhere. It was made up by specific people, most of them in their twenties, staying up too late.

I’m going back to the DOS source now. The part of me that was 13 wants to find the code behind every “Abort, Retry, Fail?” message I ever saw.*

* Except, it turns out, I won’t. The 2.0 version says “Abort, Retry, Ignore?”. “Fail” came later, in 3.3, which I’d completely forgotten.