In a new book called Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution, which was ~e ;nspiration for the conference, tenets of t}'e Hacker Ethic are stated as: [) Access to computersÄand onything whrch might teach you something about the woy the world worksÄshouid be ualimited and totol. Always yield to the Hands-On Imperairve! 2) All information shouid be free. 3) Mistrust Au~or~tyÄPromote Decentralization. 4} Hockers shouid be Judged by thetr hacking, not bogus criteria such as degrees, age, race, or pos'i'on. 5) You con create art and beauzy on a computer. 6) Computers con change your ~ife for the better. ÄSB _ DISCUSSIONS FROM THE HACKERSt CO.JFERENCE, NOVEMBER 1984 . STEVEN LEVY (outhor of Hackers): The Hacker Ethic, as I think all of you know, isn t something which back at MIT in the early '60s people vveuid reise their hand and say, ' 1 vow ro follow the hacker ethic." It's a term I used to describe whar I felt vves a shared Dhilosophy, not only of the hackers at h1IT, but the people in the Homebrow Club who designed the first srnall computers in the mid-'70s, and some of the younger people who started hacking with those small computers later on. BILL BURNS (Homebrew era hobbylst): Steve, can a person be a hacker withour being the kind of super- star or v~zard tbet you're talking about in the book7 Can somebody be a low-lovel hacker jU5t because he wants tO have fun and an intellectual cur~osity about the computer! Even though maybe he's not very good as a coder? LEVY: One issue that I found at MIT was tbet some peeple were complaining for that very reasonÄtbat you had to be a '.winner," you had to be really good to be considered a hacker. BRUCE WEBSTER (co~u~or of SUNDOC, a gnrat cap- ital~sts-in-space game): One of the ironies in tbet is tbat "hacker" originally denoted someone who wasn't very good. It was someone who vves not skilled profession- ally but tried to make up in volume what chey couidn't prodace in quality. (laughter) Or at least he vves using a shorgun rather than a high-powered rifle. RICHARD STALLMAN (MIT system hacker, author of EMACS): You're atways ganna find that if there's a community of real wizards they're gonna lose patience with the people who aren't. That doesn't mean that they can't be real hackers. VOICE: The question is, "Can you hack in BASIC7~' CHORUS: Nocooo! ROBERT WOODHEAD (co-author of WIZARDRY, d~e classic rok-pbying adventure game). Only if you're very very good cen you hack in BASIC. (laughter, applause} BRIAN HARVEY (forrner MIT ond Atori hacker, now worhing~ith kids), The terrn 'hack" at l~lIT predates compuur hacking. The way it started out, there were t~vo kinds of poople. There wem "tools," who were the ones who went to all their clas#s and when they weren't in class they were in the library. And then there were "hackers," who never went eo class and siep: all day and did something or other all night. Before it vv~s computers it was mode! reilroads. or telephones, or movies, or Chinese food, or anything. Hacking started OUt as not something technical (althongh it tended to be technical. becau# this i5 MIT vve're talking about}' but a sort of appraach to what's impor~ant in llfeMt really means being a hobbyis: and taking your hobby #riausly. If programming, for exam- pk, is something that you do on Sunday aftemoons and the rest of the time you don't think about it, then you're nor a hacker. But you don't necessarily have to be a star to be a hacker. Now, if you're at the MIT A.l. (Artificial Intelligence) Lab, at least if you vrere there when I vves there, you tid have to be a star in o~er not tO get dumpud on a lot. And that was the problem. It was something that I hated very much. DENNIS BR(:ITHERS (ou~or of MACTEP, ~e first tek- communicabons p~ogrom for d~e Macintost') 1t shouid b' painted out that, at least by the time I got there, '64 or so, "hack" meant "a prank:' plain and simple. and the better the prank the better the hack. Things like the big black moon at the Harvard-Yale garne was the ultimate hack. PHIL AGRE (MIT A.l. Lob): The# days at the A.l. Lab, the word i'hack" is very, very difluse. It is one of the very large number of content-free generic words, like frob" and ' the right thing," tbat fill the hacker's dic- tionary. I get the impression from the olden days that it once meant something more fecosed, but 1'11 be damned if i can figure out what it was. STEVEbI LEYY Well, without focusing a whole lot on the word, I think there's pretty much an agreement here tbet there's a resentrnent of using the word totally to mean breaking into computer systems. and we are talking about it in a broader sense. How much of what we see now in programming has ehat same kind of devotion, non-dilettantism~ tbet we saw in the days when people had to stsy up all nighr just to get com- puter time? DOUG CARLS1~N ([ounder and p~esident of Broderbund, publisher of computer pmesj: May I protest just a little bit' When we were hacking araund in the mid-'60s at }larvard, it was not the engineering students who were the hackers. It was the libeml ants rnajars whose only computer time available was if they gummed up the locks and snuck inro the hilding late at night because they weren't allowed to sign up for the stuff. You did everyth~ng by trial and error, because we didn't have any courses, we didn't have access to anything other tban manuals, and as far as 1'm aware the whole graup of midnight programmers there v~ere people who didn't hsve any real functional use for what they were doing at all. So we called ourselves "hackers." BRUCE BAUMGART feorly Stonford A.l. hacker): I was at Harvard in the same years when I found the PDP-I ar the Cambridge electron accelerator and to stay up all night with it was just incredible. You couid roll in at 9 P.M, when the physicists had left and you couid stsy ~here till 9 A M. when they rolled back in. Do it night alter night. I made it to classes but I slept through them. STEVE WITHAM (Xonodu, which is a scheme {or a worl”wide database and wnng system founded by Ted Nelson): It's not so much a hacker ethic as a hacker insrinct. It's sort of like rhe baby ducks when they see their first moving obiect. (]aughterj RICHARD STALLMAN: ~fou see your first computer language and you think, "This langusge is perfect." (laughter) _ ~,~ ~a ~. ' MARK MILLER ~Xonadu). The computer itself is really the f~rst rnoving oblec: in some sense tbze any of us have seen. I think that whae creates the hacker drive (1 wan't call it a hacker ethic, and I want to argue about thar) is that there's a sense, "There's somerhing terribly important here." It gues beyond the effect chat this thing can hsve on the world and what I cen do wich it and all that. 'There's something essential here to under- stand and I don't know what it is yet." I still don't know what ir is. ST[YE WOZNIAK (designer of the Apple computer' co- founder of Apple Computer, Inc.): I think the hacker drive represents rhe children ;n us. Children love to discover, expiore, create something a little beyond what they couid before. In school you have the courses that teach you the problem and the solution, v~hereas the hackers tended to be just bright enough ro take the little starting points, the mathematical tools, and build up a solution of their own, and they couid discover the optimum solution of the day. The hacker motivation is what's different. They were intrinsicsily motivated: the challenge of solving the puzzle was the ouly rewa~. The rewards were in cheir head. It v~as like a hobby, whereas in the outside worJd they wouid hsve a job, careers, advancements, salariesÄexuinsic r~wards. MARK MILLER: The reason I argue against the 6'hacker ethic'' I think ehat 5tsve Levy's book was wanderful and I enloyed it a lot, bot { very much reseneed the vvay it. I think, uied to shoeborn in this idea that hackers as a group were necessarily against the idea of intellectual property. I cons~ered myself a hacker in school, I con- sider myself a hacker now, and l've always thought tbat the idea of intellectual property was a good one. RICHARD STALLMAN: There is definitely a tendenq for hackers to not put up wieh someone who wants tO dellberately obstruct them from doing something that's a fun hack. If somebody sa~s, "It's useful for my pur- poses to provent people from doing this in-itself- innocent accivity, such as prevent people from Jogging in if I haven't given them accounts, or prevent people from running this program just because 1'11 get less money if d~ey can run ehis program," . . . VOICE: And use lots of undocumented entry points. STALLMAN: If the person doesn't see a good reason why he shouidn't run tbat program or wh~ he ~ouidn't use that computer, if he's a hacker, he'tl tend to view the buresucr~cy that StOpS him as a challenge rzeher than as an authonty that he must respec:. BILL BURNS: The drive tO do it is so strong d~at it sweeps orher things aside I think this is one of the big differences between the people that do thar hacking on computers tbst COSt a lo: and are owned by ocher peopie, and the people that do their hacking on m~cros wLere they own it. if you own the micro there's no us and ther~l' nobody's provenung you from doing anything bur yourself. I ``When we were hacking around in the mid-'60s at Harvard, nJ it was not the engineering students who were the hackers. / It was the llberal arts majors whose only computer time available was if they gummed up the locks and snuck into the buliding late at night because they weren't allowed to sign up for th. ctoff." ÄDOUG CARLSTON, feunder ond p~sident of Broderbund, publisher of computer ~ames ___ ~ -_'~ , ún 1 ~i r~