{"id":3465,"date":"2010-04-20T07:34:35","date_gmt":"2010-04-20T11:34:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=3465"},"modified":"2011-02-19T11:20:14","modified_gmt":"2011-02-19T15:20:14","slug":"25-years-on-the-hackers-bestride-the-globe","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2010\/04\/20\/25-years-on-the-hackers-bestride-the-globe\/","title":{"rendered":"25 years on, the “Hackers” bestride the globe"},"content":{"rendered":"

Steven Levy<\/a> revisits some of the people he profiled in his book Hackers<\/em>, back in the Pre-Cambrian period of the geek revolution:<\/p>\n

\n

\u201cIt\u2019s funny in a way\u201d, says Bill Gates, relaxing in an armchair in his office. \u201cWhen I was young, I didn\u2019t know any old people. When we did the microprocessor revolution, there was nobody old, nobody. It\u2019s weird how old this industry has become.\u201d The Microsoft cofounder and I, a couple of fiftysomething codgers, are following up on an interview I had with a tousle-headed Gates more than a quarter century ago. I was trying to capture what I thought was the red-hot core of the then-burgeoning computer revolution — the scarily obsessive, absurdly brainy, and endlessly inventive people known as hackers. Back then, Gates had just pulled off a deal to supply his DOS operating system to IBM. His name was not yet a household word; even Word was not yet a household word. I would interview Gates many times over the years, but that first conversation was special. I saw his passion for computers as a matter of historic import. Gates himself saw my reverence as an intriguing novelty. But by then I was convinced that I was documenting a movement that would affect everybody.<\/p>\n

The book I was writing, Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution<\/em>, came out just over 25 years ago, in the waning days of 1984. My editor had urged me to be ambitious, and so I shot high, crafting a 450-page narrative in three parts, making the case that hackers — brilliant programmers who discovered worlds of possibility within the coded confines of a computer — were the key players in a sweeping digital transformation.<\/p>\n

I hadn\u2019t expected to reach that conclusion. When I embarked on my project, I thought of hackers as little more than an interesting subculture. But as I researched them, I found that their playfulness, as well as their blithe disregard for what others said was impossible, led to the breakthroughs that would define the computing experience for millions of people.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

I must have read Hackers<\/em> during my first or second semester in college, as I tried to figure out how to get out of the series of dead-end jobs I’d had since leaving school. I found strong echoes of many of the characters Levy portrayed in the people I encountered in my first few “high tech” jobs, although I don’t think any of them have managed to become billionaires yet.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Steven Levy revisits some of the people he profiled in his book Hackers, back in the Pre-Cambrian period of the geek revolution: \u201cIt\u2019s funny in a way\u201d, says Bill Gates, relaxing in an armchair in his office. \u201cWhen I was young, I didn\u2019t know any old people. When we did the microprocessor revolution, there was […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,15],"tags":[109,129,58,94,92],"class_list":["post-3465","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-history","category-technology","tag-computers","tag-hack","tag-internet","tag-microsoft","tag-software"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-TT","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3465","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3465"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3465\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7893,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3465\/revisions\/7893"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3465"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3465"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3465"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}