I`ve finally got around to reading the book "Hackers" by Steven Levy. It is an engagingly written book, although a little sentimental of the "old days" of hackerdom - those early 1960s when hackers were in fact members of the model railroad club at MIT and were not even allowed into the same room as the "Hulking Giant" computer.
Much of the joy of programming has been lost in today`s high-capacity technology world.
Alastair Otter, Journalist, ITWeb
At the same time, however, it offers an interesting counterpoint to today`s commercial software development environment and a rare insight into the true "open source" movement.
The early hackers - and the term refers not to malicious attackers but to programmers that "hack" out new solutions to previously unsolved problems - were faced with enormous machines with negligible amounts of capacity by today`s standard. And yet, with hours of, often offline, programming they were able to turn the early computers into everything from the world`s most expensive calculator to the earliest renditions of space computer games. What drove them was not the money - they rarely got paid - but the challenge.
And their challenge was enormous. Most had to programme in assembly language, no mean feat and something very few can do today. They also had to write each of their own commands, and then often hardwire them into the machine - before being able to use them in their programs.
They also struggled against capacity limitations and the ultimate hacker accolade was to be recognised for having "bummed" a piece of code down to the smallest size without losing functionality.
Compare that with today`s hulking code that stretches to millions of lines of code. As memory and processing powers increase exponentially, so to do the programs that run on today`s machines. The challenge to keep code as efficient as possible is all but gone. Take just about any piece of code in today`s applications and marvel at how inefficient it is. Also, much of this code is developed in second and third level languages that simplify the production of code but also often make it more inefficient.
Clearly not everyone should be compelled to code in assembly language - it wouldn`t make sense - but it makes sense to take the example offered by early hackers and strive for the most elegant and efficient of solutions to computing problems.
The yesteryear hackers not only coded efficiently, but their working methods were also the earliest examples of "open source" software. The early PDP-1 hackers would typically leave their "code" on paper and punch cards in a drawer next to the computer. Doing so was an open invitation for others to improve on the code. And even in the early days of DEC, one of the earliest computer companies, it was common for hackers to approach the company and ask for code snippets that they could use, or even offer the company code that it might find useful. The ethic was that "information was free" and programmers everywhere shared what they had in the hope that they could help others or find a solution to a new challenge.
We can`t revert to the days of pre-binary coding and free information, but it is useful to take the example of hackers like Greenblat, Gosper, Kotok and Stallman, and enjoy computer programming like they did.
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