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Discussion Questions
1. What are the defining characteristics of hacker
society? How relevant are the different aspects of the Hacker Ethic (chapter 2
of Levy) to today’s computer enthusiasts.
2. What was it about MIT that allowed the hackers to
thrive there? Why was it hard at that time for people elsewhere to do the same
things?
3. What were the non-computer technologies and
activities that the hackers embraced? What elements do they have in common with
computer technology?
4. How did the hackers differ in their relationship
with computers from the “officially sanctioned” users such as graduate students?
How well did they do in their formal studies?
5. Do you know anyone (including you) who shares the
hacker spirit? How do you feel when you write a program?
Links and Further Reading
Computer History Lecture:
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More information is given on the computer history
material covered in Session 3 (SAGE, timesharing, etc.) in Campbell-Kelly,
Martin, and William Aspray. Computer: A History of the Information Machine.
New York, NY: Basic Books, 1996, chapters 6, 7 & 9.
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SAGE is discussed very cleverly from a
political and cultural viewpoint in Edwards, Paul. The Closed World:
Computers and the Politics of Discourse in Cold War America. Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press, 1996.
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SABRE is discussed in Copeland, Duncan G.,
Richard O. Mason, and James L. McKenney. "SABRE: The Development of
Information-Based Competence and Execution of Information-Based Competition."
IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 17, no. 3 (1995): 30-57. A revised
version of the same story appears in McKenney, James L., Duncan C. Copeland,
and Richard O. Mason. Waves of Change:Business Evolution through Information
Technology. Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 1995.
Hackers Reading:
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There is a site devoted to SpaceWar --
http://www.wheels.org/spacewar/.
Its most interesting feature is a scan of a famous 1972 Rolling Stone article
by Stuart Brand. The article introduced a mass audience to hacker culture and
to the then-novel concept of personal computing. You can
play the
original spacewar in your web browser! In a clever but useless feat of
programming, a Java program plugs itself into your browser. The Java runs an
emulator for a PDP-1. The PDP-1 runs the spacewar program.
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The MIT group played an enormous role in the
development of the culture and vocabulary of the broader hacker community, and
hence of the pre-commerical internet. This is most clearly documented in The
New Hacker’s Dictionary and its on-line version, the Jargon File – an updated
version of a document originally produced at MIT. Read it at
http://catb.org/esr/jargon/. Its
editor, Eric S. Raymond, is himself a
major figure in the current free software movement and we will be considering
him (and the movement’s links to the original MIT hackers) later in the
course. Older versions of the Jargon File,
like this one, have less of
Raymond's personal influence and are considered more authentic by many.
Videogames:
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For console games, the single best site is Classic
Gaming -- their
museum includes well
researched information and a bunch of links for all the early consoles. The
leading emulator for the Atari VCS, the first popular console, is called
Stella.
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If there's one company with more nostalgia site
on-line than Apple then it's Atari. By far the best general site is the
Atari Historical Society. This
includes coin-ops, consoles and home computers. It has videos, transcripts of
advertisements, pictures of engineering prototypes and links to other sites.
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We mentioned, very briefly, that the first
successful arcade game was Pong, designed by Nolan Bushnell and sold by Atari.
Somebody out there is pretty obsessive about this, and has produced an
exhaustive Pong site, with hundreds of pictures of every kind of arcade Pong
machine and technical details of all the home Pong consoles (the first
generation of home consoles). One interesting thing here is the connection of
video games, home consoles and electronics fans (who could build their own),
but mostly the fascinating thing is that someone could care so much. It's
www.pong-story.com. Ralph H. Baer, the guy who built the Odyssey, the first
home videogame, has a rather good
good page of his own.
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Finally, if you want to play the actual
coin-operated games exactly as they appeared in the arcade then you need a
program called MAME. The home site is
www.mame.net -- its an open source project, and new versions are released
constantly. However, to get the ROMS you'll have to look elsewhere, but if you
scroll down on the MAME links page they have some suggestions on sources.
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