Hackers

Appendix D. Notes

The main source of information for Hackers was over a hundred personal interviews conducted in 1982 and 1983. Besides these, I refer to a number of written sources.

Part One

Chapter 1 Some of the TMRC jargon was codified by Peter Samson in the unpublished "An Abridged Dictionary of the TMRC Language," circa 1959. This was apparently the core of a hacker dictionary, kept online at MIT for years, which eventually was expanded to The Hacker Dictionary by Gus Steele et al. (New York: Harper & Row, 1983).

Chapter 1 Samson’s poem printed in F.O.B., the TMRC newsletter, Vol. VI, No. 1 (Sept. 1960).

Chapter 1 “. . . stories abounded . . .” See Philip J. Hilts’ Scientific Temperaments: Three Lives in Contemporary Science (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1982).

Chapter 2 For IBM background, see Katharine Davis Fishman’s The Computer Establishment (New York: Harper & Row, 1981).

Chapter 3 In addition to personal interviews, some information on Spacewar was gleaned from J.M. Garetz’s article, "The Origin of Spacewar!" in Creative Computing Video and Arcade Games, as well as the same author’s paper, “Spacewar: Real-time Capability of the PDP-1,” presented in 1962 before the Digital Equipment Computer Users’ Society, and Stewart Brand’s "Spacewar: Fanatic Life and Symbolic Death Among the Computer Bums,” in Rolling Stone, Dec. 7, 1972.

Chapter 3 “What the user wants . . .” McCarthy quoted from his Time Sharing Computer Systems (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1962).

Chapter 4 How the Peg Solitaire ...