The Cathedral & the Bazaar

Chapter 1. A Brief History of Hackerdom

I explore the origins of the hacker culture, including prehistory among the Real Programmers, the glory days of the MIT hackers, and how the early ARPAnet nurtured the first network nation. I describe the early rise and eventual stagnation of Unix, the new hope from Finland, and how “the last true hacker” became the next generation’s patriarch. I sketch the way Linux and the mainstreaming of the Internet brought the hacker culture from the fringes of public consciousness to its current prominence.

Prologue: The Real Programmers

In the beginning, there were Real Programmers.

That’s not what they called themselves. They didn’t call themselves “hackers”, either, or anything in particular; the sobriquet “Real Programmer” wasn’t coined until after 1980, retrospectively by one of their own. But from 1945 onward, the technology of computing attracted many of the world’s brightest and most creative minds. From Eckert and Mauchly’s first ENIAC computer onward there was a more or less continuous and self-conscious technical culture of enthusiast programmers, people who built and played with software for fun.

The Real Programmers typically came out of engineering or physics backgrounds. They were often amateur-radio hobbyists. They wore white socks and polyester shirts and ties and thick glasses and coded in machine language and assembler and FORTRAN and half a dozen ancient languages now forgotten.

From the end of World War II to the early 1970s, in the ...