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You can create art and beauty on a computer

One of the AI Lab hackers, Bob Saunders, later described himself and the others to Levy as "an elite group. Other people were off studying, spending their days up on four-floor buildings making obnoxious vapours or off in the physics lab throwing particles at things or whatever it is they do. We were simply not paying attention to what other folks were doing because we had no interest in it. They were studying what they were studying and we were studying what we were studying. And the fact that much of it was not on the officially approved curriculum was by and large immaterial."

The job became a hobby, and the hobby was the job. The art, politics and social mores of the hackers revolved around the life of the machine. Richard Greenblatt who, in the context of the role he invented for himself at MIT, was sometimes described as 'the hacker's hacker', flunked his course because he was getting a better education and having too much fun obsessing on the machine to go to lectures or pass exams, working through the night and sleeping through the day, when he was supposed to be at lectures.

It is said that Greenblatt wasn't too much into personal hygiene and that he was notoriously shambolic in his dress, but he also famously wrote the first computer chess program, and created Maclisp, a dialect of Lisp for Project MAC on the PDP-6. He was co-author of the revolutionary Incompatible Time sharing System (ITS) operating system that became the vehicle for hacker software development, and was largely responsible, with Tom Knight, for the invention of MIT's Lisp Machine, which became the first commercial single-user workstation.

Model railways may not be cool, but the TMRC hackers who went on to become the core members of the AI Lab developed the first workstations, the first computer games, the first music software and the first display hacks - and the culture they developed was the inspiration for the creation of the free software movement.

Computers can change your life for the better

Alan Cox Model railways, ham radio and computer hacks were the hobbyist's entry into the mysterious world of computer programming. Alan Cox "was working on things like a multi-user game (AberMUD) which is how I accidentally got involved with the kernel" before he became one of the better known kernel hackers. In his spare time he "uses his hacking skills to repair tiny N scale model railway (that's rail-road to those in the USSA) locomotives for fun." He also wrote the kernel module for the packet radio protocol, AX.25, which is vital for ham radio users. And he is not alone in his interest in model railways. Neil Young, the 'godfather of grunge', holds seven US Patents in digital command and control systems for model rail-roads (which he developed to give his son, who has cerebral palsy, better access to the hobby), and once owned a 20 per cent interest in Lionel Trains.

"It's meditation for me", he once said of model railways. "It's such a relief to escape music making and the pressure of music, to release it all in algorithms and theory of operations."

All this goes to prove that hobbyists, those who are pursuing an unpaid interest just to get the best out of their hobby, can bring passion, commitment, aesthetic balance and imagination to a project which are all too often missing from the world of work, where initiative and opportunity are often sacrificed for the necessity of knowing your place and keeping to the timetable.

Yet strangely, most of the better known hackers who worked from home to create Linux and other free software projects are now employed at relatively high salaries by billion dollar corporations to do what they would be doing anyway - working on their hobby...

For other feature articles by Richard Hillesley, please see the archive.

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