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Mistrust authority - promote decentralisation

Another radio ham who rose to prominence in the computer world was Steve Wozniak, the co-founder, with Steve Jobs, of Apple computers. Wozniak's early interest in technology stemmed from his interest in amateur radio, but he later became involved in the more esoteric pastime of "phone phreaking" through his friendship with John Draper, who served two prison sentences for hacking the telephone networks but afterwards redeemed himself by writing Easy Writer, the Apple II word processor, allegedly while still in prison.

Bruce Sterling says in his book, Hacker Crackdown, that "the genuine roots of the modern hacker underground can probably be traced most successfully" to a group of the 1960s and 70s known as the Youth International Party, or Yippies, who were the first to advocate phone phreaking. The most visible of the Yippies was Abbie Hoffman, of whom Sterling says, he was a "gifted publicist, who regarded electronic media as both playground and weapon."

Sterling recounts that "during the Vietnam War, there was a federal surtax imposed on the telephone service. Hoffman and his cohorts could, and did, argue that in systematically stealing phone service they were engaging in civil disobedience: virtuously denying tax funds to an illegal and immoral war." To this end Hoffman and his co-editor, euphemistically known as Al Bell, published a newsletter called Youth International Party Line, "dedicated to collating and spreading Yippie rip-off techniques, especially of phones," by using devices to trick switchboards into giving free access to calls by mimicking the telephone system's own signals, an activity known as "phone phreaking".

The 'Blue Box' Hoffman was a prankster with a political purpose, but phone phreaking was a surprisingly widespread activity. The first business venture of Wozniak and Jobs was to design and sell boxed phone phreaking devices, known as the Blue Box, which tricked Bell telephone systems into giving their users free long distance calls, before going on to found a more orthodox empire with Apple Computers.

Hackers should be judged by their hacking, not bogus criteria such as degrees, age, race or position

The more moralistic ethos of hacker culture, as represented by the free software movement, grew out of another hobbyist playground, the Tech Model Rail road Club, TMRC, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, MIT, in the late 1950s.

Steven Levy tells the story in Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution. "Some members loved the idea of spending their time building and painting replicas of certain trains with historical and emotional value, or creating realistic scenery for the layout", he wrote. "This was the knife-and-paintbrush contingent, and it subscribed to rail-road magazines and booked the club for trips on ageing train lines. The other faction centred on the Signals and Power Subcommittee of the club, and it cared far more about what went on under the layout. This was The System, which worked something like a collaboration between Rube Goldberg and Werner von Braun, and was constantly being improved, revamped, perfected, and sometimes 'gronked' - in club jargon, screwed up. S&P people were obsessed with the way The System worked, its increasing complexities, how any change you made would affect other parts, and how you could put those relationships between the parts to optimal use."

The S&P members became known as The Midnight Requisition Committee (also TMRC), so called because "when TMRC needed a set of diodes, or some extra relays, to build some new feature into The System, a few S&P people would wait until dark and find their way into the places where those things were kept. None of the hackers, who were as a rule scrupulously honest in other matters, seemed to equate this with stealing."

The computer hacking traditions of MIT really began when the TMRC discovered a TX-0 computer in Building 26, and worked out that the best time to gain access was at night, "when no person in his right mind would have signed up for an hour-long session on the piece of paper posted every Friday beside the air conditioner in the RLE lab ... the TMRC hackers, who soon were referring to themselves as TX-0 hackers, changed their life-style to accommodate the computer", and this is where the real fun began. Their midnight forays onto the TX-0 led them into a new world of weird and wonderful hacks, which took them far off the beaten track of the model rail-road and far away from the engaging tangle of wires beneath the layout tables.

The core group of TMRC hackers were eventually absorbed into the AI Group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) - under the enlightened leadership of Professor Marvin Minsky and John McCarthy, the inventor of Lisp. The AI Group, initially part of MIT's Project MAC - for the development of Multiple Access Computing and Machine Aided Cognition, eventually gained its independence and became the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, or AI Lab.

Next: You can create art and beauty on a computer

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