[SIGCIS-Members] CACM essay about Levy's 1984 book _Hackers_

[McMillan, William W]

Mike, this interpretation of hack is consistent with how I heard the term used in the late 1970s and into the 1980s... essentially meaning a quick and dirty addition, modification, or fix, likely only effective in the short term due to the low quality of the code.

- Bill

________________________________
From: Members [members-bounces at lists.sigcis.org] on behalf of MikeWillegal [mike at willegal.net]
Sent: Friday, March 26, 2021 12:54 PM
To: thomas.haigh at gmail.com
Cc: Sigcis
Subject: Re: [SIGCIS-Members] CACM essay about Levy's 1984 book _Hackers_

Hi Thomas,

For what it’s worth.

I worked in engineering for mini-computer maker Systems Engineering Laboratories (later Gould/Computer Systems Division) throughout the 1980’s, basically until the end of the mini-computer era.  The term hack never morphed from the original definition in all that time, at least in engineering circles.  During that period,  a hack was never considered a positive attribute, and was something to be avoided, if at all possible.  The term would never be applied to someone’s work when it improved the efficiency or reliabilty of the resulting product.  In fact, I still would not use the term in a positive way, when speaking of some aspect of a design.  I do understand how much the usage has changed over the years, but in the environment I worked in, a hacker was someone who took shortcuts, and in my experience, those hacks usually resulted in design problems.

You write of MIT students optimizing a design in your paper, which would be considered good solid work, and not a hack in the environment I worked in.  This is as long as the changes accounted for all the corner cases and was relatively bug free.  However, if the optimization didn’t cover corner cases or had lots of bugs, it would most likely be considered a hack, I.E. not fitting for release to customers.

I guess the point I’m making is that, in popular culture, as you point out in your article, partly through the efforts of Steven Levy and others,  the connotations associated with the terms hack and hacker has changed.  However, there still is a significant stigma associated with the term, hack, among some engineering professionals (well at least me) that worked through that period.  In fact, it’s still hard for me to reconcile the use of the term hacker with the tremendously talented and hard working teams that managed to turn the first microcomputers from a curiosity into what they are, today.

best regards,
Mike Willegal



On Mar 26, 2021, at 12:00 AM, <thomas.haigh at gmail.com<mailto:thomas.haigh at gmail.com>> <thomas.haigh at gmail.com<mailto:thomas.haigh at gmail.com>> wrote:

Hello SIGCIS,

CACM just published part two of my trilogy on classic accounts of IT work. This once considers Steven Levy’s 1984 classic_ Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution_. It’s called “When Hackers Were Heroes” and is available at https://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2021/4/251341-when-hackers-were-heroes/fulltext. The book is the source of the much-quoted “hacker ethic” but it’s richer, stranger, and more deeply rooted in its time than you might expect if all you’ve seen is the bullet point version.

The first part focused on Tracy Kidder’s _The Soul of a New Machine_ (https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3436249) while part 3, due out in the summer, has the working title “Women’s Lives in Code.” It will explore both Ellen Ullman’s wonderful _Close the Machine_ and the more recent (but set in roughly the same era) TV series _Halt and Catch Fire_. In case you are curious about that show, here’s a preview: you should watch it but probably best to skip the first season which is a misbegotten attempt to make a _Mad Men_ derivative based around Jobs and Wozniak archetypes (except they work at what’s basically Compaq and hire a Lisbeth Salander type for gender balance). The show reboots for the second seasons, improves dramatically, and finishes up, as critics have noted, being more like _Six Feet Under_ than _Mad Men_.

While I am here, I should also point out another article of potential interest in the current issue: “Roots of ‘Program’ Revisited” by Lisebeth De Mol and Maarten Bullynck. https://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2021/4/251342-roots-of-program-revisited/fulltext

Back in February, CACM published a condensed version of Donald Knuth’s 2014 talk “Let’s Not Dumb Down the History of Computer Science.” https://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2021/2/250078-lets-not-dumb-down-the-history-of-computer-science/fulltext This gave me the feeling of being in a Christopher Nolan movie, as I’d already responded to it in the same venue in 2015, as “The Tears of Donald Knuth.” https://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2015/1/181633-the-tears-of-donald-knuth/fulltext Six years after the response, the original arrives.

Best wishes,

Tom
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