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

Fri Mar 26 11:40:50 PDT 2021

Hi Tom,

Thanks for the thoughtful feedback.  I guess I’d about just about equate a hack with a kludge, at least with my obsolete 80’s definition.  The only slight difference might be that a hack might more about reflecting time savings, whereas a kludge might be more of an outright poor design choice.  I think there are elements of both in each word as poor design choices often result from an effort to save time and visa versa.  I tend to avoid using the term hack these days, because of the confusion it may cause, as I would tend use it in the old sense and most younger people would interpret it in the new sense. :)

Regarding WOZ and the Apple II,  I think the machine is a brilliant design, not a hack (in my sense).  It was an evolution of several preceding systems that Woz either worked on or had exposure to, so it didn’t come out of the blue.  WOZ knew what was possible in both hardware and software which allowed him to make tradeoffs that favored lower parts count at the cost of some software complexity.  Programming the graphics is indeed, tricky, but once you get some underlying utilities written for your application, it really isn’t that bad.  I recently put an article up on my website that details some of the things I learned about the development of the Apple 1 and Apple ][ over the years.  

https://www.willegal.net/feature_stories/FeatureStories.htm

best regards,
Mike Willegal

> On Mar 26, 2021, at 1:44 PM, <thomas.haigh at gmail.com> <thomas.haigh at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Thanks Mike,
>  
> You are right that the word “hack” has a different meanings in different contexts. I have to be quite conscious of word limits in my CACM contributions, which are already significantly longer that what the magazine typically allows for “viewpoint” columns. So I didn’t have space to go as far into the changing meaning of the word “hack” as I’d have liked, and instead focused on making people understand that “hacker” here means something different from what it typically would in a newspaper article about Russian or North Korean hackers.
>  
> In professional circles, such as the minicomputer firms you mention,  I think it retained a similar meaning to “kludge” (which I think was popularized by Datamation) and is always negative. A kludge is an ugly design, often produced by making a clumsy adaptation to update an older piece of code or hardware to provide new functionality.
>  
> Levy focuses instead on the motivation and context of the work being done. His MIT hackers are working outside their official duties (or may have no official duties at all), which is what makes them different from the “officially sanctioned users” who come to the computer with the idea of getting something done that will directly advance their jobs or studies. 
>  
> What those two senses of hack might have in common is the idea of a manager or computer scientist (and particularly of a software engineering professor) that the hacker approach optimizes the wrong thing. Hackers were competing with each other to use the fewest chips or instructions, without concern for optimizing for the cost of programmer time, maintainability, or documentability. So the most efficient technical solution might not be the most efficient overall use of resources. That becomes particularly true as programmers move away from the incredible resource limitations of the 1950s into the relatively plentiful world of the 1960s and 70s.
>  
> On the hardware side, Levy positions Steve Wozniak as the epitome of a successful hardware hacker, in the context of PCs where cutting the chip count definitely makes sense. This led to some unmistakable quirks in the Apple II color graphics, but also the situation where the entire Apple IIe chip count, including a disk controller and drive, is less than that of the IBM CGA adapter from the same year.
>  
> Best wishes,
> 
> Tom
>  
> From: MikeWillegal <mike at willegal.net <mailto:mike at willegal.net>> 
> Sent: Friday, March 26, 2021 11:54 AM
> To: thomas.haigh at gmail.com <mailto:thomas.haigh at gmail.com>
> Cc: Sigcis <members at sigcis.org <mailto:members at sigcis.org>>
> 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 <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 <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 <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 <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 <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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