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