Information about Hacker Culture

In academia, a hacker is a person who follows a spirit of playful cleverness and enjoys programming. The context of academic hackers forms a voluntary subculture termed the academic hacking culture.

History

Before communications between computers and computer users was as networked as it is now, there were multiple independent and parallel hacker subcultures, often unaware or only partially aware of each others' existence. All of these had certain important traits in common:

• creating software and sharing it with each other
• placing a high value on freedom of inquiry; hostility to secrecy
• information-sharing as both an ideal and a practical strategy
• upholding the right to fork
• emphasis on rationality
• distaste for authority
• playful cleverness, taking the serious humorously and their humor seriously

These sorts of subcultures were commonly found at academic settings such as college campuses. The MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, the University of California, Berkeley and Carnegie Mellon University were particularly well-known hotbeds of early hacker culture. They evolved in parallel, and largely unconsciously, until the Internet, where a legendary PDP-10 machine at MIT, called AI, that was running ITS, provided an early meeting point of the hacker community. This and other developments such as the rise of the free software movement drew together a critically large population and encouraged the spread of a conscious, common, and systematic ethos. Symptomatic of this evolution was an increasing adoption of common slang and a shared view of history, similar to the way in which other occupational groups have professionalized themselves but without the formal credentialling process characteristic of most professional groups.

Over time, the academic hacker subculture has tended to become more conscious, more cohesive, and better organized. The most important consciousness-raising moments have included the composition of the first Jargon File in 1973, the promulgation of the GNU Manifesto in 1985, and the publication of The Cathedral and the Bazaar in 1997. Correlated with this has been the gradual election of a set of shared culture heroes: Bill Joy, Donald Knuth, Dennis Ritchie, Alan Kay, Ken Thompson, Richard M. Stallman, Linus Torvalds, and Larry Wall, among others.

The concentration of academic hacker subculture has paralleled and partly been driven by the commoditization of computer and networking technology, and has in turn accelerated that process. In 1975, hackerdom was scattered across several different families of operating systems and disparate networks; today it is largely a Unix and TCP/IP phenomenon, and is concentrated around various open-source operating systems.

Artifacts and customs

The academic hacker subculture is defined by shared work and play focused around central artifacts. Some of these artifacts are very large; the Internet itself, the World Wide Web, the GNU Project, and the Linux operating system are all hacker creations, works of which the subculture considers itself primary custodian.

Since 1990, the academic hacker subculture has developed a rich range of symbols that serve as recognition symbols and reinforce its group identity. Tux, the Linux penguin, the BSD Daemon, and the Perl Camel stand out as examples. More recently, the use of the glider structure from Conway's Game of Life as a general Hacker Emblem has been proposed by Eric S. Raymond. All of these routinely adorn T-shirts, mugs, and other paraphernalia.

Notably, the academic hacker subculture appears to have exactly one annual ceremonial day—April Fool's. There is a long tradition of perpetrating elaborate jokes, hoaxes, pranks and fake websites on this date. This is so well established that hackers look forward every year to the publication of the annual joke RFC, and one is invariably produced.

Documents

The Jargon File has had a special role in acculturating hackers since its origins in the early 1970s. Many textbooks and some literary works shaped the academic hacker subculture; among the most influential are:

• , by Steven Levy
• Gödel, Escher, Bach, by Douglas Hofstadter
• The Art of Computer Programming (TAOCP), by Donald Knuth
• The Mythical Man-Month, by Brooks
• ("the Dragon Book"), by Aho, Sethi, and Ullman

• Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (SICP), by Abelson and Sussman
• The C Programming Language (K&R), by Kernighan and Ritchie
• The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, by Douglas Adams
• The Tao of Programming, by Geoffrey James
• The Illuminatus! Trilogy, by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson
• Principia Discordia,by Greg Hill and Kerry Thornley
• The Soul of a New Machine, by Tracy Kidder
• The Cuckoo's Egg, by Cliff Stoll
• The Unix System, by Stephen R. Bourne
• Hackers & Painters, by Paul Graham

External links

• A Brief History of Hackerdom - more depth on the history of hackerdom
• How To Become a Hacker, by Eric S. Raymond.