During a dinner out with another couple some time ago we two men talked about “computers” as many of us are wont to do from time to time. Then, a few days later, I received Hackers in an Amazon box. Thanks, Glenn, I really enjoyed this book!
In Hackers, Steven Levy tells the story of the computer revolution starting at the beginning, when a few computer programmers at MIT started thinking about programming different from the establishment, including the academic community and, of course, business. At the time, “business” was pretty much only IBM. Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) just started and provided its revolutionary minicomputer, the PDP, to select universities.
That started it all in the Sixties, and the rest, as we so say, is history.
In this book we get to know some of the pioneers we who became household names, like Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, but there are dozens of others who contributed just as much but whose names did not become as famous.
When I was 14 years old and a schoolboy in Germany in 1970, I bought a book about computers, studied it, and started drawing logic diagrams, cobbled together logic gates to perform the basic arithmetic calculations on notepads. To test them, I used a transformer from my slotcar track, bought little lightbulbs and sockets to represent binary memory registers, toggle switches to enter binary data into the system, and wired the various gates using tiny wires and Molex connectors. Yes, I was 14, and I was designing computers.
School and life took me away, and it would be another 10 years before I entered the computer field. By then, the classic hacker revolution was over, and the industry had already worked itself into a pattern of exponential growth. Reading Hackers now brings me back to my youth and how it all started for me. Becoming an expert programmer and eventually starting a software company has consumed my professional life. By choosing a career in a field that fascinated me since my youth, I have never really worked a day in my life. I always just got paid for doing what I would have been doing anyway. But I started out as a hacker and I could relate to all these other hackers.
Any computer aficionado on any level will enjoy reading Steven Levy’s Hackers. It’s a guide through the decades of what we call the computer revolution, focusing mostly on the first two or three decades that started it all.
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