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>> A Beautiful obsession with the binary world <<
>> By Steven Levy <<
She can kill all your files;
She can freeze with a frown.
And a wave of her hand brings the
whole system down.
And she works on her code until ten
after three.
She lives like a bat but she's always a
hacker to me.
- from the LOTS
Hacker songbook
THE LOW OVERHEAD Time-Sharing (LOTS) facility at Stanford University
is blanketed with an eerie calm. There are more than a hundred
students here, but they speak in whispers, as though they were in the
presence of something godlike. The cavernous main lobby, which reaches
up to a fourth-floor skylight (the building is the architectural soul
mate of the recently collapsed Kansas City Hyatt), holds a lounge in
which a dozen or so students are scattered, some pacing impatiently,
others snoozing, their heads resting on textbooks. The names of these
students are on a computer queue; they are waiting for a free computer
terminal at the north end of the lobby, where each of perhaps fifty
cubicles is equipped with a keyboard and display screen. Staring at
each of these terminals is a Stanford student, or someone posing as a
Stanford student in order to use the computer. In an adjoing room,
there are approximately sixty more terminals, also in use. The hushed
voices give the occasional beeps of the computer an odd prominence,
and you can often hear the methodical, somewhat screechy churn of the
computer's printer in the other room. But most of the noise is lost
because of the enormity of the lobby. To the ear, this is an
electronic cathedral.
It's well past midnight.
Most of the students are under the whip of academic
discipline. Siting in a rather formal posture, they tentatively key
in data and watch for the results on the display screen with skeptical
frowns. They often consult their books before making another move.
These are the users. For them, computers are functional, if over
complex, tools: necessary evils.
But to a small society that convenes here at LOTS, computers
are much more. The big, orange-topped, million-dollar DECSYSTEM-20
(DEC-20) computer, visible behind a glass partition, looks no more
spectacular than a line of file cabinets, but it is the dominant icon
of these devotees' existence, the secret sharer of their dreams, their
instrument of power and creativity, their medium of communication,
their companion in merrymaking. This is the society of hackers.
Hackers are the mutant offspring of the eggheads who once
prowled throught engineering buildings with slide rules attached to
their belts. The computer's power has made the hackers a subculture
to be reckoned with. Their fellow students may consider them creepy,
but among themselves they are risk takers, exploreres, artists. They
communicate with one another by intricate computer networks, speak in
their own jargon and qualify for lucrative jobs in which they will
create the complex programs essential for the everyday functioning of
our nation, our world. They have the potential to be supercriminals,
to use digital skeleton keys to electronic vaults holding money,
confidential personal data and national security secrets. But the
power is not without a price: an addiction to computing, a conpulsion
to program. And they think it's fun.
I leave Newell to his PCL. There are about forty people still
using the computer. Each seems to be a self-sufficient system of man
and machine. It is almost four a.m.--the hour of the hacker.
"WITHIN THE NEXT twenty years, culture will be divided between those
who know something about the computer and those who don't. It's like
knowing how to read when the printing press was invented," says James
Milojkovic, a Stanford psychologist working toward a doctorate.
Milojkovic, a cheery Australian who studies "psychological issues in
computer interaction," has been watching hackers closely. He thinks
it's essential that we study them. "They are looked upon as sick and
strange; they see themselves as doing what everyone will be doing in
the future. There's a real mystery to them, because they know things
that we don't. They believe they have total control of what's going
on, because when you understand what the computer does, you can have
it do almost anything. Once you learn how, you're part of the
priesthood. It's a priesthood of the young. I've heard stories of
elementary school kids breaking into schools at night so they can use
the computer."
Ernest Adams never figured to be a hacker. True, he like
computing, which he'd been doing since he was twelve; then he
experienced his first epiphany: "Here I was typing things, and the
machine was typing things back at me, and we're imagining we're
playing a space war!" Adams had a natural talent for computers, but he
thought he got it all out of his system in high school, when he hung
out with a group who would stay late tapping into the computer at the
nearby University of Kentucky. He came to Stanford to major in
physics--until sometime in his first quarter, when he wandered into
LOTS.
Low Overhead Time-Sharing began at Stanford five years ago as
a twenty-four-hour self-service operation designed to encourage
student computer use. It was too successful. "The first student
coordinator dropped out of school because he got to involved with the
computer," says LOTS programmer J.Q. Johnson, "and several more got
pretty close."
The Stanford community has witnessed previous generations of
hackers, mostly in the Artificial Intelligence Lab. But that group was
unique and pioneering. LOTS hackers are indicative of a new wave
haunting computing centers in colleges throughout the country. In many
cases, these new hackers, like Adams, have been raised on computers.
They have little experience with anything but computers. They often
don't care to learn about anything else. They associate only with
other hackers, speaking in the own strange jargon, always complaining
about some "bagbiting kluge," whistling in awe over some "winner's
cuspy, yet nontrivial" program. These words are delivered in a
high-pitched, goofy burst of verbiage that assumes the listener is
inputting data as quickly as a PDP-11. Uninformed non-hackers (called
users, often modified to lusers) have a word for these creatures:
nerd. But their attitude is also touched with a trace of envy, since
hackers know something the users don't.
Five weeks away from home, Ernest Adams was unhappy. He
disliked dorm life. He was also suffering thorugh the tortuous throes
of unrequited love known only to seventeen-year-old males. Physics was
not going to solve his problems, so he came to LOTS. He sat down at a
terminal, opened an account, and for the next few hours, had a long
talk with the computer about its operating system. He'd found a
friend.
"I became involved with LOTS to the exclusion of other
things," Ernest says. "I would come to drown my sorrows." His
expertise grew, and his programming ideas became grandiose. You could
do anything with a program. As Ralph Gorin, the director of LOTS, puts
it: "Who else do you know who will do whatever you tell it to?" Adams
has his own explanation: "It's knowing you can start from scratch,
create an object called a program, hand it to the computer and have
the computer start plotting beautiful graphs across the screen--and
you are personally responsible!" He smiles demonically beneath his
beard. "It's a little like playing God."
The world that Adams has entered is based entirely on the
computer. In this world, participants are asked to choose a new name,
and they often identify themselves with such fantasy monikers as
Gandalf or Bombadil. With its multimillion-character memory, the
DEC-20 is sort of a home, an office, a babysitter and a best friend.
It will handle the most elaborate programs you can conceive of. It
will play chekcers and robot war with you, and it will remind you,
with an accompanying bell, when it's time for dinner. <Somewhere in
the computer memory is a list of pizzerias that deliver.> It will tell
you when your friends have logged into the system, and allow you to
send messages to them without leaving your terminal. It will
entertain you with lewd limericks stored in its core. It will type
your paper for you, help you with homework and, with its electronic
bulletin board, help you sell your roller skates. If you get
restless, you can go exploring in the nooks and crannies of the
DEC-20's labyrinthine operating system, looking for stray bugs.
The computer generates a closely knit community of disciples.
Hackers hang out with fellow hackers, meeting one another in
late-night sessions where they may crowd around the terminal of
someone who is preparing a hack that will, upon reaching "winnitude,"
be placed in the computer's operating system. On six a.m. excursions
to breakfast, the talk is of the machine's new PASCAL language
compiler, or the upcoming trade of a program written at SCORE (another
computer facility at Stanford) for a digital electronic memory cache.
Violent arguments erupt over the relative virtues of LISP programming
language and PCL. The arguments are fought in the weird, coldly
logical syntax that comes from working in the rigid linear protocol of
programming.
Though some hackers won't socialize at all, most love to talk
computers. On slight provocation they will overwhelm users with
arcanely detailed explanations of computer protocol. But inevitably,
they return to their terminals. Only rarely does the hacker community
gather together for special occasions, such as the recent fifth
anniversary of LOTS, when hackers faced the glass window of the
computer room and sang "Happy Birthday" to the DEC-20. Otherwise, the
most social moments at LOTS come toward the end of each quarter, when
the lobby is packed with students waiting their turns at the computer.
Those waiting for terminals swill beer to the accompaniment of a
guitar-toting crooner singing hacker lyrics to the tunes of popular
songs. Sing-along selections include "Fifty Ways to Write Your
Program," "LOTS Is Painless," "I Wonder How the System Is Doing
Tonight," "I Don't Know How to Log In" and "Fun Fun Fun Till Her Daddy
Took the Keyboard Away."
To understand what hackers really >do< when they sit at
terminals until rough stubble emerges on their chins, you must
understand something about high-level computer programming. You must
also set aside suspicions that computers are vile, impersonal
manipulators of numbers, and enemies of individuality. To hackers,
programming is the mental equivalent of supersonic test piloting, and
the computer is a bottomless font of spirituality.
A program is a set of instructions to the computer. It
consists of lines of code usually written in a specific language that
the computer, equipped with suitable microprocessing translators, can
understand. By telling the computer how to rearrange and access its
binary contents, each program allows the computer to perform a set of
functions, and the results might be anything from a Space Invaders
game to a mailing list.
A program must be scrupulously constructed to perform its
function. Former IBM software manager Frederick Brooks wrote in "The
Mythical Man-Month": "If one character, one pause of the incantation
is not in stricly proper form, the magic doesn't work." But even
after it seems to work, there might be bugs in the program that will
affect performance. A maniacal perfectionism is called for in
debugging. While it may seem workaday, hackers think otherwise."
"Debugging is like laying a long railroad track," says John
Levy, a software manager for Apple Computers. "There's a little piece
you want to test, so you back up the locomotive five miles down the
road and at ninety miles an hour, you bring it across the track yo're
testing. If everyting is perfect, it flies right over, but if there's
one flaw, the engine rools off, flying and crashing until it comes to
rest a mile down the track. Only at that point do you get to see the
pieces."
The ones who take the greatest programming challenges, who
fearlessly construct miles of fragile track and race the hugest
engines acrosss them, are hackers. Just as the early astronauts
achieved legendary status, there is a hacker elite whose wizardry has
set them apart as digital daredevils.
Don Woods is acknowledged to have the Right Stuff. With long,
stringy black hair and a bearish grin, he looks somewhat older than
his twenty-nine years. He works at Xerox and wears a dark GAMES
T-shirt that contrasts with his almost chalk-colored skin. Pinned
next to the Xerox employee badge on his shirt is a button that reads
QUESTION AUTHORITY. Wood is known as a classic, or canonical, hacker.
"Here's a quick hack I've been working on," he says. He types a few
characters on his keyboard, and from the computer come the
calliopelike sounds of a rousing, Sousa-style marching song. "I put
it together in a couple of days," he says.
One of the results of Woods' epic hacks is Adventure, a
collaboration with Will Crowther. Ostensibly a game, Adventure is a
metaphor for hacking. When you begin Adventure, the computer tells
you your location: at a stream, near a forest, within sight of a small
brick building. From there you embark on a Tolkeinesque journey
through the caverns and glens of a medieval land, encountering
murderous midgets, poisonous snakes, treacherous rapids, thieving
pirates and magazines written in dwarf language. By telling the
computer the direction you wish to move (typeing N for north or U for
up, for example), the computer calculates where, on the unseen map
created in Woods' imaginations, you will wind up next, and displays a
written description of your next location. You go deeper and deeper
into this netherworld, hoping to emerge by the same path with treasure
in hand. There are almost 200 rooms you pass through on your way to
the treasure, many dotted with hazards, and the path crosses and
intertwines in ways impossible to divine without hours of exploration.
Adventure is the most popular game at LOTS, and indeed it is a
national craze among those with access to computers. "I would show it
to people on a Fraday afternoon," Woods says, "and they wouldn't leave
their terminals until they finished it, maybe on Monday.
Adventure is a kind of litmus test for hackers: if you can
lose yourself in the gullies and misty caverns, you might be
susceptible to computer addiction. Just as the plot of Adventure is a
world unto itself, the vast memory and operating system of a mainframe
computer is a gigantic landscape, seeming impenetrable but eventually
accessible to the most devoted seekers. Just as everything in the
physical world is constructed of atoms, everything a computer
processes or reads is ultimately reduced to bits of either one or
zero. Like treasure seekers in the subterranean Adventure world,
hackers are elcetronic spelunkers who have developed the skill to
burrow down from the more superficial programming languages to the
bedrock machine language of digits. Woods call this "going down and
doing the grudgies." To get involved this deeply, you must be able to
think in dizzyingly abstract terms. Your mental concentration is so
intense that your conciousness is subsumed by the computer.
When a hacker programs, he creates worlds. A well-crafted
program - a good hack - is elegant, doing the most work in the fewest
lines of code. If it displays wizardry and is fairly sophisticated,
hackers call it a nontrivial program, even though what the program
>does< might be absurdly frivolous. Hackers judge themselves not on
criteria of compassion, wit, altruism or even the results of their
programs. If your program cures cancer, fine. If it helps a credit
bureau track down your uncle, tough. What's important is the
brilliance of the program itself.
"My level of judgment is technically oriented, one that would
disqualify many who consider themselves hackers," says Mark Crispin, a
systems programmer at SCORE. "That is, what nontrivial program have
you written? As opposed to logging in and sending bug reports and
flaming [translation: bullshitting] on the bulletin board. I
consider a nontrivial program to be something above a hundred lines of
text, and it depends on what language it is. It requires some design,
a user interface, a significant amount of time to develop. It doesn't
matter if the program itself is a great idea."
Crispin has been holding court for me in the living room of
his condominium, which is decorated in middle-period graduate student
and distinguished only by a half-dozen hand-held computer games and a
terminal hooked up to the telephone. Crispin is tall, pale, and
though he looks like he's never shaved, he's twenty-five. He shares
the condo with his finacee, who had been a member of a hacking club at
Columbia University when she spotted a bug in one of Crispin's
programs she was using. She sent him transcontinental computer mail,
he replied, and the digital correspondence led to a meeting and
eventually a proposal. She listens approvingly as he speak in a nasal
voice that grows louder when he has a particular point to make.
Crispin wants to show me something. He bounds out of his
chair, heads for his terminal and calls the LOTS computer. He types
in his password, ignores the computer message that tells him he has
electronic mail and demonstrates a program that generates sexual
quips. Typing its name, Tingle, brings this to the screen:
"I'm back in the saddle again, again!..." shrieked the quadriplegic as
the lurid sabra savagely tossed away his well-cut pants and munched on
his spunk-filled pepperoni.
Crispin admires the hell out of this hack. "Tingle is
definitely a nontrivial program," he says. "It has its own concept of
structured English sentences. It is completely computer-generated.
Everything Tingle points out makes literal sense. Tingle builds
scripts of what it's going to do; it remembers male and female
characteristics. Only then does it randomly choose from vocabulary
columns."
With all this hoopla, you'd think the program was perfect.
But no program is. "The program can always work, but you can always
make it better," says Crispin. "You can always have it do something
new, make it perform faster, give it more structure, make it >do<
more!" Crispin's voice is a high whine, and he's almost out of his
chair. ">You can always think of ways to make it better!<" You're
never at the point where you stop. Just when you say, 'It's totally
perfect,' you say, 'Gee, but I can make it do >this<!'"
Is a computer program a work of art? Mark Crispin thinks so,
and other hackers agree. Hackers insist that each programmer wirtes
code in an individual, recognizable style. Programmers work at a
level of creativity, they say, that is comparable to writing poetry,
composing, painting. "You can express yourself by writing code," says
Marc LeBrun, a twenty-nine year-old hacker who never aytended college
but spent his teen years at Stanford's Artificial Intelligence Lab.
"And you begin to judge programs on high-level things like style. You
say, is this a flavorful way to do this? And people will often get
into huge arguemtnst about something that will ultimately make a
difference of a small microsecond but will have profound stylistic
implications."
Hackers as artists! Can it happen? Will hackers give
dramatic renditions of their latest COBOL hacks? Will we curl up on
the beach with a good, long word-processing program? It seems
impossible, because the programmer's art is so self-contained,
esoterically personal, agressively elitist and void of the stuff of
human experience. "People don't read programs like novels, that's
true," says Stanford computer scientis Dennis Allison. "And it's a
shame."
DON PARKER IS NO FAN of hackers. Author of "Crime by Computer",
resident expert of computer abuse at the Stanford Research Institute
(SRI) and a lanky, three-piece-suited man who resembles an elongated
Donald Pleasance, Parker thinks that hackers promote an attitude that
could lead to disastrous results.
Computers are highly prone to being tampered with by knowl-
edgeable intruders. When a large computer is used in a time-sharing
system, safeguards are installed to prevent users from getting access
to the digital files of other users. If a troublemaker succeeds in
getting these files, he not only can read the private notes but can
change and even erase them. Parker fears hackers because they not
only have the know-how to crack security, but they regard these
safeguards as mountaineers regard Mount McKinley. "The more barriers
you put up, the more compelling the incentive is to break them down,"
Parker says. Marc LeBrun agrees: "I think the hacker viewpoint is
that the world exists to hack," he says, "and there aren't any angels
with flaming swords standing over the world saying, 'Thou shalt not
push these buttons.'"
If those angels existed, hackers would finds programs to dull
their swords. Despite the best efforts of the business and military
establishment, the hacker-proof security system has yet to be devised.
When SRI gathered a team of crack programmers to test the
inviolability of military defense computers, the programmers were
shocked to find that it took them only one telephone call and a few
minutes to break into files containing top-secret information.
"What we have to do is change the cultural values in this
[hacker] subculture," says Parker. "there are instructors in high
school and universities who encourage people to attack security
systems as a means to learn more about computers. There are people
who think of this a a matter of fun and games, a stimulating thing to
do."
One idle form of hacker amusement is causing the computer to
crash, or temporarily break down. I've asked at least six hackers to
explain the thrill of this, and I've received only inarticulate
sentence fragments to the effect of, well, it's >there<. Maybe they
do it to show the computer who's boss. One hacker bragged how he set
a few hundred programs into motion that constantly forked into other
programs, which begat even more programs, growing at a logarithmic
rate until the overloaded DEC-20 was brought to its knees. "I guess
it's a phase everyone goes through," explains another hacker.
Hackers everywhere delight in these tricks, the more harrowing
the better. Take Julius Smith's Seppuku program. Smith is a grad
student who hacks at Stanford's Computer Music Center; he has long
been engaged in a search for the algorithm of the violin. Smith knows
the old hacker trick of giving an enticing name to a rogue program:
when a user peruses a system's menu and sees something call Seppuku,
he'll access it. (All hackers have insatiable curiosity about other
programs.) On the screen the user sees:
Seppuku is not a program for honorable users. Do not
run Seppuku unless you can live with your shame. Type
y if you must run it.
As soon as the poor sucker types 'y', the screen becomes
ablaze with six-inch letters shouting, "GOMEN NASAI!!" This is
approximate Japanese for "Now you've done it." The screen immediately
begins to list the titles of every file the user has ever stored in
the computer memory. These files represent years of work. "Do you
really want to delete all your files?" the computer asks. DELETE?
Before the stunned user can fully comprehend the catastropghic
implications of this message, the computer answers with a 'Yes'. One
by one the files are wiped off the screen.
"Your every file directory has been deleted," says the
computer. "Goodbye - have a good life." Then the user is logged out.
Screen blank.
"Seppuku doesn't REALLY delete the files," says Smith. "It
just looks like it does. You see, hackers really don't hurt anyone."
But once a hacker has the knowledge to crack security, he
simply has to be trusted.
At a terminal sits a hacker and a wheel by his prompt
And his screen shows the reminders
Of every bug that broke his code or
halted
Till he cried out, in his anger and his shame
I am leaving, logout, killjob, but the hacker still
remains....
After a few quarters at Stanford, Ernest Adams began to
reassess hacking: what had it done for him? What had it done TO him?
He had learned an incredible amount about computers but felt cut off
from the mainstream. He had top grades in this programming courses
but had failed calculus because he spent too much time at LOTS. He
looked at some of his fellow hackers and decided that their devotion
to computers was eroding their humanity. Was he turning into a
maching himself?
Stored within the LOTS computer memory is a computer bulletin
board that is open to comment and response from any user in the
system. Items on B-Board range from lonely-hearts messages to offers
to sell bicycles, to long-winded debates about issues of school
politics, world affairs and computing ("If a computer had a voice,
which sex would it be?").
One intense B-Board exchange dealt with the concerns Adams had
about excessive hacking. The opening salvo was launced by a
disgruntled hacker who flamed about the narrowness, inhumanity and
addictiveness of hacking - he called LOTS an "alien culture" whose
inhabitans' personalities are irreversibly shaped by machine. This
kicked off a running debate between those like Adams who agreed with
the gist of the attack, and hackers who defended their long hours of
interfacing with "the infinite tool."
A Stanford psychology professor named Philip Zimbardo acquired
a printout of this debate and sent it to "Psychology Today", which
presented it as "The Hacker Papers," accompanied by Zimbardo's
commentary. He suggested basically, that hackers would be well
advised to join the human race. The article made many of the LOTS
hackers self conscious. "I sometimes try to hide the fact that I'm a
hacker," says Dan Newell. Others are now defensive at the least sign
of disapproval, charging their critis with "computerphobia." "Why
single >us< out?" says one. "Why not talk about how much time the
Stanford marching band practices?"
All hackers, though, have a hedge against insecurity: they
are needed. "The computer field is growing at a termendous rate,"
says Dennis Allison, "and it's going to take a concentrated amount of
wizardy to bring it about." As our dependence on computers increases,
it will be the hackers who can best create the supersoftware that will
keep society from imploding into a mass of jumbled bits. An industry
study showed that one good programmer is as productive a ten merely
competent ones; a wizard-level programmer can almost name his price.
The viciously competitive computer firms are desparate for hackers,
who ask only for flexible working hours, no dress or etiquette
requirements, and, above all, nontrivial, trailblazing tasks. Then
the hackers proceed to work sixteen-hour days until the project is
completed. "There're lots of opportunities to make an obscene amount
of money," says LOTS staffer Bob Knight.
Such "real world" pursuits (along with other distractions like
marriage and family) have the potential of eventually turning a hacker
from his computer extremism. So, many of the LOTS hackers see
Stanford - and possibly graduate school - as a last chance to run amok
with the DEC-20. As Julius Smith puts it: "My [student] funding runs
out in a year. This is my last chance to do something pure in my
life."
Some hackers find ways of remaining "pure": taking on
temporary programming stints at Silicon Valley's high-tech operations,
keeping a connection with other hackers by illegal accounts on
university computers.
But Ernest Adams prefers a more conventional existence. He
wants to be counted among those who have hacked intensely for a year
or two, then managed to grow out of it. He took off a quarter of his
sophomore year to work computers for the Viking Mars Landing Project,
and later took off more time to do some professional programming. He
made a conscious effort to pay more attention to his other studies and
get back into the mainstream of users, nonwinners, and even people who
don't know a byte form an escape key. He once was convince that
hacking was transitory, that society need not worry about it
proliferation. Now he sees more hackers than ever, and he's not so
sure. Still, he believes he has freed himself from computer
addiction.
But old obsessions die hard. Recently, at six in the morning,
Adams was at LOTS working at a terminal. "Just editing a paper" was
his excuse. But he offered no apologies for speaking in rapturous
tones about his planned thesis for a computer doctorate.
"I would like to write a program that reproduces, that reacts
negatively or positively to its environment and, most important of
all, could be mutated by its environment. I would like to see if I
could start several of these programs running, and start some sort of
superior program that watches them mutating, and see if they evolve.
That's the God program. It invents the environment, reates the data
that the programs read, and will mutate the programs...."
Adams flames on rabidly, his face lit up like a display for a
well-hacked game. The God program will create hot spots to control
the motions of the one-celled programs. A maturation factor will
control the growth and adolescence of the one-cells. The program
might well duplicate the theory of natural selection, and be a kind of
vindication of Darwinian theory ....>I am leaving, logout, killjob,
but the hacker still remains.<
[end of article from April Rolling Stone by Steven Levy]