Hackers as the new bohemians
Jun 3 10 by daniel
No. Not those New Bohemians!
As part of my research, I’ve had to dig into the history of hackers. Real hackers, not the the criminals and vandals that the media refers to.
The fundamental reference for hacker history is Steven Levy’s Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution, written in 1984, way before the media started using the word as a synonym for someone who breaks the law.
The book has been around for a while, so I will not bother to review it, other than to say that it still remains the most comprehensive resource for understanding the origins of a movement that has began as a small group of people at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Now, what’s interesting about hackers, is that, in my opinion, they are somewhat unacknowledged heirs to the bohemian tradition.
“How can that be?” you might ask. After all bohemians are night creatures who sit around bars and paint stuff, while hackers (the real ones) are just computer nerds who have no girlfriends and use the terminal! If you get past the stereotypes, though, you can find many similarities between the archetypal bohemians from the late 19th Century and early 20th Century and the hackers that emerged from the 1950s and after.
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