Piracy_ The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates - Adrian Johns [275]
The subsequent trajectory of hacking from Cambridge to Palo Alto and beyond has been well known since Steven Levy's classic Hackers. Originally a term for a practical joke of the childish but technically neat kind long popular at places like MIT and Caltech, it now came to mean the virtuoso feats of computer cognoscenti-those who neglected every other aspect of life in order to tweak digital systems to create elegant solutions ("hacks") to tricky problems. At a time when computers were still largely the preserve of specialist technicians, these young virtuosi held a basic commitment to direct "hands-on" experience in order to produce their hacks. Emulating the communities of radio amateurs and phone experimenters, they insisted on the importance of freedom to engage directly with the technology itself. Accessing technologies and sharing the resulting knowledge was in their view essential for technical and even social progress. Moreover, when even the most basic tools - like an assemblerhad to be concocted by the group itself, asserting proprietorial authorship made no sense. They upheld the (Wienerian) view that their work should resemble the unimpeded flow of information inside the system. The computer game, Spacewar, that emerged from this conviction has been called the first piece of open-source software.12
Hacking took on a different form in Palo Alto. It did so because the Bay Area had a history of its own in radio and telecommunications, which extended back to the AT&T patent conflicts and the culture of radio experimenters. In the 1920s-1930s, local companies there had fought the big East Coast combines. The best-known of them, the Federal Telegraph Corporation, employed amateur radio enthusiasts even before WWI; Lee De Forest developed vacuum tubes there that became central to the broadcasting industry. In the twenties FTC continued to defy the radio trust, recruiting radio amateurs to assist in circumventing patent restrictions while winking at local emulators of its own technology. A Palo Alto industry dedicated to advanced technologies developed alongside it that was antithetical to patent pools.13The cluster of research institutions that subsequently emerged in the area drew on this tradition. The three principal sites-Douglas Engelbart's Augmented Human Intellect Research Center, ex MIT professor John McCarthy's Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, and, a little later, Xerox's Palo Alto Research Centerembraced an understanding of the computer as another key to a liberating democratization of thinking and acting. The commitment to openness therefore shifted from a technocratic maxim to a democratic one. It became a mode of emancipation at once practical, self-improving, and utopian.14 Achieving a broad level of access for "the people" to networked computers, under an ideal of democratic research, was more important than the MIT ideal of deep access for a small cadre of technical adepts.
What emerged from that shift in emphasis was a new kind of computer. The "home computer," as it was christened, was as alien and unsettling a thing as the home pirate, and for similar reasons. As in Cambridge, however, a merger of phreaking and hacking was central to defining the new technology. It occurred at a range of extramural and sometimes transient social settings, including various homes, Kepler's bookstore (a place reminiscent of the bookshops and coffeehouses of Restoration London), and a Free University that offered courses on "How to End the IBM Monopoly" 15 In print, there was of course Stewart Brand's Whole Earth Catalog a guide to "tools" useful for readers impatient with the conformities of American consumerism. Launched in 1969, the catalogue touched on an extraordinary range of topics, from cybernetics and communication theories to agriculture and medicine, with an eclectic individualism purportedly inspired by Buckminster Fuller. It grew with successive editions until by 1971