The academic hacker culture developed in the 1960s among hackers working on early minicomputers in academic computer science environments, especially at MIT. After 1969 it fused with the technical culture of the pioneers of the Internet, after 1980 with the culture of Unix, and after 1987 with elements of the early microcomputer hobbyists. Since the mid-1990s, it has been largely coincident with what is now called the free software movement.
The hobby and network hacker culture developed in the 1960s, too (though some claim origins related to radio amateurs in 1920s), in the context of phreaking. It is often implicated with 2600: The Hacker Quarterly and the alt.2600 newsgroup. There are also relations to hobbyist home computing of the early 80s, however, contrary to the academic hacker culture, mostly related to commercial computer and video games, software cracking and later the demo scene. There are overlaps in ideas and members of both cultures, however, members of the first culture have a tendency to look down and disassociate from these overlaps. They often refer disparagingly to people in the second culture as crackers. The second culture on the other hand tends not to distinguish between the two cultures as harshly, instead acknowledging that they have much in common including many members, political and social ideologies, and a love of learning about technology. They have more a tendency to categorize people into script kiddies and black hat (which is what the second culture refers to as crackers instead), grey hat and white hat hackers. They also sometimes refer to the first culture as conservative hackers. However, neither of those terms are much used or taken seriously outside of the influence of the second hacker culture.
Before the computing world was as networked as it is now, there were multiple independent and parallel hacker cultures, often unaware or only partially aware of each others' existence. All of these had certain important traits in common:
These sorts of cultures 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 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 hacker culture 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, debatably Eric S. Raymond, Dennis Ritchie, Alan Kay, Ken Thompson, Richard M. Stallman, Linus Torvalds, and Larry Wall, among others.
The concentration of hacker culture 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 Linux.
The hacker culture 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 culture considers itself primary custodian. Wikipedia itself can be considered an artifact of hacker culture.
Since 1990, the hacker culture 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 hacker culture 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.
In modern parlance, the hacker ethic is either:
Both of these normative ethical principles are widely, but by no means universally, accepted among hackers. The first, and arguably the second, emerged from the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory during the '60s and '70s. Most hackers subscribe to the hacker ethic in the first sense, and many act on it by writing free software, giving the user permission to study, modify, and redistribute it. A few, such as the Free Software Foundation, go further and assert that it is immoral to prevent computer users from sharing or altering software, as is typical with proprietary software.
The second sense is more controversial: some people consider the act of cracking afoul of the government itself to be unethical, like breaking and entering into an office. But the belief that 'ethical' cracking excludes destruction at least moderates the behavior of people who see themselves as 'benign' crackers (see also samurai, grey hat). On this view, it may be one of the highest forms of hacker courtesy to (a) break into a system, and then (b) explain to the SysOp, preferably by email from a superuser account, exactly how it was done and how the hole can be plugged; effectively acting as an unpaid (and unsolicited) tiger team.
The most reliable manifestation of either version of the hacker ethic is that almost all hackers are actively willing to share technical tricks, software, and (where possible) computing resources with other hackers. Huge cooperative networks such as Usenet, FidoNet and the Internet itself can function without central control because of this trait; they both rely on and reinforce a sense of community that may be hackerdom's most valuable intangible asset.
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