Computers: Let Us Now Praise Famous Hackers

A new view of some much maligned electronic pioneers

Legend at M.I.T. has it that one night in the mid-'50s some students paid a clandestine visit to Cambridge's Kendall Square subway station, where they quietly spread grease all over the tracks. The next morning, the first train that pulled into the station hit the grease and skidded right through the other side, taking its passengers to an unscheduled stop in the middle of a darkened tunnel. When the motorman backed up to see what had happened, the train slid through the station in the other direction as well. The ensuing snarl is supposed to have tied up transit officials and straphangers for hours.

For several generations of M.I.T. engineers, the subway prank was known as the ultimate "hack," the rare practical joke clever and elegant enough to be worthy of one of the world's most prestigious technical schools. Today the best and the brightest technology students are more likely to be found hanging around a computer system than a subway system. But they still call themselves hackers, and although they insist they have been misunderstood, their relationship with the public is once again on the skids.

Last year's hit movie War-Games and a series of well-publicized computer break-ins have created an image of a teen-age computer hacker that is giving the term a bad name. Many people now think of hackers as pests or perhaps even criminals. But the hackers them selves claim they are getting a bum rap from movies and newspapers. Says Bill Burns, an industrial psychologist and part-time hacker: "We are the victims of a major press screw-up."

Hackers, as most computer experts use the term, are distinguished not by their mischievousness but by their persistence and skill. Some of the key breakthroughs in modern computer science, including the development of the personal computer, can be traced to these often fanatically dedicated people. Even today, men and women who are proud to call themselves hackers can be found in the research departments of almost any major computer firm, designing state-of-the-art machines and writing the software that runs on them.

Now some of the real computer whiz kids are finally getting their due. In a new book called Hackers (Doubleday; $17.95), Writer Steven Levy argues that these "science-mad people" are the true heroes of the computer revolution. He traces the history of hackers from M.I.T.'s Tech Model Railroad Club, their first mecca, to Silicon Valley's Homebrew Computer Club, an early microcomputer gathering spot, to a video-game factory in Coarsegold, Calif. Through it all he discerns a common thread: the unspoken assumption among crack computer programmers and engineers that they could straighten out the world by dint of their intelligence if they could only get their hands on the control box.