User:Woomas214

"Old School Hackers"
The phrase “old school hackers” are referring to the group of computer geek heroes tracing back to the early days when the computer first came to existence. In the past, “hackers” are not recognized as nerdy, bad guys who got criminalized for their hacking. Instead, they are the group of people who actually accelerate the innovation of computers by trying to urge for improvements. This shifting of connotation on the term ‘hacker’ can be taken as a demonstration of our increasing anxiety on contemporary technology and is indeed a struggle for commercial and ideological dominance of cyberspace - the Internet today.

It is known that old school hackers are the group of people who are “most productive…working on Signals and Power…with pride” (Levy,1984:10) and in order to qualify as a hack, “the feat must be imbued with innovation, style, and technical virtuosity” (Levy,1984:10). Furthermore, as demonstrated in the Hacker Ethic by Steven Levy, hackers are people who “believe that essential lessons can be learned about the systems – about the world – from taking things apart, seeing how they work, and using this knowledge to create a new and even more interesting things” (Levy,1984:27) and they “came to deeply appreciate innovative techniques which allowed programs to do complicated tasks with very few instructions” (Levy,1984:31). In other words, with reference to the work done by the old school hackers, their ethic of changing our life for the better through computers is indeed exercised. The internet is recognized as one of the contemporary relevance of Hacker Ethic. Despite its capability of universal access and non-restricted feature, the legacy and ethic of the old school hackers concerning a free flow and exchange of information is also demonstrated. Therefore, it is no doubt that old school hackers being the innovators in the early computer industry indeed exhibit a democratization of computing. Such democratization can be further seen as a substantial key to understanding the changes of the world and a step closer to have computers capable of changing our life for the better achieved.

Reference: Levy, Steven (1984) Hackers:Heroes of the Computer Revolution, Anchor Press/Doubleday, New York