The term “hacker” has received a bad rap because of cybercriminals, but it represents the people responsible both for the creation and development of modern computing—tinkerers and people inquisitive about the inner workings of machines.
The passing of Alan Turing’s 100th birthday on June 23 holds significance to modern computing in our times. Turing is credited as the inventor of modern computing—and just like Charles Babbage, the Victorian inventor who created the first mechanical computer, they were both wartime code-breakers.
According to Ian D. Watson, author of “The Universal Machine: From the Dawn of Computing to Digital Consciousness,” code-breaking is still popular with hackers today—his point being that code-breaking is a common trait among people involved in advancing computer technology, and is representative of the connection between hackers and inventors.
Watson is a professor of in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Auckland in New Zealand.
“If we move to modern times, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, the co-founders of Apple, actually first designed, built, and sold an electronic device for hacking telephone systems,” he said via email, nothing these systems “let its users illegally make free long distance phone calls.”
“Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook was a hacker—he was disciplined for this whilst at Harvard,” Watson said, adding that even Julian Assange, the head of information leaking company WikiLeaks, was a hacker who went by the name of “Mendax.”
His point is that both the creators of modern computing and those who have advanced it were, and are, hackers.
Of course, “hacker” wasn’t always a bad word. The modern use of the term originates from the Tech Model Railroad Club at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology—where people tinker with the inner workings of automated model trains—and likewise holds the meaning of someone who tinkers with technology and software.
People who use hacking as a form of crime fall into a different category, often referred to as “crackers,” or defined as someone who leans towards the dark side of computer security.
But there is a “hacker ethos” that tends to fall somewhere in the middle. “You see at the heart of the hacker ethos is the desire to explore a system, exploit its vulnerabilities, perhaps make it do something it wasn’t intended to do, and often liberate information—as the counter culture guru Stewart Brand said in the 1960s ‘information wants to be free,’” said Watson.
This idea of “information wants to be free,” he adds, “is at the heart of the development of the Internet, the open source software movement, and our current difficulties with copyright, intellectual property, file sharing, and piracy.”
Beyond this, however, the people who have created modern computing were typically unwilling to accept the status quo, said Watson, “They know they can do better, they have the skills to try and they are prepared to take risks,” and this includes Bill Gates dropping out of Harvard, and Larry Page and Sergey Brin of Google leaving college before finishing their PhD programs.
Watson said that with his book, he hopes people come to understand “what is common to all computers, what makes them universal machines. Beyond that I hope they are fascinated by some of the biographies in the book and that they are curious as to what is to come in the future.”
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