1967: Time sharing machines were the medium the hacker culture grew in. The most important of these was the PDP-10, first released in 1967.


Pdp 10

MIT's hackers refused to use DEC's operating software for the PDP-10, and built their own operating system, the legendary ITS.

ITS stood for "Incompatible Timesharing System," a name which gives a good idea on their attitude. They wanted it their way. Fortunately for all, MIT's people had the intelligence to match their arrogance. ITS, quirky and eccentric and occasionally buggy though it always was, hosted a brilliant series of technical innovations.

ITS itself was written in assembler, but many ITS projects were written in the AI language LISP.

1969: the first year of the ARPAnet. The ARPAnet was the first transcontinental computer network. It was built by the Defense Department as an experiment in digital communications, but grew to link together hundreds of universities and research laboratories. It enabled researchers everywhere to exchange information with unprecedented speed and flexibility, giving a huge boost to collaborative work and tremendously increasing both the pace and intensity of technological advance.

But the ARPAnet did something else as well. Its electronic highways brought together hackers all over the U.S. in a critical mass; instead of remaining isolated in small groups each developing their own ephemeral local cultures, they discovered themselves as a sort of networked tribe.

The first intentional artifacts of hackerdom--the first slang lists, the first satires, the first self-conscious discussions of the hacker ethic--all propagated on the ARPAnet in its early years. (The first version of the Jargon File, as a major example, dated from 1973.)

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