What is Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution about?

Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution is Steven Levy's account of the community of computer enthusiasts who drove the digital revolution from the late 1950s through the early 1980s — the original hackers of MIT's Tech Model Railroad Club and later AI lab, the hardware hackers of the Bay Area Homebrew Computer Club, and the software entrepreneurs who built the early PC industry. The book traces a culture and an ethic rather than a technology chronology.

The term "hacker" in Levy's usage has no criminal connotation. It means a person so passionate about computers that they will explore any system at any depth, finding elegant solutions to technical problems for the intrinsic pleasure of the craft. The hacker ethic, as Levy articulates it, holds that information wants to be free, that access to computers should be universal and total, that you can be judged only by your technical work, and that you can improve any system by taking it apart and rebuilding it better. This ethic, born in the MIT labs of the early 1960s, was countercultural and explicitly utopian.

The book follows the generations. The first generation — the MIT hackers — worked on room-filling mainframes, developed time-sharing systems, and built the early AI programs. The second generation — the hardware hackers around the Homebrew Computer Club in Silicon Valley in the mid-1970s — built the first personal computers. The third generation — the game hackers who built the early video game industry — made the first mass-market software.

Levy conducted many of the interviews himself and writes with obvious affection for the culture he's documenting. The book captures a specific moment before the commercialization of computing when the culture was small, idealistic, and genuinely revolutionary. It has been called the defining history of hacker culture and is frequently cited as a foundational text for understanding the origins of Silicon Valley and the open-source movement.