Hacking as art: Demoscene
Steven Levy’s book Hackers (summary, e-text) from 1984 is a great history of hacker culture until 1984. For what happens after 1984, you must read Stallman or Raymond. But they only cover the Unix/university world. From the early 80s on, really interesting things started happening on the home computer front.
According to Levy, one of the imperatives of the MIT hacker community was: You can create art and beauty on a computer. An early hack on the TX-0 computer at the MIT AI lab was a program that played music. I don’t know what happened during 60s and 70s, but since the late 70s, lots of games were written. Games have always been part of the hacker culture (some games at least, not any games).
A recent book edited by Lassi Tasaj�rvi, called Demoscene: The Art of Real-time tells a story about the birth of the demoscene in the beginning of 80s. (more…)
Long-term Approach to Software
In his essay Software That Lasts 200 Years, Dan Bricklin calls for an approach to software that takes into account long-term consequences. Bricklin compares software production to building projects - houses, bridges, roads - that are planned and built to last for a very long time. By contrast, “software has historically been built assuming that it will be replaced in the near future (remember the Y2K problem)”.
