4. The End of Elder Days
So matters stood in 1980; three cultures, overlapping at the edges but
clustered around very different technologies. The ARPANET/PDP-10
culture, wedded to LISP and MACRO and TOPS-10 and ITS and SAIL. The
Unix and C crowd with their PDP-11s and VAXen and pokey telephone
connections. And an anarchic horde of early microcomputer enthusiasts
bent on taking computer power to the people.
Among these, the ITS culture could still claim pride of place. But
stormclouds were gathering over the Lab. The PDP-10 technology ITS
depended on was aging, and the Lab itself was split into factions by
the first attempts to commercialize artificial intelligence. Some of
the Lab's (and SAIL's and CMU's) best were lured away to high-paying
jobs at startup companies.
The death blow came in 1983, when DEC cancelled its `Jupiter' followon
to the PDP-10 in order to concentrate on the PDP-11 and VAX lines.
ITS no longer had a future. Because it wasn't portable, it was more
effort than anyone could afford to move ITS to new hardware. The
Berkeley variant of Unix running on a VAX became the hacking system
par excellence, and anyone with an eye on the future could see that
microcomputers were growing in power so rapidly that they were likely
to sweep all before them.
It's around this time that Levy wrote Hackers. One of his prime
informants was Richard M. Stallman (inventor of EMACS), a leading
figure at the Lab and its most fanatical holdout against the
commercialization of Lab technology.
Stallman (who is usually known by his initials and login name, RMS)
went on to form the Free Software Foundation and dedicate himself to
producing high-quality free software. Levy eulogized him as ``the
last true hacker'', a description which happily proved incorrect.
Stallman's grandest scheme neatly epitomized the transition hackerdom
underwent in the early eighties --- in 1982 he began the construction
of an entire clone of Unix, written in C and available for free. His
project was known as the GNU (Gnu's Not Unix) operating system, in a
kind of recursive acronym. GNU quickly became a major focus for
hacker activity. Thus, the spirit and tradition of ITS was preserved
as an important part of the newer, Unix and VAX-centered hacker
culture.
Indeed, for more than a decade after its founding RMS's Free Software
Foundation would largely define the public ideology of the hacker
culture, and Stallman himself would be the only credible claimant to
leadership of the tribe.
It was also around 1982-83 that microchip and local-area network
technology began to have a serious impact on hackerdom. Ethernet and
the Motorola 68000 microchip made a potentially potent combination,
and several different startups had been formed to build the first
generation of what we now call workstations.
In 1982, a group of Unix hackers from Stanford and Berkeley founded
Sun Microsystems on the belief that Unix running on relatively
inexpensive 68000-based hardware would prove a winning combination for
a wide variety of applications. They were right, and their vision set
the pattern for an entire industry. While still priced out of reach
of most individuals, workstations were cheap for corporations and
universities; networks of them (one to a user) rapidly replaced the
older VAXes and other timesharing systems.