1. Prologue: The Real Programmers
In the beginning, there were Real Programmers.
That's not what they called themselves. They didn't call themselves
`hackers', either, or anything in particular; the sobriquet `Real
Programmer' wasn't coined until after 1980, retrospectively by one of
their own. But from 1945 onward, the technology of computing
attracted many of the world's brightest and most creative minds. From
Eckert & Mauchly's first ENIAC computer onward there was a more or
less continuous and self-conscious technical culture of enthusiast
programmers, people who built and played with software for fun.
The Real Programmers typically came out of engineering or physics
backgrounds. They were often amateur-radio hobbyists. They wore
white socks and polyester shirts and ties and thick glasses and coded
in machine language and assembler and FORTRAN and half a dozen ancient
languages now forgotten.
From the end of World War Two to the early 1970s, in the great days of
batch processing and the ``big iron'' mainframes, the Real Programmers
were the dominant technical culture in computing. A few pieces of
revered hacker folklore date from this era, including various lists of
Murphy's Laws and the mock-German ``Blinkenlights'' poster that still
graces many computer rooms.
Some people who grew up in the `Real Programmer' culture remained
active into the 1990s. Seymour Cray, designer of the Cray line of
supercomputers, was among the greatest. He is said once to have
toggled an entire operating system of his own design into a computer
of his own design through its front-panel switches. In octal.
Without an error. And it worked. Real Programmer macho supremo.
The `Real Programmer' culture, though, was heavily associated with
batch (and especially batch scientific) computing. It was eventually
eclipsed by the rise of interactive computing, the universities, and
the networks. These gave birth to another engineering tradition that,
eventually, would evolve into today's open-source hacker culture.