Hacker Perspective: Jason Scott
At the time, I called myself a hacker simply because it was the word that fit.
I am nearly 40 years old, but I feel like I have lived several lifetimes, multiple distinct capsules of being and knowing, each quietly coming to a close with a physical or mental move into a new direction. Through it all, however, machines of plastic and metal and glass have guided my direction, given me sustenance and comfort, and driven me to come out of various shells that sometimes I didn't even know I had been disguising myself in.
From the moment my father, working at IBM's research center in upstate New York, brought home what passed for a home computer, it was obvious which one of the three children would make them his life; my siblings and I do not share the same accents in our voices, the forking of our daily lives and my attachment to this machinery and way of life being so total and complete. In 1978, these computers were borrowed from work as you might sign out a rare book or artifact, and the weekend visitations I would make to my father's house, now nearly empty from a divorce, were centered around which new item he'd be able to bring to my attention. After a dozen or so of these lends, the Commodore PET, a machine bursting with 8k of memory to write programs, stayed permanently, a between-the-cracks forgotten item from work. With a cassette drive that relied on audio signals to transfer a program over a matter of minutes, and a black and white screen barely five inches across, it was obvious that I was never looking back to any other choice in life. Computers it was, and computers it is.
I feel the hardest thing to translate from these old memories is the sense of time, the distances of minutes that were an expected aspect of the experience at the time. I recall an Atari game that would take 20 minutes to load by cassette. "Once you get a floppy drive, you'll never go back," said the wonderful man who ran the local computer store who I befriended. And he was very right; I never did. Even now in the dusk and sunset of the floppy disk, the feeling of holding a solid piece of plastic in my hand and knowing information was on it is still strong in me. I could walk around with whatever-you-please on those floppies, be they games, programs, or writings typed out and transferred via phone line to other waiting floppy disks inside floppy disk drives that would write their payload with a churning, remembered-years-hence grind.
To speak of "transferring," as well, is to bring back a flood of memories; of phone numbers dialed in the dark of night, hoping beyond hope that a busy signal wouldn't respond, that I'd hear the click of relay that meant a machine, a modem, was providing me a terrible screech of a carrier that meant it was my turn, my solitary turn, to connect to another person's computer. A person, I might add, that I would likely never meet.
But maybe this is one of the biggest mistakes that people make when they look back at the era I was a part of: meeting was fundamental! Modems, all told, were miraculous things, able to connect and transfer data via telephone lines, but they did so very slowly, very unevenly, and it was so much easier just to find a way to travel the distance, meet the people, trade, and duplicate there in person.
Some of my finest memories of that time are not of cards successfully installed, games finally beaten, or messages successfully written. It's of parties I had my father drive me to to meet online friends, of careful negotiation of the train system to arrive at a mall in White Plains to quietly wait for friends to arrive at the appointed time. I remember aimless walks through neighbor-hoods and streets, talking of all things technical, occasionally misrepresenting my knowledge or having others misrepresent theirs, but through it all, a muddling, growing sense of self-worth and character that would only strengthen as disk-copying friends became best friends.
And I recall a meeting in the Citicorp Center in 1987, a trip into then-scary New York City. I was a 16-year-old "hacker," wide-eyed and nervous, standing among kindred spirits, one of them calling himself Emmanuel Goldstein and heading out to a Chinese dinner afterwards, my scant funds barely able to pay my part of even this inexpensive meal.
The "hacker" nomenclature, which I fashioned on my breastplate and used to shock and ally, was something I picked up from media and what I read; I didn't know at the time the long history the spirit of it had or when it truly became a synonym of evil. All I knew was that it felt right, a word that got attention and which I felt applied to me - I still do. It was a word that felt like an adjective, a noun, a verb. It felt like a song, a theme, a medal. And whether I sought knowledge, or attention, or friendship, the word served me well.
Information was meager, then. Information, that is, that would be of interest to a computer-obsessed person who wanted to know what was out there, out beyond his seemingly tiny realm of mastered knowledge. I'd take commuter railtrains to libraries in larger towns, poring over paper copies of The Readers' Guide to Periodical Literature to find some mention, any at all, of hacking, computer information, or bulletin board systems. It was, often, a fruitless search, and a wasted afternoon save the paperback novel I'd read on my long trip back home. Imagine a single Google search that was a day's trip.
But when information became available to me, via the bulletin boards (computers with modems attached, really), I'd save it. I'd print it out, store it to one of my beloved floppies, and later keep them at hand on the many-thousands-of-dollars hard drive I had, again a lend from IBM by my father, providing me ten megabytes of storage for whatever shook my fancy. Hard drives, as they entered the homes of my friends and myself, were like being given the keys to a city. We'd sit on the phone and scope out the future expansion of information we'd be able to sustain on these monsters.
I kept them, these talismans of information, these hard-won, slow-downloaded, carefully traded pieces of text, which we just called textfiles or general files or texts and later textz. I sorted them, held them close, and let them follow me through my capsules of living, of college student and temp worker and art director and system administrator. They stayed in the back of my mind, and in my 28th year, I browsed around what seemed to have been an infinite collection of information on the Internet, and found these files had not survived the trip. So I brought them online, from my backups. They had taken me years to collect; they barely counted up to 40 megabytes. This was textfiles.com, and in no short time it became the way many people knew me, and formed the backbone of my online identity. It still does, to hundreds of thousands of people a month.
A week barely goes by without some handful of what might be called fan letters, people writing me to thank me for thinking to collect these artifacts of my youth, these writings and programs and captures and printouts. To some who are my age, these are memories, nostalgic guideposts to their own childhoods and early adulthoods, when all of us were swept into this wave of technology and changed ourselves forever. Others, I am pleased to note, read these files for the first time, as I read them for the first time 20 years ago, with no expectations and the humor, horror, and inspiration that comes from reading missives from another like-minded soul.
Once upon a time, as my father was growing up in the 1940s, his father would unnerve him by simply watching him eat dinner quietly, not taking his own food but just watching his son eat. For my grandfather, an immigrant who had lived through some terrible times and had many close relatives lost in war and Holocaust, just the sight of his own son eating as much as he cared to and facing a life ahead was pleasure itself. My father could understand this, in a general sense, but he himself had not been through war and did not know loss to such a level. For my father, life was the way it was and his own happiness was seeing his children grow up in the 1970s and 80s with their own removed boundaries, the inexpensive-ness of air travel, the delight of suburban space in a beautiful countryside, and the potential of their own lives.
For me, the delight of seeing the next generation grow up in a world where screens can be touched and react accordingly, where devices hanging off key chains can contain the entirety of my 1980s collection of information, where one glance at a device in their pocket and they know exactly where they stand and not know the fear of being truly lost... these are what drive me to keep my eyes open, to know the next new thing, to remember the old but not be trapped by it.
The idea, the spirit of what I call "hacking" is buried in those files, awaiting each new set of folks to come across them, either by laptop or mobile phone or inkjet printing or whatever brings the words to you. I could tell you what "hacking" is, for me, and I think I've done a bit of that here, but realize that "hacking," in the end, is just a word, a shorthand to try and reach out to others like yourself and begin a conversation.
But the conversation, the information, the story is where the treasure is.
That is what mattered.
That's what matters now.
Jason Scott is the webmaster behind textfiles.com, a collection of historical documents from most of the networked life of computers. He is also the director of BBS: The Documentary, a Creative Commons licensed documentary on the history of the bulletin board system.