The precepts of this revolutionary Hacker Ethic were not so much debated and discussed as silently agreed upon. No manifestos were issued. No missionaries tried to gather converts. The computer did the converting, and those who seemed to follow the Hacker Ethic most faithfully were people like Samson, Saunders, and Kotok, whose lives before MIT seemed to be mere preludes to that moment when they fulfilled themselves behind the console of the TX-0. Later there would come hackers who took the implicit Ethic even more seriously than the TX-0 hackers did, hackers like the legendary Greenblatt or Gosper, though it would be some years yet before the tenets of hackerism would be explicitly delineated.
Still, even in the days of the TX-0, the planks of the platform were in place. The Hacker Ethic:
ACCESS TO COMPUTERS—AND ANYTHING WHICH MIGHT TEACH YOU SOMETHING ABOUT THE WAY THE WORLD WORKS—SHOULD BE UNLIMITED AND TOTAL. ALWAYS YIELD TO THE HANDS-ON IMPERATIVE!
Hackers believe that essential lessons can be learned about the systems—about the world—from taking things apart, seeing how they work, and using this knowledge to create new and even more interesting things. They resent any person, physical barrier, or law that tries to keep them from doing this.
This is especially true when a hacker wants to fix something that (from his point of view) is broken or needs improvement. Imperfect systems infuriate hackers, whose primal instinct is to debug them. This is one reason why hackers generally hate driving cars—the system of randomly programmed red lights and oddly laid out one-way streets causes delays which are so goddamned UNNECESSARY that the impulse is to rearrange signs, open up traffic-light control boxes . . .redesign the entire system.
In a perfect hacker world, anyone pissed off enough to open up a control box near a traffic light and take it apart to make it work better should be perfectly welcome to make the attempt. Rules which prevent you from taking matters like that into your own hands are too ridiculous to even consider abiding by. This attitude helped the Model Railroad Club start, on an extremely informal basis, something called the Midnight Requisitioning Committee. When TMRC needed a set of diodes, or some extra relays, to build some new feature into The System, a few S&P people would wait until dark and find their way into the places where those things were kept. None of the hackers, who were as a rule scrupulously honest in other matters, seemed to equate this with "stealing." A willful blindness.
ALL INFORMATION SHOULD BE FREE.
If you don't have access to the information you need to improve things, how can you fix them? A free exchange of information particularly when the information was in the form of a computer program, allowed for greater overall creativity. When you were working on a machine like the TX-0, which came with almost no software, everyone would furiously write systems programs to make programming easier—Tools to Make Tools, kept in the drawer by the console for easy access by anyone using the machine. This prevented the dread, time-wasting ritual of reinventing the wheel: instead of everybody writing his own version of the same program, the best version would be available to everyone, and everyone would be free to delve into the code and improve on THAT. A world studded with feature-full programs, bummed to the minimum, debugged to perfection.
The belief, sometimes taken unconditionally, that information should be free was a direct tribute to the way a splendid computer, or computer program, works—the binary bits moving in the most straightforward, logical path necessary to do their complex job, What was a computer but something which benefited from a free flow of information? If, say, the accumulator found itself unable to get information from the input/output (i/o) devices like the tape reader or the switches, the whole system would collapse. In the hacker viewpoint, any system could benefit from that easy flow of information.