Books, Brochures, and Chapters>Book: Levy , Steven (2010-05-20), Hackers, O'Reilly Media, Inc., Retrieved on 2012-01-12Source Material [books.google.com]
Folksonomies: computers Memes
12 JAN 2012
Two Factions of the Model Railroad Club
There were two factions of TMRC. Some members loved the idea of spending their time building and painting replicas of certain trains with historical and emotional value, or creating realistic scenery for the layout. This was the knife-and-paintbrush contingent, and it subscribed to railroad magazines and booked the club for trips on aging train lines. The other faction centered on the Signals and Power Subcommittee of the club, and it cared far more about what went on under the layout. This w... 1 
notes
notesThe club is were many hackers came from in the early days of computing. Half its members were into history and total control over a miniature world, the half that would become hackers were interested in the technology beneath the plywood.
12 JAN 2012
State of Mind in a Marathon Coding Session
The peak hour itself was tremendously intense, but during the hours before, and even during the hours afterward, a hacker attained a state of pure concentration. When you programmed a computer, you had to be aware of where all the thousands of bits of information were going from one instruction to the next, and be able to predict—and exploit—the effect of all that movement. When you had all that information glued to your cerebral being, it was almost as if your own mind had merged into th...
1 There is a point where you have the whole program in your head at once, one with it, and you don't want to let it go, so you keep working in a marathon burst of energy.
12 JAN 2012
Hackers Hate Driving Cars
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 cause delays that are so goddamned unnecessary that the impulse is to rearrange signs, open up traffic-light control boxes . . . redesign the entire system. 1 notes
notesThe imperfect traffic systems infuriate them.
12 JAN 2012
Hackers Loved Chinese Food
Chinese food was a system, too, and the hacker curiosity was applied to that system as assiduously as to a new LISP compiler. Samson had been an aficionado from his first experience on a TMRC outing to Joy Fong’s on Central Square, and by the early sixties he had actually learned enough Chinese characters to read menus and order obscure dishes. Gosper took to the cuisine with even greater vigor; he would prowl Chinatown looking for restaurants open after midnight, and one night he found a t... 1 notes
notesBecause they discovered, through Chinese dictionaries, that there was another menu for Chinese patrons with better food that had fantastic names.
