A Brief History of Hackerdom

This Article is originally written by Eric S. Raymond.
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. But from 1945 onward, the technology of computing attracted many of the world’s brightest and most creative minds. From Eckert and Mauchly’s ENIAC 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 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. These were the hacker culture’s precursors, the largely unsung protagonists of its prehistory.

From the end of World War II to the early 1970s, in the great days of batch computing 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 the well-known story of Mel (included in the Jargon File), various lists of Murphy’s Laws, and the mock-German “Blinkenlights” poster that still graces many computer rooms.