The “Hardware Hackers” of this era built on the word and ethic of the “True Hackers”, but approached the issues in a way that was critical for the expansion of the community. As much as the “True Hackers” hated the gatekeeping of the AI people and their computers, they were really just mad they didn’t have unlimited access for themselves - they were happy to be their own gatekeepers once they managed to break in and gain access for themselves. These hackers also leaned into their arcane knowledge and refused to use languages higher level than assembly. The hardware hackers took a much wider approach and truly tried to democratize the world of computing to a wide audience.

The mission of the People’s Computer Company (PCC) and the Community Memory project truly embodied this idea of democratization. Instead of just doing things for the technology’s sake, these projects actually cared about spreading the allure and power of computers. Bob Albrecht, one of the minds behind the PCC, expanded the community by teaching high schoolers and others that had genuine interest in the field. He didn’t care that the new techniques were “easier” than assembly, he just cared that they were learning and having fun playing games and programming them.

But as the community grew, an inevitable change occurred where commercialization and capitalism took root where before money and profit were not even afterthoughts. They saw people like Bill Gates pushing for higher quality, yet paid and proprietary, software that would theoretically enable these hobbyist machines to achieve more with his implementation of BASIC designed for the cheap and widespread Altair machine. It also saw the expansion of Apple, which, as a hardware company, didn’t face the same issues as Gates’ Micro-Soft, but still embraced a very corporate and proprietary culture. Once their machines were selling well, the company started to lock down their engineering to preserve any competitive edge they had.

This shift was a long time coming. Of course, companies like IBM had been following this model for some time, but the hackers breaking ground in new directions were either too stubborn or naive to see that they were leaving money on the table. Many of these hackers believed in this stuff being free for pure ideological reasons, and I think this was extremely short sighted. This viewpoint works well so long as you have government funding or you have someone else paying for your apartment, but it does not work in the long term or at scale. Proprietary software is a fact of life, and while some software can and should be open source, we shouldn’t pretend that we could flip a switch to open all code without any negative side effects.

Additionally, this era of hackers grappled with the ramifications of what their work would be used for. Efrem Lipkin drew a hard line while he was working for a computer consulting company that was working on military applications. For him, this was a non-starter and he quit on the spot without notice after realizing that was his only choice. Still, the president of the company had a better explanation: helping build military grade weapons was necessary to do good in the face of the technological threat posed by the Japanese. I am sympathetic to the viewpoint of the president of the company. While Efrem was looking at this situation from a perspective of novelty, we understand now that if you don’t build a weapon first, your enemy will build that weapon before you. Oppenheimer dealt with this same question - and I believe that he made the right choice. Unfortunately, this is human nature and building a bigger bomb (metaphorically and literally) seems to do a decent job of keeping peace.

Still, in the modern age we are seeing lots of examples of tech that was built for a good use that is no longer serving our best interests. I think one of the best examples is the computerization of vehicles. Adding tech to cars makes a lot of sense - they can inspect the engine and tell us what is going wrong and what maintenance needs to be done. In the very modern case, being able to connect a phone to control the display, show maps, and play music in cars is objectively great technology. However, things never stop there. Recently, GM was in the news for constantly recording location and other data from its fleet of cars and selling the data for a profit without the consent of the users. Ford just patented a system that eavesdrops on you to play ads. BMW is trying to sell subscriptions to physical features you’ve already paid for. These “features” are a gross abuse of the trust these automakers have built up over the years and are absolutely not in the best interest of their customers - they only serve to pump their margins in a low growth industry. But it is crucial to note that I believe in the free market - companies are welcome to make whatever products they want, and we the consumers are just as welcome to not buy these adversarial products. It is on us to not support their behavior - this is not a technology problem. Even if all their engineers quit like Efrem, getting new ones is not a problem (just look at the current job market…)