The computer industry changes so fast that a ten-year old book is practically pre-historic, but Penguin has chosen to re-issue this one on its tenth anniversary, and I would applaud the decision, having it the first time around. Hackers is no ordinary book - it covers three generations, from the “True Hackers” at MIT in the late ‘50s to the builders of the first personal computers in the mid-seventies and the more pragmatic entrepreneurs of the games industry of the early ‘80s.

The stories themselves are fascinating. Levy interviewed the creators of the first successful home computer - not the Apple II, but the Altair, and describes the Community Memory project - possibly the first experiment in bringing computers to the people, through a terminal at a record store in Berkeley, California. What makes the book compulsively readable, though, is the insight Levy gives the reader into the minds of these men (and they are almost entirely male).

Viewed objectively these are deeply strange people - most of them more interested in computers than sex or personal hygiene. When Peter Samson hacked on the TX-0 at MIT, it had less than 10K of system memory and he struggled through the night for weeks at a time to make a program that converted arabic numbers to roman ones. Fifteen years later, Steve Dompier programmed an Altair to play “The Fool on the Hill”, entering the software that made it run by flipping switches on the front of the machine.

They frequently broke laws in their quest for the perfect machine or program - “when TMRC [the Tech Model Railway Club] needed a set of diodes, or some extra relays, to build some new feature into The System, a few 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’.” The book also describes numerous incidents of lock picking, phone ‘phreaking’ (use without payment) and even the odd spot of recreational drug use.

Yet after a few chapters of Stephen Levy’s breathless prose, you begin to see what makes this misfits tick and forgive them these misdemeanours - none of them meant any harm, and some of them helped to create a multi-billion dollar industry. It is true that the book seems at time to lose its way, smothered in the avalanche of anecdotes from a dizzying array of characters (a four page “Who’s Who” is provided at the front) but I’d be sorry if a tighter editing meant missing a single story.

My only real regret is that this book ends when it does - much has happened in the last ten years. Indeed, some of our readers may have thought that the term “hacker” itself only emerged in the years since the book was first published with the growth of the personal computer and networks like the Internet. There are little more than five pages at the end of this book to bring it up to the present day - a second volume is really called for.