If you ever heard the term hacker, there’s a good chance you don’t know what one is. You probably think they’re people who use computers to commit crimes, plant viruses, trojans or intrude into other people’s computer systems. They’re not hackers. The term has been misused lately but there are many that remember what a hacker is and will always be.

A hacker is a person that was at the forefront of computers; the very beginning. They were computer innovators, creators, brilliant men and women who were there at the dawn of the computer revolution and defined and/or created what we take for granted every day - computers and how we use them. They added from the ether something that never was or helped the spark of it along to prosper, grow and evolve into what we know and enjoy today.

Hackers were people like those teens who first played on mainframe computers. They were members of the Homebrew Computer Club that was at the beginning of the home computer’s evolution. They were first to hear a PC computer “sing” thanks to Steve Dompier. Other hackers and members of the club were the Woz aka Steven Wozniak who created the first Apple computer and did more to spur the home computer revolution in the 70’s than anyone and people like Bill Gates, founder of Microsoft who created the Altair 8800’s BASIC programming language.

Then there were other famous hackers like Ken and Roberta Williams, who formed Sierra On-Line, one of the early video game publishers. These two visionaries were at the forefront of gaming and took their players to whole new realms for the first time, full of graphics and sounds instead of mono computer beeps and scrolling text. They were creators of the famous Space and King’s Quest series and along with John Harris helped change gaming forever. Harris created games like Jawbreaker and the stellar port of Frogger to the Atari 800 computer and the revolutionary early video game console the Atari 2600. And let’s not forget hackers like Steve Russel who programmed the first computer video game, Spacewar! or John McCarthy, a man who helped design what he called “artificial intelligence.”

If you want to know more about these actual real and true hackers and want to hear wondrous stories of it all from the very beginning of the inception of computers and the computer revolution, I can point you to no finer book than Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution by Steven Levy.

It’s my favorite book; I hope it will be yours too.