City authorities, considering pinball machines to be implements of vice and corruption, would break them up for spare parts, consigning the debris to bins in the police department's electronics shop at downtown's Lincoln Jail. Among the parts stockpiled at the jail were heaps of solenoids -- electromagnetic coils used for initiating pinball plunger and bumper action.

Solenoids are really, really good at facilitating on/off flip-flops, mechanically opening and closing circuits depending upon the flow of electric current. During World War II the solenoids were a vital military resource material. But afterwards, they sat unused -- until a couple of teenaged proto-hackers named Phil Cramer and Bill Fletcher came along.

Cramer and Fletcher knew just what to do with leftover solenoids. They would be perfect for constructing Giant Brains!

Like many other aspiring electronics geeks in the immediate postwar era, Cramer and Fletcher's imaginations had been enticed by a book published in 1949 called "Giant Brains, or Machines That Think." Written by Edmund C. Berkeley, an expert in the then-infant field of computing, "Giant Brains" was both a primer and a manifesto.

In language that managed the delicate trick of being exquisitely clear and uncompromisingly evangelistic, Berkeley described how a computer works, step by step, instruction by instruction. Employing numerous diagrams, and painstakingly explaining every underlying concept (like "binary" or "register" or "input/output") as if it had never been explained before, Berkeley demonstrated how it was possible to move digital information from one "place" to another -- and how a set of on/off switches, if wired correctly, could perform operations on that information, handling such extraordinary feats as the addition of two plus two.

In 1952, Berkeley walked the walk. He built his own computer, Simon, considered by some historians to be the first "personal computer," and documented the process in a series of 13 articles for Radio Electronics magazine. Cramer and Fletcher, demonstrating a cavalier attitude towards proprietary information that would become a calling card for do-it-yourself hackers in generations to come, ripped the pages of schematics right out of copies of the magazines at their local library. (As Cramer noted shamefacedly, 50 years later, "We had no duplicators in those days!")

Fletcher had a contact within the police department who let them rummage through the bins of electronics. Following Berkeley's instructions, the two teenagers built a simple solenoid relay-driven computer. It didn't work exactly as planned, but it did something, and that was enough. Enough to get Cramer's father, an accountant, to give the youngsters $50 to buy more parts. Enough to encourage them to try again, to build another simple machine that did work. Enough, in the case of Phil Cramer, to launch him into a life spent tending Giant Brains, a career of computer programming that continues to this day.

Dig under the surface of your average computer geek and you will find a person in love with the idea of having a Giant Brain of one's own to play with. As computer scientist Dick Karpinski observes, computers, or to be precise, the act of programming computers, "is the only way to have socially acceptable slaves."

Over the decades, the opportunity to harness the power of a computer to one's own selfish purposes, whatever those may be, has proven irresistibly seductive. From the '50s kids who gravitated inexorably to IBM mainframes to the Homebrew Computer Club tinkerers who built the first personal computers in the '70s to the Linux hackers exchanging tips and tricks in their user's groups in the '90s, the underlying passion is identical: It is a whole lot of fun to be the master of a Giant Brain, down to the very last binary one or zero.

And anything that hinders that mastery is resented. Abhorred. Reviled. Detested. It is no accident that the hacker of the '50s and '60s despised IBM while his counterpart in the '80s and '90s denounced Microsoft. They got in the way! The love affair that so many programmers have with free software isn't reducible to mere respect for an efficient software development methodology. It is also an expression of the programmer's age-old craving to be in intimate control of every aspect of the machine -- and unwillingness to allow any barriers to block the Source.

Of course, when programmers like Cramer got started, there was no real difference between hardware and software. It was all just stuff that made the machine go. You might be inputting instructions by floppy disk, or magnetic tape, or punch cards, or paper tape, or even by wiring plugs together -- the medium simply didn't matter: The point was to get the machine to work.

Hackers have always understood this -- and indeed, in the earliest days, there was little need to worry about any separation. Hardware came with software, and you fiddled with both until you got the machine to do what you wanted it to do. But over the decades since the '50s the growth of the commercial software industry, combined with the increasing complexity of software, has worked to divide programmers from the object of their passions. As programmers began to be consigned to smaller and smaller pieces of a larger and larger pie, the job became less and less fun. And when a 19-year-old Bill Gates appeared on the scene in the mid-'70s, admonishing the Homebrew hackers to stop "stealing" his BASIC programming language, the end of hacker happiness seemed nigh.

But true hackers don't let little things like monopolies or near-infinite complexity stop them. As their first line of defense, they have always sought strength in numbers. In the '50s, programmers like Phil Cramer joined a powerful IBM computer user's "club" called SHARE, determined to pool their resources in order to get their machines working better -- and make IBM dance to their tune. In the '70s, the Homebrew hackers likewise came together, in garages and living rooms, to share their expertise and code in the service of their new, desk-sized, power-to-the-people machines. And from the '90s right on through to a new century, free software hackers have also flocked to one another. The programmer-computer relationship may be an inescapably solitary interaction, but the fight for control over every last bit of digital and silicon granularity requires collective effort.

The free software movement has often been described as being by hackers, for hackers, with the rest of us just lucky beneficiaries of the byproduct of hacker obsessions. Even as the free software movement has been organized and corporatized, at root it's still the same as it ever was -- a movement fueled by tinkerers who are constitutionally unable to allow anything to stand between them and their machines.

It doesn't matter whether the tools of their trade are piles of solenoids or copylefted compiler and debugger programs. Hackers will stop at nothing in their drive to play with their Giant Brains. If that means that along the way they'll build the Internet, unleash the personal computer industry and topple Microsoft, well, so be it: They just want to have fun.

The Free Software Project
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