The Hackers Conference is an annual invitation-only gathering of designers, engineers and programmers to discuss the latest developments and innovations in the computer industry. On a daily basis, many hackers only interact virtually, and therefore rarely have face-to-face contact. The conference is a time for hackers to come together to share ideas. [1]
The first Hackers Conference was organized in 1984 in Marin County, California, by Stewart Brand and his associates at Whole Earth and The Point Foundation. [2] It was conceived in response to Steven Levy's book, Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution , which inspired Brand to arrange a meeting between the individuals, or "hackers", the book named. [2] [3] The first conference's roughly 150 attendees included Steve Wozniak, Ted Nelson, Richard Stallman, John Draper, Richard Greenblatt, Robert Woodhead, and Bob Wallace. [4] The gathering has been identified as instrumental in establishing the libertarian ethos attributed to cyberculture, [5] and was the subject of a PBS documentary, produced by KQED: Hackers: Wizards of the Electronic Age. [5]
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Here is the list of participants at the original 1984 Hackers Conference, given in the contact list distributed to participants titled "List of Participants at the Hackers' Conference November 9–11, 1984"
Arthur Abraham, Roe Adams, Phil Agre, Dick Ainsworth, Bob Albrecht, Bill Atkinson, Bill Bates, Allen Baum, Bruce Baumgart, Mike Beeler, Ward Bell, Gerry Berkowitz, Nancy Blachman, Steve Bobker, Stewart Bonn, Russell Brand, Stewart Brand, John Brockman, Dennis Brothers, Bill Budge, John Bumgarner, Bill Burns, Art Canfil, Steve Capps, Doug Carlston, Simon Cassidy, Dave Caulkins, Richard Cheshire, Fred Cisin, Mike Coffey, Margot Comstock, Rich Davis, Steven Dompier, Wes Dorman, John Draper, Mark Duchaineau, Les Earnest, Philip Elmer-DeWitt, Erik Fair, Richard Fateman, Lee Felsenstein, Jay Fenlason, Fabrice Florin, Andrew Fluegelman, Robert Frankston, Paul Freiberger, Rob Fulop, Robert Gaskins, Nasir Gebelli, Steve Gibson, Geoff Goodfellow, Richard Greenblatt, Roger Gregory, Leslie Grimm, Robert Hardy, Brian Harvey, Dick Heiser, Matt Herron, Andy Hertzfeld, Bruce Horn, David Hughes, John James, Tom Jennings, Jerry Jewell, Chris Jochumson, Ted Kaehler, Sat Tara Khalsa, Scott Kim, Peter LaDeau, Fred Lakin, Marc Le Brun, Jim Leeke, David Levitt, Steven Levy, Henry Lieberman, Efrem Lipkin, William Low, David Lubar, Scott Mace, John Markoff, David Maynard, Bob McConaghy, Roger Melen, Diana Merry, Mark Miller, Charles Moore, Michael Naimark, Ted Nelson, Terry Niksch, Guy Nouri, David Oster, Ray Ozzie, Donn Parker, Howard Pearlmutter, Mark Pelczarski, Michael Perry, Patricia Phelan, Tom Pittman, Eric Podietz, Kevin Poulsen, Jerry Pournelle, Larry Press, Steve Purcell, Christopher Reed, David Reed, Barbara Robertson, Michael Rogers, Pete Rowe, Peter Samson, Steve Saunders, Laura Scholl, Rich Schroeppel, Tom Scoville, Rony Sebok, Rhod Sharp, Bob Shur, Burrell Smith, David Snider, Tom Spence, Bud Spurgeon, Richard Stallman, Michael Swaine, David Taylor, Jack Trainor, Bud Tribble, Bruce H. Van Natta, Bob Wallace, Walter E. (Gene) Wallis, Bruce Webster, Ken Williams, Deborah Wise, Steve Witham, Robert Woodhead, Don Woods, Steve Wozniak, Fred Wright
Whole Earth Review was a magazine which was founded in January 1985 after the merger of the Whole Earth Software Review and the CoEvolution Quarterly. All of these periodicals are descendants of Stewart Brand's Whole Earth Catalog.
Stewart Brand is an American project developer and writer, best known as the co-founder and editor of the Whole Earth Catalog. He has founded a number of organizations, including the WELL, the Global Business Network, and the Long Now Foundation. He is the author of several books, most recently Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto.
The Whole Earth Catalog (WEC) was an American counterculture magazine and product catalog published by Stewart Brand several times a year between 1968 and 1972, and occasionally thereafter, until 1998.
"The Mother of All Demos" was a landmark computer demonstration of developments by Stanford Research Institute's Augmentation Research Center, given at the Association for Computing Machinery / Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (ACM/IEEE)—Computer Society's Fall Joint Computer Conference in San Francisco, by Douglas Engelbart, on December 9, 1968. The name The Mother of All Demos has been retroactively applied to the demonstration.
Kevin Kelly is the founding executive editor of Wired magazine and a former editor and publisher of the Whole Earth Review. He has also been a writer, photographer, conservationist, and student of Asian and digital culture.
Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems, and the Economic World (ISBN 978-0201483406) is a 1992 book by Kevin Kelly. Major themes in Out of Control are cybernetics, emergence, self-organization, complex systems, negentropy and chaos theory and it can be seen as a work of techno-utopianism.
CoEvolution Quarterly (1974–1985) was a journal descended from Stewart Brand's Whole Earth Catalog. Brand founded the CoEvolution Quarterly in 1974 using proceeds from the Whole Earth Catalog. It evolved out of the original Supplement to the Whole Earth Catalog. Fred Turner notes that in 1985, Brand merged CoEvolution Quarterly with The Whole Earth Software Review to create the Whole Earth Review.
The Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link, normally shortened to The WELL or The Well, is a virtual community that was launched in 1985. It is one of the oldest continuously operating virtual communities. By 1993 it had 7,000 members, a staff of 12, and gross annual income of $2 million. A 1997 feature in Wired magazine called it "The world's most influential online community." In 2012, when it was last publicly offered for sale, it had 2,693 members. It is best known for its Internet forums, but also provides email, shell accounts, and web pages. Discussion topics are organized into conferences that cover broad areas of interest. User anonymity is prohibited.
"Information wants to be free" is an expression that means either that all people should be able to access information freely, or that information naturally strives to become as freely available among people as possible. It is often used by technology activists to criticize laws that limit transparency and general access to information. People who criticize intellectual property law say the system of such government-granted monopolies conflicts with the development of a public domain of information. The expression is often credited to Stewart Brand, who was recorded saying it at a Hackers Conference in 1984.
The POINT Foundation was a nonprofit organization based in San Francisco and founded by Stewart Brand and Dick Raymond. It published works related to the Whole Earth Catalog, an American magazine and product catalog. It was also a co-owner of The WELL.
Fred Turner is an American academic. He is the Harry and Norman Chandler Professor of Communication at Stanford University, having formerly served as department chair.
"The Californian Ideology" is a 1995 essay by English media theorists Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron of the University of Westminster. Barbrook describes it as a "critique of dotcom neoliberalism". In the essay, Barbrook and Cameron argue that the rise of networking technologies in Silicon Valley in the 1990s was linked to American neoliberalism and a paradoxical hybridization of beliefs from the political left and right in the form of hopeful technological determinism.
The Portola Institute was a "nonprofit educational foundation" founded in Menlo Park, California in 1966 by Dick Raymond. The Portola institute helped to develop other organizations such as The Briarpatch Society and Bob Albrecht's People's Computer Company. It was also the publisher of Stewart Brand's Whole Earth Catalog beginning with the first issue in 1968. The first issue of The Whole Earth Catalog notes that the catalog is one division of The Portola Institute and that other activities of the Institute include: "computer education for all grade levels, simulation games for classroom use, new approaches to music education, Ortega Park Teachers Laboratory." Raymond and Brand later collaborated to form the Point Foundation.
The Whole Earth Software Catalog and The Whole Earth Software Review (1984–1985) were two publications produced by Stewart Brand's Point Foundation as an extension of the Whole Earth Catalog.
PicoSpan was a popular computer conferencing tool written by Marcus D. Watts for the Altos 68000. It was written in 1983 for M-Net, which was owned and operated by Mike Myers. Sometime in 1984, Marcus's employer, an Ann Arbor company called Network Technologies International (NETI), purchased the rights for PicoSpan planning to develop it into a commercial product called E-Forum.
Hackers: Wizards of the Electronic Age is a 1985 TV documentary about the hacker community.
Cyber-utopianism, web-utopianism, digital utopianism, or utopian internet is a subcategory of technological utopianism and the belief that online communication helps bring about a more decentralized, democratic, and libertarian society. The desired values may also be privacy and anonymity, freedom of expression, access to culture and information or also socialist ideals leading to digital socialism.
The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution is an overview of the history of computer science and the Digital Revolution. It was written by Walter Isaacson, and published in 2014 by Simon & Schuster.
"All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace" is a poem by Richard Brautigan first published in his 1967 collection of the same name, his fifth book of poetry. It presents an enthusiastic description of a technological utopia in which machines improve and protect the lives of humans. The poem has counterculture and hippie themes, influenced by Cold War-era technology. It has been interpreted both as utopian and as an ironic critique of the utopia it describes. It is Brautigan's most frequently reprinted poem.