Hackers

Twenty-five years after its publication, Steven Levy's classic book on the creativity and risk-taking of the computer revolution's original hackers—those brilliant and eccentric nerds from the late 1950s through the early 1980s who took risks, bent rules, and pushed the world in a radical new direction—is back with new material.  

With updated material from noteworthy hackers such as Mark Zuckerberg, Steve Wozniak, and Bill Gates, Hacker is a fascinating story that begins in early computer research labs and leads to the first home computers. Levy chronicles the imaginative brainiacs who found clever and unorthodox solutions to computer engineering problems. 

They had a shared sense of values, known as the hacker ethic (still thriving today), that was forged in the counterculture movement of the 1960s and '70s. Hacker captures a seminal period in recent history when underground activities blazed a trail for today's digital world—from MIT students finagling access to clunky computer-card machines to the DIY culture that spawned the Altair and the Apple II.