Forty years ago, the word "hacker" was little known. Its march from obscurity to newspaper headlines owes a great deal to tech journalist Steven Levy, who in 1984 defied the advice of his publisher to call his first book Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution.11 Hackers were a subculture of computer enthusiasts for whom programming was a vocation and playing around with computers constituted a lifestyle. Hackers was published only three years after Tracy Kidder's The Soul of a New Machine, explored in my last column (January 2021, p. 32–37), but a lot had changed during the interval. Kidder's assumed readers had never seen a minicomputer, still less designed one. By 1984, in contrast, the computer geek was a prominent part of popular culture. Unlike Kidder, Levy had to make people reconsider what they thought they already knew. Computers were suddenly everywhere, but they remained unfamiliar enough to inspire a host of popular books to ponder the personal and social transformations triggered by the microchip. The short-lived home computer boom had brought computer programming into the living rooms and basements of millions of middle-class Americans, sparking warnings about the perils of computer addiction. A satirical guide, published the same year, warned of "micromania."15 The year before, the film Wargames suggested computer-obsessed youth might accidentally trigger nuclear war.

Richard Stallman, pictured in 2015, resigned from his posts as President of the Free Software Foundation and visiting scientist at MIT's Computer Science & Artificial Intelligence lab. Richard Stallman, pictured in 2015, resigned from his posts as President of the Free Software Foundation and visiting scientist at MIT's Computer Science & Artificial Intelligence lab. Free software pioneer and renowned computer scientist Richard Stallman resigned from his post at MIT following recent comments about one of Jeffrey Epstein's sex-trafficking victims. He also resigned as president of the Free Software Foundation. On Monday, Stallman, a visiting scientist at the university's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, posted a brief message on his blog announcing the decision.

Fox News Flash top headlines for Sept. 16 are here. Check out what's clicking on Foxnews.com The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) computer scientist who said the alleged sex-abuse victims of an associate of deceased convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein were "entirely willing" has resigned. Richard Stallman, a famed open-source advocate, announced his departure in an email published online Monday. "I am resigning effective immediately from my position in CSAIL at MIT," he wrote.

Fox News Flash top headlines for Sept. 14 are here. Check out what's clicking on Foxnews.com Famed Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) computer scientist Richard Stallman is under fire after a leaked email thread showed him defending an associate of the late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, claiming that his alleged victims were "entirely willing." In the email thread, leaked by MIT alum Salam Jie Gano to VICE on Friday, Stallman argued that the late Marvin Minsky – an AI pioneer who died in 2016 and is accused of assaulting one of Epstein's victims, Virginia Giuffre, - had not actually assaulted anyone. "The word'assaulting' presumes that he applied force or violence, in some unspecified way, but the article itself says no such thing. Only that they had sex," he wrote, referring to an article about Giuffre's testimony against Minsky.