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cept known as ‘open architecture’. They were hardware hackers. Their achievement can now be seen in the generality of the PC standard.

Each decade has brought a different twist of geography and motivation to the various generations of hackers: the 1960s hackers, the first generation, were based on the East Coast, developing software; the second-generation 1970s hackers were on the West Coast, developing hardware.

The next generation, the third, was based in both North America and Europe. These were the kids who had inherited the gift of the personal computer and were hacking out and selling the first computer games. Their motivation was often a fast buck and their instincts entirely commercial.

The Captain’s audience, the fourth generation, had inherited a world in which technology was rapidly converging around the new standard bearer, the IBM PC. This new generation shared the same obsessions as their predecessors, but now that they had everything that technology could offer they took ‘hacking’ – previously an honourable trade – and made it into a form of breaking and entering.

The aims of the fourth generation were summed up in a draft declaration prepared by the Galactic Hacker Party’s organizers and circulated among delegates for their signatures. ‘The free and unfettered flow of information is an essential part of our fundamental liberties, and shall be upheld in all circumstances,’ the document loftily proclaimed. ‘Computer technology shall not be used by government and corporate bodies to control and oppress the people.’

Though the language echoed the beliefs of the second generation of hackers, the conversation among the party-goers in the crypt and in the halls belied the rhetoric of the organizers. For Lee Felsenstein, an American visitor, it was a disturbing experience. Lee was a confirmed second-generation hacker, one of the original founders of the Homebrew Computer Club. He remained a staunch believer in freedom of speech and an avid supporter of individual rights. But he felt that the fourth generation hackers were ‘under-age and underdeveloped’: they displayed ‘negative social attitudes’. Hacking, he said, had degenerated from being a collective mission of exploration into an orgy of self-indulgence.

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