Raw Notes:

• Intellectual curiosity seems to be true among all great groups, including artists. They all seem to desperately want to understand, to understand new art, new mediums, new techniques, new technologies, new philosophies... The hackers were curious about computers. They NEEDED to know how they worked.
• The hackers didn't seem to care much about "cool" or "hot". Peter Deutsch was an overweight 12 year old kid, but he was smart and curious, and the hackers were very inclusive. He had the intellectual curiosity.
• The hackers cared more about "neat hacks" than nearly anything. And something simply being a "neat hack" was enough to make it worthy of existence. "purpose" is a silly frame. The real question is: how did you do it? Was it fun? Was it hard?
• Again, one of the biggest themes is unblocking. The hackers were relentless about helping each other, for free, to achieve their goals — they wanted an open computing world, and they embodied that by always being available to trade parts, answer questions, or support neat hacks.
• The Homebrew Hackers Club was basically the equivalent of a twice-monthly Meetup, but some of the greatest minds in computing all showed up there... to be a part of the frontier together. One guy learned how to hack the Altair to play music via a Radio using an exploit in the EM waves that were emitted by the device, and worked furiously to get it working before the first club meeting. Steve Wozniack literally shared the schematics for all the early apple computers openly! This was the foundation of the open source community.

Synthesized Notes:

Inspired by the great hacker contexts, I wrote up notes here:

On Great Contexts vs. Great Groups

Raw Notes