“It’s funny,” says Bill Gates. “When I was young, I didn’t know any old people. When we did the microprocessor revolution, there was nobody old, nobody. They didn’t make us meet with journalists who were old people. I didn’t deal with people in their 30s. Now there’s people in their 50s and 60s. And now I’m old and I have to put up with it. It’s weird how old this industry has become. When I was young I met with you, and now I’m old, I meet with you. Jesus!”

The Microsoft cofounder and I, a couple of fifty-something codgers, are following up on the interview I conducted for Hackers with a tousle-headed Gates more than a quarter century ago. I was trying to capture what I thought was the red-hot core of the then-burgeoning computer revolution—the scarily obsessive, absurdly brainy, and endlessly inventive people known as hackers. Gates was only beginning to reap the rewards of his deal to supply his DOS operating system to IBM, which would position Microsoft to dominate PC desktops for decades. His name was not yet a household word. Word was not yet a household word. I would subsequently interview Gates many times, but that first interview was special. I saw his passion for computers as a matter of historical import. Gates found my interest in things like his “Letter to Hobbyists” as an intriguing novelty. But by then I was convinced that my project was indeed a record of a movement that would affect everybody.

My editor had urged me to be ambitious, and for my first book, I did shoot high, making the case that the brilliant programmers who discovered worlds in the computer were the key players in a sweeping digital transformation. This big-think approach wasn’t my original intent. When I embarked on my project, I thought of hackers as little more than an interesting subculture. But as my research progressed, I discovered their playfulness, as well as their blithe disregard of what others said couldn’t be done, led to the breakthroughs that determined how billions of people used computers. The MIT hackers helped hatch video games and word processing. The Homebrew Computer Club alchemized the hard math of Moore’s Law into something that wound up on all our desktops, in spite of the prevailing wisdom that no one would ever need or want a personal computer. And most of these hackers did it simply for the joy of pulling off an awesome trick.

Behind the inventiveness, I discovered something even more marvelous—real hackers, no matter when or where they arose, shared a set of values that turned out to be a credo for the information age. I attempted to codify this unspoken code into a series of principles I called The Hacker Ethic. I hoped that these ideas—particularly the hacker belief that “Information Should Be Free”—would make people view hackers in a different light.

Though the book initially landed with somewhat of a thud (the New York Times called it “a monstrously overblown magazine story”), it eventually found its audience, beyond even my over-heated expectations. Through chance encounters, email, and tweets, people constantly tell me that reading Hackers inspired them in their careers or their thinking. Thumbing through a book about Doom creator John Carmack, I learned that reading Hackers assured the geeky teenager that he was not alone in the world. When I recently interviewed Ben Fried, Google’s Chief Information Officer, he showed up with a dog-eared copy of Hackers for me to sign. “I wouldn’t be here today if I hadn’t read this,” he told me. I hear that dozens of times a year and never tire of it.

Just as satisfying is the fact that the issues raised by the book have become some of the central controversies of the information age. On the week of the book’s publication, many of my subjects, (along with other remarkable hackers I hadn’t included), met in Marin County, California, for the first Hackers Conference. It was there that Stewart Brand, hacker godfather and Whole Earth Catalog editor, hacked the “Information Should Be Free” principle. It’s worth citing his comment, uttered off the cuff at a session I hosted called “The Future of the Hacker Ethic,” because it’s so often misquoted. “On one hand, information wants to be expensive, because it’s so valuable,” Brand said. “The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other.”

A quarter-century later, Brand’s rephrasing is so familiar that it’s become an adjective (critics talk about the “information-wants-to-be-free crowd”). But the entire quotation neatly encapsulates the tension that has defined the hacker movement over the last quarter-century—an often heated battle between geeky idealism and cold-hearted commerce. Hackers want information to be free—not necessarily free as in beer, but free as in freedom, to quote Richard Stallman. Thankfully, Stallman’s fear that he would become like Ishi, the Last Yahi was not realized.

The world of hackers has seen seismic changes since I wrote Hackers on an Apple II computer with WordStar. (I could only fit a half of a chapter on the floppy disks used back then.) Almost no one knew what a hacker was—some of the salespeople at the original publisher, Doubleday, urged that the book’s title be changed because of its obscurity. The Internet was a little-known network linking a few computers in government and academia. People who spent a lot of time with a computer were considered antisocial and somewhat unfit for conversation. And some of the ideas behind the peculiar set of values in The Hacker Ethic now seem so obvious that new readers may wonder why I even bothered writing them down. (“You can create art and beauty on a computer”? Duh.)

With Hackers reaching its 25th anniversary, I set out to look once more on hackerism, by revisiting some of the people I met while researching the book. My visits also included some who didn’t make it the first time around, mainly because they had yet to make their marks in hackerdom. Part of my quest was to see what it meant to be a hacker in 2010. But another motivation was simply to reconnect with those frozen in the strange caesura that occurs when portraits are locked in print. As with Bill Murray’s road trip to visit old girlfriends in the movie Broken Flowers, I hoped to extract some meaning from seeing what had happened to my subjects, hoping that they would cast light on what has happened to hacking, and maybe give a glimpse to how hacking has changed the world—and vice versa.

I could only visit a small sample, but in their examples I found a reflection of how the tech world has developed over the past twenty-five years. While the hacker movement has triumphed, not all the people who created it enjoyed the same fate. Like Gates, some of the people in Hackers are now rich, famous, and powerful. They thrived in the movement’s transition from insular subculture to multibillion-dollar industry, even if it meant in some ways veering from the Hacker True Way. Others, unwilling or unable to adapt to a world that had discovered and exploited their passion—or just plain unlucky—toiled in obscurity and fought to stave off bitterness. I also saw the emergence of a new wave: the present-day heirs to the hacker legacy who grew up in a world where commerce and hacker were never seen as opposing values. They are molding the future of the movement.

Real hackers don’t take vacations. And judging by those standards, Bill Gates is no longer a real hacker.

Gates himself admits as much. “I believe in intensity, and I have to totally agree, by objective measures my intensity in my teens and twenties was more extreme,” he says. “In my twenties, I just worked. Now I go home for dinner. When you choose to get married and have kids, if you’re going to do it well, you are going to give up some of the fanaticism.” Indeed, looking back, Gates says that the key years in his hackerhood came even earlier, as a teenager in the Lakeside School. “The hard core years, the most fanatical years, are thirteen to sixteen,” he says.

“So you were over the hill by the time you got to Harvard?” I ask.

“In terms of programming twenty-four hours a day? Oh yeah,” he says. “Certainly by the time I was seventeen, my software mind had been shaped.”

I wonder how a kid today, when computers are ubiquitous and easy to control, could make a similar impact. Could there be a Bill Gates today? “Well, there certainly isn’t the opportunity to bring computers to the masses,” he says. The big bang of the computer revolution has already been heard. However, he says, “There’s bigger bangs.” Somewhere, Gates believes, there could be some genius who, starting from a blank set of paper, will create an entire industry. When I suggest that blank pieces of paper are hard to find, he brushes me off. “There’s tons,” he says. “In robotics. In AI. In DNA programming. And five or six things I can’t even name because I’m not young. We’ve got one hundred thirty-five million people born every year—we don’t need a high percentage. You don’t even need one a year. And so you can be extremely picky.”

He still seemed plenty intense when I met him as a twenty-seven-year-old: brash but reluctant to make direct eye contact. For half the interview, he stared at a computer screen, testing software that used one of those new-fangled mouses. But he engaged fully with my questions, rattling off his highly opinionated view of some of the people he worked with—and against—in the early days of the PC. That intensity would inform his work and his company, helping him to turn Microsoft into the world’s premier software company and make him, for a time, the richest human being in the world. Gates’s faith in hacking underscored all of his work, right down to his staffing decisions. “If you want to hire an engineer,” he says, “look at the guy’s code. That’s all. If he hasn’t written a lot of code, don’t hire him.”

I revisit the incident of his 1976 “Open Letter to Hobbyists.” “I raised it in the sense of, ‘Geez, if people paid more for software, I’d be able to hire more people,’” he says now.

Could he have imagined that those issues would still be around so many years later? The answer was yes, and his explanation is a mini-history lesson of intellectual property law, reaching back to Adam Smith’s theories and the unauthorized and unpaid reprinting of Benjamin Franklin’s writings by European publishers. “Benjamin Franklin was so ripped off,” Gates says. “He could have written exactly what I wrote. ‘That damned printing press!’" Gates thinks that we’re in for a long period of testing new business models to find the right balance between rights holders and readers in the digital age. And, to my ear at least, he seems to harbor some satisfaction that it’s now the journalists whining about the same thing he whined about in his letter. “Maybe magazine writers will still get paid twenty years from now,” he says. “Or maybe you’ll have to cut hair during the day and just write articles at night. Who knows?”

Gates had to stray from the hacker’s rigid moral code to become a mainstream success. All Steve Wozniak had to do was don a pair of dancing shoes. While Woz remains a hacker legend, he has also become an unlikely pop-culture icon, turning up on the hit show Dancing with the Stars. When I met up with him for a twenty-five-year reinterview, he’d just been reunited with other contestants for a season finale. “I was dancing against Jerry Springer and Cloris Leachman,” he says, over chips and salsa at a Mexican restaurant in Fremont, California. His early elimination in no way dampened his spirits. Very little dampens Woz’s spirits, even the fact that reality TV celebrity is overshadowing his genuine accomplishments in tech history. “People come up to me and say, ‘Omigod, I saw you on Dancing with the Stars!’ I have to say, ‘Well, I did computers, too.’”

Casual fans can be forgiven for overlooking Woz’s tech cred. These days, he’s more likely to get attention for his hobbies (like Segway polo) or his love life—he had a sign-of-the-apocalypse romance with comedian Kathy Griffin, although he has since married a woman he met on a Geek Cruise. Snarky websites have mercilessly mocked Woz’s celebrity-mag turns and frequent appearances in Apple Store first-day lines as indications of a sad irrelevance. But Woz blithely shrugs off the ribbing. He recalls the instruction he gave to Griffin a few years ago: “Hey, you can embarrass me, you can abuse me, you can ridicule me as much as you want—if it makes people laugh it’s worth it.” When I’d met him in the early 1980s, Woz was a socially awkward and dangerously vulnerable millionaire. Now, he is a bulletproof and a widely loved father figure—a mascot for hacking culture at large.

From time to time, Woz appears in the news as a force behind a startup with potentially groundbreaking technology. CL 9 was going to devise super-powerful remote controls. Wheels of Zeus promised to let users track their possessions through wireless technology. But the first wasn’t successful and the second never came out with a product. Now he works as chief scientist for a storage company called Fusion-io. “I’m speaking for the product, doing a lot of sales-marketing work, but I’m also looking at technologies that might be competitive in the future.”

But even Woz doesn’t expect to create another Apple II. In 2010, his greatest contribution is as a role model. His universal renown is a continuing reminder that brains and creativity can trump traditional notions of coolness. He’s the nerd in the computer room whose stature—and happiness—far eclipses that of fallen prom kings. And that’s an inspiration for nerds everywhere.

Indeed, one of his protégés, Andy Hertzfeld, remains inspired by hacking. Hertzfeld wasn’t a major figure in Hackers, but as one of the brightest early employees at Apple Computer, he could have been. (I first met him in late 1983, when he was one of the designers of the Macintosh operating system.) Today he’s at Google, where his most visible contribution is a feature that creates chronologies for Google News queries so users can see a story in context of its time. But hacking in your fifties isn’t as easy as doing it in your twenties. “When I was hacking on the Mac, I’d be working away and think an hour had passed. Then I’d look up and it had been four hours,” he says. “Now when I think an hour has gone by, I look up and it’s an hour.”

It’s not just the passage of years that’s changed Hertzfeld’s experience. He’s also had to adapt his individualistic approach to serve the geek-industrial complex that is Google. On one hand, Google is a hacker Mecca. It values engineers as its most important asset. “You are expected to work out of your passion,” Hertzfeld says—definitely a hacker-friendly value. But Hertzfeld can’t duck the fact that Google is also a big company with firm standards and processes when it comes to designing products, which makes the whole process more formal and less fun. “My relationship to my work is that of an artist to his work,” he says. At Google, he adds, “I can’t exercise my creativity in a way that gives me joy, which is my basic approach.”

But while he has lost some personal control, he has gained an unprecedented ability to make a mark on the world. Because of the ubiquity of computers and the Internet, with a few lines of code a person at Google or Apple can make a change that improves the life of millions. And that makes for a different kind of thrill than Hertzfeld experienced during the early days at Apple. “Do you know what was exciting about the Apple II?” he says. “We could beep the speaker. But we knew it could one day make music. That’s why it was so exciting—when things are more potential than realization, that’s the maximum excitement. On the other hand, there’s so much more leverage now to make a big impact. This stuff is as mainstream as can be these days. Google, the iPhone—these move the culture more than the Beatles did in the sixties. It’s shaping the human race.”

Richard Greenblatt tells me he has a rant to deliver.

Uh-oh.

After all these years, is he finally going to complain about the way I talked about his personal hygiene in the early chapters of Hackers?

To my relief, Greenblatt is more concerned with what he views as the decrepit state of computing. He hates today’s dominant coding languages like HTML and C++. He misses LISP, the beloved language that he worked with back when he was at MIT. “The world is screwed up,” he says, before launching on a technical analysis of the current state of programming that I can’t even hope to follow.

But coding is just the beginning. The real problem, Greenblatt says, is that business interests have intruded on a culture that was built on the ideals of openness and creativity. In Greenblatt’s heyday, he and his friends shared code freely, devoting themselves purely to the goal of building better products. “There’s a dynamic now that says, ‘Let’s format our web page so people have to push the button a lot so that they’ll see lots of ads,’” Greenblatt says. “Basically, the people who win are the people who manage to make things the most inconvenient for you.”

Greenblatt is not one of those people. He belongs to a different group: the true believers who still cling to their original motivation—the joy of discovery, the free exchange of ideas—even as their passion glows in the shadow of a multibillion-dollar industry. Despite their brilliance and importance, they never launched a million-dollar product, never became an icon. They just kept hacking.

I am surrounded by similar idealists here at the 25th Hacker’s Conference, which has continued as an annual gathering that celebrates the thrill of building something really cool. It has been a few years since I last attended, but it is just as I remember it: forty-eight hours of hackers meeting deep into the night at a Santa Cruz resort, discussing everything from economic theory to massive data storage. The crowd is somewhat long-in-the-tooth, despite an overdue effort to bring in more people under the age of thirty. The old dogs are still going at it.

Greenblatt is a regular here, a link to the Mesopotamia of hacker culture, MIT. These days, Greenblatt describes himself as an independent researcher. He moved into his mother’s house in Cambridge several years ago to take care of her in the last years of her life and has lived there alone since she died in 2005. He keeps up with some of his colleagues at MIT and for years has tried to get the other great canonical hacker of the Project MAC, Bill Gosper, to come to a Hackers Conference. But the brilliant Gosper, somewhat of a hermit, has never agreed. (Gosper, also still hacking, lives in Silicon Valley and sells math puzzles from his website.) “The main project I’ve been working on for fifteen years is called thread memory, and it has something to do with English language comprehension stuff,” says Greenblatt. “It’s basic research. It’s not something that works today, but anyway, it’s something.”

When Greenblatt looks at the current state of hacking, he sees a fallen world. Even the word itself has lost its meaning. When I ask him the state of hacking today, his reply is instant and heartfelt. “They stole our word,” he says, “and it’s irretrievably gone.”

Greenblatt is far from alone in his wistful invocation of the past. Even when I first interviewed Richard Stallman in 1983, he was bemoaning the sad decline of hacker culture and felt that the commercialization of software was a crime. I’d assumed the world would soon squash “The Last of the True Hackers” like a bug.

Was I ever wrong. Stallman’s crusade for free software has continued to inform the ongoing struggles over intellectual property, and won him a MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant. He founded the Free Software Foundation and wrote the GNU operating system, which found widespread adoption after Linus Torvalds wrote Linux to run it; the combination is used in millions of devices. More important perhaps is that Stallman provided the intellectual framework that led to the open source movement, a critical element of modern software and the Internet itself. If software had its saints Stallman would have been beatified long ago.

Yet he is almost as famous for his unyielding personality. In 2002, Creative Commons founder Lawrence Lessig wrote “I don’t know Stallman well. I know him well enough to know he is a hard man to like.” (And that was in the preface of Stallman’s own book!) Time has not softened him. In our original interview, Stallman had said, “I’m the last survivor of a dead culture. And I don’t really belong in the world any more. And in some ways I feel I ought to be dead.” Now—meeting over Chinese food, of course—he reaffirms this. “I certainly wished I had killed myself when I was born,” he says. “In terms of effect on the world, it’s very good that I’ve lived. And so I guess, if I could go back in time and prevent my birth, I wouldn’t do it. But I sure wish I hadn’t had so much pain.”

The pain came in part from loneliness, which was once a common complaint among the tiny and obsessive cadre of computer fans. (A 1980 commentary by Stanford psychologist Philip Zimbardo implied that hackers were antisocial losers who turned to computers to avoid human contact.) But as hacker culture spread, so did its social acceptability. Today, computer geeks are seen not as losers, but as moguls in the making. They tend not to suffer the intense isolation that has plagued Stallman—thanks, ironically enough, to the commercialization that he so bemoans.

Now, as much now as twenty-five years ago, Stallman is a fundamentalist, a Hutterite of hackerism. His personal website is a grab bag of appeals to boycott various enemies of the cause, ranging from Blu-Ray to J.K. Rowling. He even feuds with his former allies, including Torvalds. (“He doesn’t want to defend user’s freedom,” says Stallman.) He has particular contempt for Apple, with its closed systems and digital rights software. He refers to their products using Mad-magazine-style puns. The music player is an iScrod. Its mobile device is an iGroan. The new tablet computer is the iBad. And he is an equal-opportunity kvetcher. When I tell him that Hackers will soon be available on a Kindle—which Stallman, predictably, calls a Swindle—his dour demeanor evaporates as he energetically encourages me to resist the e-reader’s onerous DRM. “You have to believe that freedom is important and you deserve it,” he says. Despite his disillusionment, the fire still burns within him.

Lee Felsenstein is keeping the flame alive as well. Of all the people I wrote of in Hackers, Felsenstein was the one who most explicitly spoke of the political consequences of the computing revolution. But since his triumph with the Osborne, his own career has been checkered. He worked for eight years with the innovation lab Interval Research, but that effort went bust. A number of other projects seemed promising—including an effort to distribute Internet telephone service to Laos that was to be powered by bicycle generators—but for one reason or another that didn’t take off. “If I wanted to, I could be bitter about it, but I don’t want to,” he says.

Though Felsenstein foresaw the rise of personal computers, he’s still waiting for the kind of democratization that he hoped would accompany it, when cheap computers in the hand of “the people” would allow everyone to take information, manipulate it to better reflect the truth, and distribute it widely. “It’s beginning to happen, but not the way I had assumed,” he says. "Lincoln Steffens once commented, ‘I have seen the future and it works,’ but I’m with the guy who changed that to, ‘I have seen the future and it needs work.’”

Felsenstein saw with dismay the erosion of the term “hacker” but thinks that it is now on the upswing. “Hacker now has the connotation of someone on the edge and more likely be able to do good than bad. So I think we’re winning the cultural war that everybody thought we lost back in the 80s.” For his part, Felsenstein is putting the next generation of geeks on the path of righteousness. He recently helped establish a workspace in Mountain View, California, called the Hacker Dojo, which charges its eighty members $100 a month for access to a 9500-square-foot space with an in-house network and weird tools like IR readers. It’s one outpost in a growing number of "Hacker Spaces" across the country devoted to empowering formerly isolated and underequipped gearheads. “I am a sensei of the dojo, which as you may know is a grand revered master,” he says, a wide grin on his face. “Felsenstein sensei.”

Greenblatt, Stallman, and Felsenstein see hacking as a set of ideals. But Paul Graham sees it as a humming economic engine. The forty-five-year-old Internet guru, himself a fanatic engineer in his day, is a cofounder of Y Combinator, an incubator for Internet startups. Twice a year, his company runs American Idol-style contests to select twenty to thirty budding companies to participate in a three-month boot camp, culminating in a demo day packed with Angel investors, VCs, and acquisition-hungry companies like Google and Yahoo.

How does Graham pick the most promising candidates? Easy. He looks for the hackers. “We’re pretty hackerly so it’s easy to recognize a kindred spirit,” says Graham, who in 1995 co-created Viaweb, the first web-based application. “Hackers understand a system well enough to be in charge of it and make it do their bidding, and maybe make it do things that weren’t intended.” The best prospects, he says, are “world hackers”—people “who not only understand how to mess with computers, but mess with everything.” Indeed, Graham says that today, every company is looking to hire or invest in companies run by hackers. “We tell founders presenting at Demo Day, ‘If you dress up too much, you will read as a stupid person to the investors.’ They’re coming to see the next Larry and Sergey, not some junior MBA type.”

Stallman would recoil in horror at Graham’s equating hacking with entrepreneurial effectiveness. But Graham has found that hacking’s values aren’t threatened by business—they have conquered business. Seat-of-the-pants problem solving. Decentralized decision making. Emphasizing quality of work over quality of wardrobe. These are all hacker ideals, and they have all infiltrated the working world. The kind of tension I saw between hackers and bosses in Sierra On-Line has largely been resolved, not just at start-up companies but bigger ones like Google, as the hacker mentality has been incorporated as a value within the firm. (Ken Williams, by the way, has left the business after Sierra was snapped up by a conglomerate. “Both Roberta and I have completely ‘dropped out’ of the game business, or even playing games,” he writes in an email. A sailing enthusiast, he’s written three books on his cruising adventures, and Roberta is working on a nonfiction novel about the Irish immigration.)

A new generation of hackers has emerged, techies who don’t see business as an enemy but the means through which their ideas and innovations can find the broadest audience. Take Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who has drawn four hundred million users to share their personal lives online. At twenty-five, he has proven a master at the black art of business development—deliberately and purposefully opening his site to advertisers and marketers. Yet he clearly thinks of himself as a hacker; last year, he told the audience at an event for would-be Internet entrepreneurs that “We’ve got this whole ethos that we want to build a hacker culture.”

To find out what he meant by that, I visit him at Facebook headquarters, a large building on California Avenue in Palo Alto—the same street where I rented a room in 1983 to research Hackers. Surprisingly, the CEO, best known for wearing North Face fleece, is sporting a tie. He explains that he is nearing the end of a year in which he promised his team that he would show up for work in neckwear every day. It turned out to be a good one for Facebook—despite the recession, it doubled its user base and made hundreds of millions of dollars in profit. “Maybe it’s a charm,” he says, of the attire. “But I think it mostly just chokes me.”

Zuckerberg’s style may not come from the golden age of hacking, but his work ethic does. “We didn’t start with some grand theory, but a project we hacked together in a couple of weeks,” Zuckerberg says. “Our whole culture is we want to build something quickly.” Every six to eight weeks, Facebook conducts “hackathons” where people have one night to dream up and complete a project. “The idea is you can build something really good in a night,” says Zuckerberg. “And that’s part of the personality of Facebook now. We have a big belief in moving fast, pushing boundaries, saying that it’s OK to break things. It’s definitely very core in my personality.”

In the ongoing competition for talent, Zuckerberg believes that the company with the best hackers wins. “One good hacker can be as good as ten or twenty engineers, and we try to embrace that. We want to be the place where the best hackers want to work, because our culture is set up so they can build stuff quickly and do crazy stuff and can be recognized for standout brilliance.”

Unlike the original hackers, Zuckerberg’s generation didn’t have to start from scratch or use assembly language to get control of their machines. “I never wanted to take apart my computer,” he says. As a budding hacker in the late 90s, Zuckerberg tinkered with the higher-level languages, allowing him to concentrate on systems, rather than machines.

For instance, when he played with his beloved Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, he wouldn’t act out wars with them like other kids did. He would build societies and pretend the Turtles were interacting with each other “I was just interested in how systems work,” he says. Similarly, when he began playing with computers he didn’t hack motherboards or telephones but entire communities—exploiting bugs to kick his friends off AOL Instant Messenger, for instance.

As was the case with Gates, Zuckerberg is often accused of turning his back on hacker ideals because he refused to allow other sites to access the information that Facebook users contribute. But Zuckerberg says that the truth is just the opposite; his company piggybacks on—and builds on—the free flow of information. “I never had this thing where I wanted to have information that other people didn’t,” he says. “I just thought it should all be more available. The world was becoming more open and more access to information was really good. From everything I read, that’s a very core part of hacker culture. Like ‘Information wants to be free’ and all that.”

A previous generation of hackers—and I—worried that the world of commerce would choke off innovation and stymie a burgeoning cultural movement. But hackerism has survived and thrived, a testament to its flexibility and its power. According to computer book publisher Tim O’Reilly—who fosters hackerism through his Foo Camp "unconferences“—the hacking culture will always find new outlets. (It’s no coincidence that this new edition of Hackers is under the O’Reilly imprint.) Big business may stumble upon and commodify hackers’ breakthroughs, but the hackers will simply move on to new frontiers. “It’s like that line in Last Tango in Paris,” O’Reilly says, “where Marlon Brando says, ‘It’s over, and then it begins again.’”

The current frontier for hackers, O’Reilly says, is not the purely mathematical realm of ones and zeros, but actual stuff—taking the same tear-it-down-and-built-it-anew attitude that programmers once took to compilers, and applying it to power-generating kites and body parts. (O’Reilly publishes Make magazine and runs the Maker Faire festivals, celebrations of this DIY spirit.) “DIY is really another word for hacking,” he says. But even this area, he points out, has begun the shift towards entrepreneurship. O’Reilly says the action now is in DIY biology—manipulating cell’s genetic code in a way a previous generation of hackers manipulated computer code. “It’s still in the fun stage.”

Just ask Bill Gates. If he were a teenager again, he’d be biology hacking. “Creating artificial life with DNA synthesis. That’s sort of the equivalent of machine language programming,” says Gates, whose work for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has led him to become a didactic expert in disease and immunology. “If you want to change the world in some big way, that’s where you should start—biological molecules. Those are all pretty deep problems that need the same type of crazy fanaticism of youthful genius and naiveté that drove the PC industry, and can have the same impact on the human condition.”

In other words, Gates expects hackers to be the heroes of the next revolution, too. Sounds good to me.

—Steven Levy May 2010