Hacking Europe traces the user practices of chopping games in Warsaw, hacking software in Athens, creating chaos in Hamburg, producing demos in Turku, and partying with computing in Zagreb and Amsterdam. Focusing on several European countries at the end of the Cold War, the book shows the digital development was not an exclusively American affair. Local hacker communities appropriated the computer and forged new cultures around it like the hackers in Yugoslavia, Poland and Finland, who showed off their tricks and creating distinct “demoscenes.” Together the essays reflect a diverse palette of cultural practices by which European users domesticated computer technologies. Each chapter explores the mediating actors instrumental in introducing and spreading the cultures of computing around Europe. More generally, the “ludological” element--the role of mischief, humor, and play--discussed here as crucial for analysis of hacker culture, opens new vistas for the study of the history of technology.
Author(s): Gerard Alberts, Ruth Oldenziel (eds.)
Series: History of Computing
Edition: 1
Publisher: Springer-Verlag London
Year: 2014
Language: English
Pages: 269
Tags: History of Computing; Personal Computing; Computers and Society
Front Matter....Pages i-viii
Introduction: How European Players Captured the Computer and Created the Scenes....Pages 1-22
Front Matter....Pages 23-23
Transnational (Dis)Connection in Localizing Personal Computing in the Netherlands, 1975–1990....Pages 25-48
“Inside a Day You Will Be Talking to It Like an Old Friend”: The Making and Remaking of Sinclair Personal Computing in 1980s Britain....Pages 49-71
Legal Pirates Ltd: Home Computing Cultures in Early 1980s Greece....Pages 73-103
Front Matter....Pages 105-105
Galaxy and the New Wave: Yugoslav Computer Culture in the 1980s....Pages 107-128
Playing and Copying: Social Practices of Home Computer Users in Poland during the 1980s....Pages 129-150
Multiple Users, Diverse Users: Appropriation of Personal Computers by Demoscene Hackers....Pages 151-163
Front Matter....Pages 165-165
Heroes Yet Criminals of the German Computer Revolution....Pages 167-187
How Amsterdam Invented the Internet: European Networks of Significance, 1980–1995....Pages 189-217
Users in the Dark: The Development of a User-Controlled Technology in the Czech Wireless Network Community....Pages 219-239
Back Matter....Pages 241-269
