rowing up in a suburb of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in the early 1970s,

Paul Graham (b. 1964) became fascinated with the depiction of computers
in television and film. They were like electronic brains with limitless
powers. In the near future, or so it seemed, you would be able to talk to
your computer, and it would do everything you wanted.
In junior high school he had been admitted into a program for gifted
students that provided them with the chance to work on a creative project
of
their choosing. Graham decided to focus his project on the school’s
computer, an IBM mainframe that was used for printing out grade reports
and class schedules. This was the first time he had gotten his hands on a
computer, and although it was primitive and had to be programmed with
punch cards, it seemed like something magical—a portal to the future.
Over the next few years, he taught himself how to program by
consulting the few books then written on the subject, but mostly he learned
by trial and error. Like painting on a canvas, he could see the results
immediately of what he had done—and if the programming worked, it had
a
certain aesthetic rightness to it. The process of learning through trial and
error was immensely satisfying. He could discover things on his own,
without having to follow a rigid path set up by others. (This is the essence
of being a “hacker.”) And the better he got at programming, the more he
could make it do.
Deciding to pursue his studies further, he chose to attend Cornell
University, which at the time had one of the best computer science
departments in the country. Here he finally received instruction in the basic
principles of programming, cleaning up many of the bad hacking habits he
had developed on his own. He became intrigued by the recently developed
field of artificial intelligence—the key to designing the kinds of computers
he had dreamed about as a child. To be on the frontier of this new field, he
applied and was accepted to the graduate school in computer science at
Harvard University.
At Harvard Graham finally had to confront something about himself—
he was not cut out for academia. He hated writing research papers. The
university way of programming took all the fun and excitement out of it—
the process of discovering through trial and error. He was a hacker at heart,
one who liked to figure things out for himself. He found a fellow hacker at