.  Hackers never were part of the mainstream establishment, but their current reputation as villains of cyberspace is a far cry from the early days when, first and foremost, they were seen as ardent quirky programmers, capable of near-miraculous, unorthodox feats of machine manipulation. But the shift in popular perception to hackers as deviants and criminals is important not only because it affects the hackers themselves and the extraordinary culture that has grown around them, but because it reflects shifts in the development, governance, and meaning of the new information technology.
    In "Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution", Stevern Levy traces the roots of evolving hacker communities to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the late 1950s. Here, core members of the Tech Model Railroad Clud "discovered" computers first as a tool for enhancing their considerable creative energies to the task of building and programming MIT's early mainframes in uneasy but relatively peaceful coexistence with formal employees of the university's technical staff.
    Formidable programmers, these hackers produced and debugged computer code at an astonishing rate. They helped develop hardware and software for existing computer functions and invented novel algorithms and applications that were incorporated into subsequent generations of computers. These novel functions not only extended recreational capabilities—gaming, virtual reality, and digitized music—but also increased practical capabilities such as control of robots and processing speeds. Obsessive work also yielded a host of basic system subroutines and utilities that pushed operating capacities and efficiency to new heights, and became a fundamental part of what we experience every time we sit in front of a computer.
    This book describes legendary hacking binges—days and nights with little or no sleep—leading to products that surprised and sometimes annoyed colleagues in mainstream academic and research positions. The "pure hack" did not respect prescribed methods or theory-driven, top-down approaches to computer science and engineering. The unconventional lifestyle did not seem to put off adherents, even though it could be pretty unwholesome: a disregard for patterns of night and day, a diet of junk-food, inattention to personal appearance and hygiene, and the virtual absence of any life outside of hacking.
    It was not only single-minded attachment to their craft that defined these early hackers but their conception of an ideology informally called the "hacker ethic." This creed included several elements: commitment to total and free access to computers and information, belief in the immense powers of computers to improve people's lives and create art and beauty, disdain for obstacles erected against free access to computing, and an insistence that hackers be evaluated by no other criteria than technical virtuosity and accomplishment. In other words, the culture of hacking incorporated political and moral values as well as technical ends.1.  The relationship between the hacker community and MIT administration in the late 1950s can be best described as ______.