Bill Gates is an Evil Nerd. The Hippie Hacker is Richard M. Stallman, founder of the Free Software Foundation and the GNU Project, not to mention writer of the only text editor that’s also a development environment, an OS, and a religious experience: emacs.
rms is the ultimate hippie coder. I mean, look at the guy. If he doesn’t smell of patchouli, the Pope ain’t Catholic.
casdave: IBM has nothing to do with CP/M. CP/M was Gary Kildall’s OS, and he founded Digital Research to sell it. CP/M was developed into DR-DOS, the superior OS Microsoft killed by crippling Windows 3 so it would only run on MS-DOS.
And, for the time, CP/M was pretty damn good. CP/M-86 was better than MS-DOS, despite the fact MS-DOS is a direct lift of it.
By the way, there never really were all that many hippies. But then, there weren’t all that many beatniks either. Maynard G. Krebs was no beatnik.
Oh, yeah, those guys in the zoot suits were hep cats.
Mostly it was the music, the drugs were just the side show. And you never really were one, if you started doing it after there was a name for it. After that, it’s just pop art.
A hippie with a political platform is a Yippie, and is necessarily full of shit as a precondition of his politics. Being right or wrong in his opinions is optional.
Tris
Got the hair, got the beard, did the drugs, did the movement, did the crime, did the time, and still don’t think that war is the answer. What was the question?
Derleth, thank you for addressing the CP/M slight.
My first real computing environment (ie: not Apple ][ or C64) was running CP/M on a creaky toy Z80 in the early eighties… And the scales fell from my eyes, the first time I fired up ASCOM to access my hacked shell account at UBC – Mudd’s first internet provider, although I didn’t think of it that way.
I’ve got to stop now, I’m getting all choked up over here.
They comb their hair with porcupines and loofah their feet
And they become indignant when you threaten them with meat
Their windows grin like pumpkins, filled with candles and beads
Their beds are all platonic and there’s babies on their knees
A commonly heard phrase in the '80s was “All the hippies are executives now.” No, no, no. First of all, just because someone who had a corporate job in the '80s had had long hair in 1968, that didn’t mean that they’d been a true “hippie”. As you imply, there were a lot of posers.
Second of all, not everyone who had long hair in 1968, true hippie or not, ended up in a corporate office. In the late '80s, I lived with my parents in a town where the DPW was never idle. I was in my mom’s car while she waited patiently for a worker with a stop sign to wave us through an intersection (the traffic light had been deactivated). He had long hair, and so did several other crew members.
“Funny to see long hair on a construction worker,” my mom remarked. “Back in the day, they were the ones who used to yell at long-haired hippies and call them ‘fairy’ and worse.”
“Could be that these are the same guys who got yelled at then,” said I. “Some people from that era got arrested so many times, besides neglecting their schooling, that their career options are limited. And some others might choose construction, so they at least know their work is doing some good, and it frees them up in the evenings to play in their band or whatever they do.”
That’s another myth that galls me: the idea that everyone from that era was passionately interested in art or political science or whatever. If you compare the claims of devotion to “liberal” courses of study, and the claims of turning on, tuning in and dropping out, they don’t quite reconcile.
I wish more people would look at the film The Big Chill objectively, instead of dismissing it as a supposed stroke-job for “ex-hippies” or decrying it for not being Return of the Secaucus Seven (sorry, but I thought that film was a real dog). There were, IMO, two very telling scenes. First is the one where Mary Kay Place’s character discusses how she chose corporate law. Paraphrasing: “So I started in a public defender’s office, and I had this one client who broke into a house, beat up the husband, raped the wife, and then tried to blow the whole place up. I asked him what happened and he said, ‘I was in Montreal at the time’. So I got an offer from [corporation]…the offices were very clean, and the clients were only raping the land…” I mean, you’d think environmental issues would be dear enough to her heart that that would be the job she wouldn’t want. But being a public defender lost its appeal for her as soon as she found out she’d have to defend…you know, actual criminals.
Second was towards the end of the film. Kevin Kline’s character says something along the lines of “C’mon, man, we know each other…” William Hurt’s character snaps back, “Wrong. A long time ago, we knew each other for a short while; that’s it.” At age 15, I thought that was horrible, and hoped I would never meet anyone so cold-hearted. At age 32, I now understand just how true that statement is.
My point is, anyone who feels disillusioned that so many people have supposedly given up the “hippie ideal” may take comfort in knowing that, for the most part, it was just that: an ideal. One can’t claim that so many have fallen short of it, when so few genuinely tried to live up to it, even then.
P.S. glarGH, have you tried appealing to your landlords on the grounds that they should not ask you to endanger your health? If they’re so bloody concerned with your welfare, they should STFU and let you do what’s best for you.
