Agreed. Levy's "Hackers" is still the best book I know about the mindset that begets hacking and hackers. I can't recommend it highly enough. It opened the d

Agreed. Levy's "Hackers" is still the best book I know about the mindset that begets hacking and hackers. I can't recommend it highly enough. It opened the door to my first job in programming. The author seems to be bemoaning the lack of opportunities today to return to the halcyon days of yore. Mostly I agree. I was coding back in the early 80's, and the energy surrounding computers then was much more dynamic, open-ended, and seemingly limited only by one's imagination. Alas the rise of open source inevitably grew hobbyist computing into the panoply of richly ornamented computing tools we know so well today, from the Linux kernel to the GNU toolchain and far beyond. It was probably inevitable when millions of youngsters with copious free time can dive deep into the bowels of PC hardware using a wealth of S/W tools that the formation of a big complex (daunting) computing ecosphere was inevitable. And all that technical mass makes it much harder to perturb the universe and do something new and cool and share your hack with like-minded friends. As to the roots of hacking... solving a puzzle is where the adventure begins, but solving it elegantly, even optimally, is where it goes from there. The best hacks open doors to other hackerfolk, enabling them to go where nobody you know has gone before, and they make ever deeper dives into computing that much more compelling. AFAIK, this is true of all hackerfolk, be they white or black hatted, in S/W or H/W.