"The workstation-class machines built by Sun and others opened up new worlds for hackers"
About this Quote
There is a whole ideology smuggled into Raymond's seemingly technical nostalgia: that better tools don’t just make work faster, they reorganize who gets to participate in the future. “Workstation-class machines” isn’t a neutral spec sheet phrase. It signals a jump from hobbyist tinkering and time-shared scarcity to personal, desk-level power: Unix under your hands, serious memory, real compilers, networking that treats connection as the default. Sun, in this framing, isn’t merely a vendor; it’s an enabler of a new social class inside computing.
The line’s key move is the word “opened.” It casts hardware as a frontier gate, not a product. Raymond is writing from within hacker culture, where access to capable machines translates into access to prestige, experimentation, and community. “New worlds” does cultural work: it suggests that what followed wasn’t incremental progress but a qualitative shift in imagination. This is the origin story of open systems, internet-native collaboration, and the belief that intellectual autonomy is inseparable from compute autonomy.
Subtextually, it’s also an argument against closed ecosystems. Sun and its peers represent the moment when high-end computing felt permissive: standards, shells, source, and a bias toward interoperability. The admiration is pointed; it implies that later eras of locked-down devices and app-store feudalism are a narrowing, not an evolution.
Context matters: Raymond’s broader project is to defend “hacker” as builder, not criminal, and to explain why certain technological environments produce disproportionate innovation. He’s praising a machine, but really he’s praising the conditions that made a movement think it could rewrite the rules.
The line’s key move is the word “opened.” It casts hardware as a frontier gate, not a product. Raymond is writing from within hacker culture, where access to capable machines translates into access to prestige, experimentation, and community. “New worlds” does cultural work: it suggests that what followed wasn’t incremental progress but a qualitative shift in imagination. This is the origin story of open systems, internet-native collaboration, and the belief that intellectual autonomy is inseparable from compute autonomy.
Subtextually, it’s also an argument against closed ecosystems. Sun and its peers represent the moment when high-end computing felt permissive: standards, shells, source, and a bias toward interoperability. The admiration is pointed; it implies that later eras of locked-down devices and app-store feudalism are a narrowing, not an evolution.
Context matters: Raymond’s broader project is to defend “hacker” as builder, not criminal, and to explain why certain technological environments produce disproportionate innovation. He’s praising a machine, but really he’s praising the conditions that made a movement think it could rewrite the rules.
Quote Details
| Topic | Technology |
|---|
More Quotes by Eric
Add to List
