Hacking Europe focuses on the playfulness that was at the heart of how European users appropriated microcomputers in the last quarter of the twentieth century. The essays argue that users--whether the design of the projected use of computers was detailed or still unfinished--assigned their own meanings to the machines in unintended ways. The book traces the user practices of chopping games in Warsaw, hacking software in Athens, creating chaos in Hamburg, producing demos in Turku, and partying with computing in Zagreb and Amsterdam. Focusing on several European countries at the end of the Cold War, the collection of essays shows the digital development was not an exclusively American affair, but far more diverse and complicated. Local hacker communities appropriated the computer and forged new cultures around it like the hackers in Yugoslavia, Poland and Finland, who showed off their tricks and creating distinct "demoscenes." Together the essays reflect a diverse palette of cultural practices by which European users domesticated computer technologies. Each chapter explores the mediating actors instrumental in introducing and spreading the cultures of computing around Europe. More generally, the "ludological" element--the role of mischief, humor, and play--discussed here as crucial for analysis of hacker culture, opens new vistas for the study of the history of technology.

This illuminating collection of diverse case studies will be of considerable interest to scholars in a range of disciplines, from computer science to the history of technology, and European-American studies.

Gerard Alberts teaches history of computing and mathematics at the University of Amsterdam. Ruth Oldenziel is a professor at the Eindhoven University of Technology and is a Fellow at the Rachel Carson Center, Munich in 2013-2014.

Klappentext

Hacking Europe focuses on the playfulness that was at the heart of how European users appropriated microcomputers in the last quarter of the twentieth century. The essays argue that users--whether the design of the projected use of computers was detailed or still unfinished--assigned their own meanings to the machines in unintended ways. The book traces the user practices of chopping games in Warsaw, hacking software in Athens, creating chaos in Hamburg, producing demos in Turku, and partying with computing in Zagreb and Amsterdam. Focusing on several European countries at the end of the Cold War, the collection of essays shows the digital development was not an exclusively American affair, but far more diverse and complicated. Local hacker communities appropriated the computer and forged new cultures around it like the hackers in Yugoslavia, Poland and Finland, who showed off their tricks and creating distinct demoscenes. Together the essays reflect a diverse palette of cultural practices by which European users domesticated computer technologies. Each chapter explores the mediating actors instrumental in introducing and spreading the cultures of computing around Europe. More generally, the ludological element--the role of mischief, humor, and play--discussed here as crucial for analysis of hacker culture, opens new vistas for the study of the history of technology.

This illuminating collection of diverse case studies will be of considerable interest to scholars in a range of disciplines, from computer science to the history of technology, and European-American studies.

Gerard Alberts teaches history of computing and mathematics at the University of Amsterdam. Ruth Oldenziel is a professor at the Eindhoven University of Technology and is a Fellow at the Rachel Carson Center, Munich in 2013-2014.

Zusammenfassung

Hacking Europe traces the user practices of chopping games in Warsaw, hacking software in Athens, creating chaos in Hamburg, producing demos in Turku, and partying with computing in Zagreb and Amsterdam. Focusing on several European countries at the end of the Cold War, the book shows the digital development was not an exclusively American affair. Local hacker communities appropriated the computer and forged new cultures around it like the hackers in Yugoslavia, Poland and Finland, who showed off their tricks and creating distinct demoscenes. Together the essays reflect a diverse palette of cultural practices by which European users domesticated computer technologies. Each chapter explores the mediating actors instrumental in introducing and spreading the cultures of computing around Europe. More generally, the ludological element--the role of mischief, humor, and play--discussed here as crucial for analysis of hacker culture, opens new vistas for the study of the historyof technology.

Inhalt

Introduction: How European Players Captured the Computer and Created the Scenes.- Part I: Appropriating America: Making One's Own.- Transnational (Dis)connection in Localizing Personal Computing in the Netherlands, 1975-1990.- Inside a Day You'll be Talking to it Like an Old Friend: The Making and Remaking of Sinclair Personal Computing in 1980s Britain.- Legal Pirates Ltd: Home Computing Cultures in Early 1980s Greece.- Part II: Illegitimate Sons in Between: Scences.- Galaxy and the New Wave: Yugoslav Computer Culture in the 1980s.- Playing and Copying: Social Practices of Home Computer Users in Poland During the 1980s.- Multiple Users, Diverse Users: Demoscene and the Appropriation of the Personal Computer by Demoscene Hackers.- Part III: Going Public: How to Change the World.- Heroes Yet Criminals of the German Computer Revolution.- How Amsterdam Invented the Internet: European Networks of Significance 1980-1995.- Users in the Dark: The Development ofa User-Controlled Technology in the Czech Wireless Network Community.