In the 1960s, while ITS was developed at MIT, AT&T Bell Labs fostered a similar hacker spirit, creating Unix and the C language. Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie, transitioning from the Multics project, aimed for simplicity and efficiency, developing Unix on PDP-7 and later porting it to PDP-11. The creation of the C language, evolving from B, allowed Unix to be rewritten in a high-level language, setting a foundational standard for modern computing and operating system development...

The hacker culture at MIT began with the Tech Model Railroad Club, which explored controlling trains via the PDP-1. This experimentation fostered the hacker ethos, leading to the development of the first video game, Spacewar!, and the ITS. The open, collaborative nature of ITS at the MIT AI Lab, accessible through ARPAnet, significantly influenced the hacker culture and laid the groundwork for the free/open-source software movement...

The origins of hacker culture trace back to the 1960s, starting with MIT's introduction of the PDP-1 computer. Early enthusiasts, often with backgrounds in mathematics, physics, or engineering, engaged in creating foundational software like Spacewar!, text editors, and music programs. This culture evolved into today's open-source hacker community, expanding with the advent of ARPAnet, the precursor to the internet... 

Until the 1960s, the focus was on hardware in computing, with software not recognized as a separate engineering discipline. Mathematicians and scientists initially drove programming, evolving into early software engineering roles. Margaret Hamilton, who developed software for the Apollo 11 mission, played a key role in establishing software engineering as a serious discipline, amidst a backdrop where many programmers were women, reflecting the field's undervalued status at the time... 

In the early days of computing, programming was done at the hardware level, with functionality embedded in circuits. ENIAC, for example, ran programs by manual rewiring. With the advent of stored-program computers like EDVAC and EDSAC, programming involved writing machine code, a binary language difficult for humans. Assembly language, using mnemonics for machine instructions, simplified the process. Programmers wrote code on paper, debugged it mentally, then transferred it to punch cards for execution, a tedious process that involved waiting for machine time and results...