Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution (Levy, 1984)
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Steven Levy's history of the first three hacker generations - the MIT model-railroad and PDP crowd, the Homebrew hardware builders, and the early game programmers - and the book that first wrote down the hacker ethic.
Levy's principles are the field's oldest creed: access to computers should be unlimited and hands-on, all information should be free, mistrust authority and promote decentralisation, judge hackers by their hacking rather than their credentials, and computers can change your life for the better. Every argument about open source, disclosure and platform control since has been an argument with this list.
Also known as: steven levy, hacker ethic, hackers heroes