[...] I was inspired by the attitude at the MITAI Lab, where the hackers said: ‘We’re not going to let the administrators tell us how to do things; we’re going to work on what they need, but we will decide how; and we won’t let them implement computer security to restrict us with.’ This was a conscious decision of the hackers who had written the time-sharing system, which they’d started a couple of years before I got there. Their attitude was, yes, the administrators could fire us, but we were not going to suck up to them. They weren’t going to stand being treated like ordinary employees. I wouldn’t have had the strength to do this on my own, but as part of a team, I learned it. We were the best, and most of us weren’t getting paid an awful lot—any of us could have got a much better-paying job someplace else if we’d wanted. We were there because we were free to improve the system and do useful things, the way we wanted to, and not be treated like people who had to obey all the time.