But crucially, nobody was telling them what to program or what not to program. They were the first group of coders who used the machines to do things that were simply whimsical or creative. They’d get the machines to play music by writing code that turned the vibrating speaker on and off at different frequencies. They’d write programs to calculate chess moves, one of which eventually beat an actual human. Russell wrote Spacewar!, one of the world’s first graphical computer games, in which two players each piloted a ship around a black hole, trying to shoot the other. Using a $120,000 machine to play a video game would likely have seemed, to computer-makers at the time, a madly frivolous thing to do. But the MIT hackers regarded themselves as liberating programming from its mundane history of mere bean counting and scientific problem-solving. Coding itself, they felt, was a playful, artistic act.

The Niagara of money in Silicon Valley, though, has been bringing in a new breed of coder that cared considerably less. By the late ’00s, the example of companies like Instagram—minting so many multimillionaires by making something that Facebook or Google might buy—caught the attention of a new breed of striver, one that we might call the Ivy League frat boys. In previous generations, they’d head for Wall Street, hungry to make quick millions. After the financial collapse of 2008, they needed a new field and found it in Silicon Valley. These “brogrammers” who began to show up, some straight from the frat house, weren’t even concerned about the impact of their code; they weren’t even necessarily interested in the intellectual thrill of the work, frankly. For them, the industry was purely a route to power. It’s safe to say that overall this new population has made less of a contribution to coding than to the overall culture of Silicon Valley.