Levy_S-Hackers-Heroes-Computer-Revolution

programs which make valiant tries but don't quite fly.These are important things to know, but they did not necessarily make you awinner. It was hacking that did it for Sussman. He stuck at it, hung around Gospera lot, toned down his know-it-all attitude, and, above all, became an impressiveprogrammer. He was the rare loser who eventually turned things around andbecame a winner. He later wrote a very complicated and much-heralded program inwhich the computer would move blocks with a robot arm; and by a process muchlike debugging, the program would figure out for itself which blocks it would haveto move to get to the one requested. It was a significant step forward for artificialintelligence, and Sussman became known thereafter as more of a scientist, aplanner. He named his famous program HACKER.One thing that helped Sussman in his turnaround from loser to winner was a senseof what The Right Thing was. The biggest losers of all, in the eyes of the hackers,were those who so lacked that ability that they were incapable of realizing what thetrue best machine was, or the true best computer language, or the true best way touse a computer. And no system of using a computer earned the hackers' contemptas much as the time-sharing systems which, since they were a major part of ProjectMAC, were also based on the ninth floor of Tech Square. The first one, which wasoperating since the mid-sixties, was the Compatible Time-sharing System (CTSS).The other, long in preparation and high in expense, was called Multics, and was sooffensive that its mere existence was an outrage.Unlike the quiltwork of constantly improving systems programs operating on thePDP-6, CTSS had been written by one man, MIT Professor F. J. Corbate. It hadbeen a virtuoso job in many respects, all carefully coded and ready to run on theIBM 7094, which would support a series of terminals to be used simultaneously.But to the hackers, CTSS represented bureaucracy and IBM-ism. "One of the reallyfun things about computers is that you have control over them," CTSS foe TomKnight would later explain. "When you have a bureaucracy around a computer youno longer have control over it. The CTSS was a 'serious' system. People had to goget accounts and had to pay attention to security. It was a benign bureaucracy, butnevertheless a bureaucracy, full of people who were here from nine to five. If therewas some reason you wanted to change the behavior of the system, the way itworked, or develop a program that might have only sometimes worked, or mighthave some danger of crashing the system, that was not encouraged [on CTSS]. Youwant an environment where making those mistakes is not something for whichyou're castigated, but an environment where people say, 'Oops, you made amistake.'"In other words, CTSS discouraged hacking. Add to this the fact that it was run on atwo-million-dollar IBM machine that the hackers thought was much inferior to