Levy_S-Hackers-Heroes-Computer-Revolution

hackers were concerned), it urged you to spend less time and to use less of thecomputer's facilities once you were on! The Multics philosophy was a disaster.The hackers plagued the Multics system with tricks and crashes. It was almost aduty to do it. As Minsky would later say, "There were people doing projects thatsome other people didn't like and they would play all sorts of jokes on them so thatit was impossible to work with them... I think [the hackers] helped progress byundermining professors with stupid plans."In light of the guerrilla tendencies of hackers, the planners in charge of the AI labhad to tread very lightly with suggestions that would impact the hackerenvironment. And around 1967, the planners wanted a whopper of a change. Theywanted to convert the hackers' beloved PDP-6 into a time-sharing machine.By that time, Minsky had turned many of his AI lab leadership duties over to hisfriend Ed Fredkin, Nelson's boss at Triple-I who himself was easing out of fulltimebusiness and into a professorship at MIT. (Fredkin would be one of theyoungest full professors on the faculty, and the only full professor without adegree.) A master programmer himself, Fredkin was already close to the hackers.He appreciated the way the laissez-faire attitude allowed hackers to be dazzlinglyproductive. But he thought that sometimes the hackers could benefit from top-downdirection. One of his early attempts to organize a "human wave" approach toward arobotics problem, assigning the hackers specific parts of the problem himself, hadfailed ignominiously. "Everyone thought I was crazy," Fredkin later recalled. Heultimately accepted the fact that the best way to get hackers to do things was tosuggest them, and hope that the hackers would be interested enough. Then youwould get production unheard of in industry or academia.Time-sharing was something that Minsky and Fredkin considered essential.Between hackers and Officially Sanctioned Users, the PDP-6 was in constantdemand; people were frustrated by long waits for access. But the hackers did notconsider time-sharing acceptable. They pointed at CTSS, Multics, even at JackDennis' more amiable system on the PDP-1, as examples of the slower, lesspowerful access one would be stuck with when one shared the computer withothers using it at the same time.They noted that certain large programs could not be run at all with time-sharing.One of these was a monster program that Peter Samson had been working on. Itwas sort of an outgrowth of one of his first hacks on the TX-0, a program which, ifyou typed in the names of two subway stations on the MTA, would tell you theproper subway lines to take, and where to make the changes from one to another.Now, Samson was tackling the entire New York subway system ... he intended toput the entire system in the computer's memory, and the full timetable of its trains