Levy_S-Hackers-Heroes-Computer-Revolution

explored in the Adventure world were akin to the basic, most obscure levels of the machine thatyou'd be traveling in when you hacked in assembly code. You could get dizzy trying to rememberwhere you were in both activities. Indeed, Adventure proved as addicting as programming Woodsput the program on the SAIL PDP-10 on a Friday, and some hackers (and Real World "tourists")spent the entire weekend trying to solve it. Like any good system or program, of course, Adventurewas never finished Woods and his friends were always improving it, debugging it, adding morepuzzles and features. And like every significant program. Adventure was expressive of thepersonality and environment of the authors. For instance, Woods' vision of a mist-covered TollBridge protected by a stubborn troll came during a break in hacking one night, when Woods andsome other hackers decided to watch the sun rise at a mist-shrouded Mount Diablo, a substantialdrive away. They didn't make it in time, and Woods remembered what that misty dawn looked like,and wrote it into the description of that scene in the game, which he conceived of over breakfast thatmorning.It was at Stanford that gurus were as likely to be faculty people as systems hackers (among Stanfordprofessors was the noted computer scientist Donald Knuth, author of the multivolume classic TheArt of Computer Programming). It was at Stanford that, before the Adventure craze, the casualpleasures of Spacewar were honed to a high art (Slug Russell had come out with McCarthy, but itwas younger hackers who developed five-player versions and options for reincarnation, and ranextensive all-night tournaments). It was at Stanford that hackers would actually leave theirterminals for a daily game of volleyball. It was at Stanford that a fund-raising drive wassuccessfully undertaken for an addition to the lab which would have been inconceivable at MIT: asauna. It was at Stanford that the computer could support video images, allowing users to switchfrom a computer program to a television program. The most famous use of this, according to someSAIL regulars, came when SAIL hackers placed an ad in the campus newspaper for a couple ofwilling young coeds, and the women answering the ad became stars of a sex orgy at the AI lab,captured by a video camera and watched over the terminals by appreciative hackers. Something elsethat never would have occurred at MIT.It was not as if the SAIL hackers were any less devoted to their hacking than the MIT people. In apaper summarizing the history of the Stanford lab, Professor Bruce Buchanan refers to the "strangesocial environment created by intense young people whose first love was hacking," and it was truethat the lengths that hackers went to in California were no less extreme than those at Tech Square.For instance, it did not take long for SAIL hackers to notice that the crawl space between the lowhangingartificial ceiling and the roof could be a comfortable sleeping hutch, and several of themactually lived there for years. One systems hacker spent the early 1970s living in his dysfunctionalcar parked in the lot outside the building once a week he'd bicycle down to Palo Alto for provisions.The other alternative for food was the Prancing Pony; named after a tavern in Middle Earth, thiswas the SAIL food-vending machine, loaded with health-food goodies and pot-stickers from a localChinese restaurant. Each hacker kept an account on the Prancing Pony, maintained by the computer.After you made your food purchase, you were given the option to double-or-nothing the cost ofyour food, the outcome depending on whether it was an odd- or even-numbered millisecond whenyou made the gamble. With those kinds of provisions, SAIL was even more amenable than MIT forround-the-clock hacking. It had its applications people and its systems people. It was open tooutsiders, who would sit down and begin hacking; and if they showed promise, Uncle JohnMcCarthy might hire them.SAIL hackers also lived by the Hacker Ethic. The time-sharing system on the SAIL machine, likeITS, did not require passwords, but, at John McCarthy's insistence, a user had the option to keep hisfiles private. The SAIL hackers wrote a program to identify these people, and proceeded to unlock