Levy_S-Hackers-Heroes-Computer-Revolution

He loved the idea of electronics. He filled the cover of his sixth-grade notebook with electricaldiagrams. He would go to his neighborhood branch of the Free Library of Philadelphia and thumbthrough the pages of the Radio Amateur's Handbook. He got the biggest thrill from a HeathCompany instruction manual for building a shortwave receiver. The Heath Company specialized indo-it-yourself electronics projects, and this particular manual had very detailed diagrams of wiresand connections. Comparing the actual parts for that five-tube project with the perfect diagram, withits octagons linked to other octagons, Lee saw the connection ... this line of the schematicrepresented that pin on the tube socket. It gave him an almost sensual thrill, this linking of hisfantasy electronics world to reality. He carried around the manual everywhere, a pilgrim toting aprayerbook. Soon he was completing projects, and was vindicated when at age thirteen he won aprize for his model space satellite its name a bow to Mother Russia, the Fel-snik.But even though he was realizing himself in a way he never had before, each of Lee's new productswas a venture in paranoia, as he feared that he might not be able to get the part to make it work. "Iwas always seeing these [Popular Mechanics] articles saying, 'Gee, if you have this transistor youcould make a regular radio you always wanted, and talk to your friends and make new friends' ...but I never could get that part and I didn't really know how to go about getting it, or I couldn't getthe money to get it." He imagined the mocking voice of his brother, labeling him a failure.When Lee was a freshman at Central High, Philadelphia's special academic high school for boys,brother Joe, a senior, drafted him to become chief engineer at the school's budding Computer Club,showing Lee a diagram of some obsolete flip-flops and challenging his younger brother to buildthem. Lee was too terrified to say no, and tried unsuccessfully to complete the project. The effortmade him wary of computers for a decade afterward.But high school uplifted Lee he was involved in political groups, did some work on the school'scyclotron, and did some significant reading particularly some novels by Robert Heinlein. Theslightly built, spectacled Jewish teen-ager somehow identified with the futuristic protagonists,particularly the virginal young soldier in Revolt in 2100. The novel's setting is a twenty-first-centurydictatorship, where a devoted, idealistic underground is plotting to fight the forces of the Prophet,an omnipotent Orwellian thug supported by unthinking masses who worship him. The protagoniststumbles upon evidence of the Prophet's hypocrisy, and, forced to choose between good and evil, hetakes the drastic step of joining the revolutionary Cabal, which provides him with the teachings tostir his imagination.For the first time in my life I was reading things which had not been approved by theProphet's censors, and the impact on my mind was devastating. Sometimes I wouldglance over my shoulder to see who was watching me, frightened in spite of myself. Ibegan to sense faintly that secrecy is the keystone of all tyranny.(from Revolt in 2100)Reading that novel, and later reading Stranger in a Strange Land, in which Heinlein'sextraterrestrial protagonist becomes a leader of a spiritual group which has a profound effect onsociety, Lee Felsenstein began to see his own life as something akin to a science-fiction novel. The