Levy_S-Hackers-Heroes-Computer-Revolution

purity of those hackers, particularly their insouciance when it came to spreadingthe technology among the "losers." "Anyone who's been around artificialintelligence is likely to be a hopeless case," he'd later explain. "They're so farremoved from reality that they cannot deal with the real world. When they startsaying, 'Well, essentially all you need to do is dot dot dot,' I just glaze over andsay, 'OK, buddy, but that's the easy part. Where we do our work is the rest of that.'"His suspicions were confirmed when he met diminutive but strong-willed StewNelson. Almost instantly, they were involved in a disagreement, an arcanetechnical dispute which Lee later termed an "I'm-smarter-than-you-are, typicalhacker dispute." Stew was insisting that you could pull off a certain hardware trick,while Lee, whose engineering style was shaped by his early childhood paranoiathat things might not work, said he wouldn't risk it. Sitting in the big, wooden,warehouse-like structure that housed Systems Concepts, Lee felt that these guyswere not as interested in getting computer technology out to the people as theywere in elegant, mind-blowing computer pyrotechnics. To Lee, they weretechnological Jesuits. He was unconcerned about the high magic they couldproduce and the exalted pantheon of canonical wizards they revered. What aboutthe people?So when Stew Nelson, the archetypal MIT hacker type, gave Felsenstein theequivalent of an audition, a quick design test for a hardware product, Lee did notplay the game. He could care less about producing the technological bon motwhich Stew was looking for. Lee walked out.He'd look for work elsewhere. He figured he could make it if he brought in eightthousand dollars a year. Because of the recession, work had been hard to find, butthings were picking up. Fifty miles south of Berkeley, Silicon Valley wasbeginning to come alive.The twenty miles or so between Palo Alto on the peninsula and San Jose at thelower end of San Francisco Bay had earned the title "Silicon Valley" from thematerial, made of refined sand, used to make semiconductors. Two decades before,Palo Alto had been the spawning ground of the transistor; this advance had beenparlayed into the magic of integrated circuits (ICs) tiny networks of transistorswhich were compressed onto chips, little plastic-covered squares with thin metallicconnectors on the bottom. They looked like headless robot insects. And now, in theearly 1970s, three daring engineers working for a Santa Clara company called Intelhad invented a chip called a microprocessor: a dazzlingly intricate layout ofconnections which duplicated the complex grid of circuitry one would find in thecentral processing unit (CPU) of a computer.The bosses of these engineers were still pondering the potential uses of the