Levy_S-Hackers-Heroes-Computer-Revolution

Finally, you'd go to a local board house with drawings in hand. You'd give it tothem. Since it was still a recession, they would be happy for the business, evenbusiness coming from a scruffy, small-time, glassy-eyed hardware hacker. Theywould put the thing on a digitizer, drill the holes, and produce on greenish epoxymaterial a mess of silvery interconnections. That was the deluxe method BobMarsh at first could not afford that, so he hand-etched the board over the kitchenstove, using printed circuit laminate material, making barely discernible lines thatthe material would melt into. That method was a tortuous courting of the bitchgoddess Disaster, but Marsh was a compulsively careful worker. He laterexplained: "I really get into it. I become one with my schematic design."For this first memory board, Marsh was under particular pressure. Every otherweek at the Homebrew meeting, every day on the phone, frantic people weregasping for static memory boards like divers gasping for air. Marsh later recalledtheir cries: "Where's my board? I need it. I GOTTA HAVE IT."Finally Marsh was done. There wasn't time for a prototype. He had his board,which was the green epoxy rectangle with a little protrusion of etched goldconnectors underneath, sized to fit into a slot in the Altair bus. He had the chipsand wires which the kit-builders would solder onto it. (Processor Tech would onlysell unassembled boards at first.) Marsh had it all ready and no Altair to test it outon. So despite the fact that it was three in the morning he called that guy Dompierhe knew from Homebrew and told him to bring the machine over. Dompier'sAltair was at least as valuable to him as a human infant offspring would be if heweren't in Bachelor Mode, so he carefully wrapped it up in a little red blanket tobring it over. Dompier had gone by the book in assembling the machine, evenwearing a copper bracelet around his wrist when he soldered (to keep static down),and taking care not to touch the fragile 8080 heart of the machine. So he wasstunned, after lovingly setting the machine down in Marsh's workshop, when thehardware veterans Marsh and Ingram began handling chips like a couple of garagemechanics installing a muffler. They'd grab chips with their grubby fingers andthrow chips around and pull chips out and stuff them back in. Dompier watched inhorror. Finally they had the board all ready, and Ingram nicked the switch on, andSteve Dompier's precious computer fizzled into unconsciousness. They'd put theboard in backward.It took a day to fix Dompier's Altair, but Steve Dompier harbored no anger: infact, he loaned his machine to Processor Technology for future testing. It wasindicative of Homebrew behavior. These were a different breed of hacker than theunapproachable wizards of MIT, but they still held to the Hacker Ethic thatsublimated possession and selfishness in favor of the common good, which meantanything that could help people hack more efficiently. Steve Dompier was nervousabout his Altair, but he wanted little in the world more than a memory board, so he