Levy_S-Hackers-Heroes-Computer-Revolution

a third to half the staff [excluding manufacturing]. And this went on seven days aweek. People were really caught up in this because they were giving computers topeople who were so appreciative, and who wanted them so badly. It was a grandand glorious crusade."Only one machine at MITS then had 4K of memory, and that barely worked.When Paul Alien stuck the tape in the teletype reader and read the tape in, no onewas sure what would happen. What happened was that the teletype it wasconnected to said, READY. Ready to program! "They got very excited," BillGates later said. "Nobody had ever seen the machine do anything."The BASIC was far from a working version, but it was close enough to completionand its routines were sufficiently clever to impress Ed Roberts. He hired Alien andarranged to have Gates work from Harvard to help get the thing working. When,not long afterward, Gates finally took off from school (he would never return) togo to Albuquerque, he felt like Picasso stumbling upon a sea of blank canvaseshere was a neat computer without utilities. "They had nothing!" he said later, awedyears after the fact. "I mean, the place was not sophisticated, as far as softwarewent. We rewrote the assembler, we rewrote the loader ... we put together asoftware library. It was pretty trashy stuff, but people could have fun using thething."The difference between the Gates-Alien software library and the software libraryin the drawer by the PDP-6 or the Homebrew Club library was that the former wasfor sale only. Neither Bill Gates nor Ed Roberts believed that software was anykind of sanctified material, meant to be passed around as if it were too holy to payfor. It represented work, just as hardware did, and Altair BASIC was listed in theMITS catalog like anything else it sold.Meanwhile, the hunger at Homebrew for an Altair BASIC was getting unbearable.As it turned out, Homebrew members were perfectly capable of writing BASICinterpreters, and some of them would do just that. Others, though, had orderedAltair BASIC and were impatiently awaiting delivery, just as they had impatientlyawaited delivery of other MITS products. Patience with MITS was getting thin,especially since the debacle with the dynamic memory boards which Ed Robertsinsisted should work and never did. People who had been burned by buyingmemory boards began to snort and pout when they spoke of Ed Roberts' company,especially since Roberts himself, who had attained legendary status as a reclusivegenius who never left Albuquerque, was spoken of as a greedy, power-mad foe ofthe Hacker Ethic. It was even rumored that he wished ill on his competitors. Theproper hacker response to competitors was to give them your business plan andtechnical information, so they might make better products and the world in generalmight improve. Not to act as Ed Roberts did at the First World Altair Convention,