Levy_S-Hackers-Heroes-Computer-Revolution

listening to the Christian radio station in San Jose or tape cassettes of speakers atChristian conferences, and fold paper tapes, having mastered the skill of foldingevery eight inches. Then he'd go to the post office, and send the packages off. Itwas all done by hand, with the help of his wife, who had been skeptical about thewhole enterprise.It was a triumph for hackerism, but Tom Pittman did not stop there. He wanted totell people about it, show them the example by which they could grow. He latergave a presentation at a Homebrew meeting, and when he loped to the front of theauditorium, Lee saw that his body was knotted with tension. Lee tried to loosenhim up "They call you Tiny Tom Pittman, but you're really not so small," he said."Why is that?" Tom, not used to public repartee, did not respond with more than alaugh. But when he began speaking he gained strength, coiling and uncoiling hisbody, chopping his arm in the air to make points about free software. It had acertain drama to it, this normally taciturn technician speaking with heartfeltopenness about an issue that obviously mattered to him: w the free flow ofinformation.Not long after Tiny BASIC he went a step further, announcing his intention towrite a FORTRAN for microcomputers and sell it for twenty-five dollars. Thiswas to be another gung-ho full-time enterprise, and he was still hacking awaywhen, as he later put it, "my computer widow left me. She decided she didn't wantto be married to an addict."It was a jolt that many Homebrew members those who had convinced a woman tomarry a computer addict in the first place would experience. "I would say thedivorce rate among computer-ists is almost 100 percent certainly in my case,"Gordon French later said. That did not make things easier for Tom Pittman. Hehad no heart to finish the FORTRAN. He did a lot of thinking about the devotionhe'd given to the machine, and where it came from, and sat down to writesomething, not in machine language, but in English.He called the essay "Deus Ex Machina, or The True Computer-ist" (one might usethe last word interehangeably with "hacker"), and it was a telling explanation ofwhat bound together the hardware hackers of Silicon Valley and the artificialintelligence hackers of Cambridge. He wrote about the certain feeling one getsafter hacking something. "In that instant," he wrote, "I as a Christian thought Icould feel something of the satisfaction that God must have felt when He createdthe world." He went on to compile the creed of the computerist the hardwarehacker which included such familiar "articles of faith" (to Homebrew people) as: