Levy_S-Hackers-Heroes-Computer-Revolution

The convivial approach I suggest would rely on the user's ability to leam about andgain some control over the tool. The user will have to spend some amount of timeprobing around inside the equipment, and we will have to make this possible andnot fatal to either the equipment or the person."The piece of equipment to which Felsenstein referred was his Tom SwiftTerminal, which still had not been built in 1975. But it was getting close. BobMarsh, eager to expand the scope of his booming Processor Technology company,offered Lee a deal he couldn't refuse. "I'll pay you to design the video portion ofthe Tom Swift Terminal," he told him. That sounded all right to Lee, who hadbeen doing work in documentation and schematics for Processor Technology allalong. Bob Marsh, in the company's first year of business, was adhering to theHacker Ethic. The company distributed schematics and source code for software,free or at nominal cost. (In partial reaction to MIT's high-priced BASIC, ProcessorTechnology would develop its own and sell it, along with source code, for fivedollars.) For a time, the company had a socialistic salary structure of $800 a monthfor all employees. "We didn't pay attention to profits or management of almost anykind."Lee was not an employee, choosing to work on a contract basis. "I'd quote them aprice," Lee later recalled, and "they had to get the price up by a factor of ten, sinceI was such a small-time thinker. In terms of money."In less than three months, Lee had done a working prototype. Lee's "video displaymodule" (VDM) embodied a different philosophy than the other video board forAltair, Cromemco's Dazzler. The Dazzler used color, and produced its flashyeffects by constantly going back to the memory in the main chip of the Altair (orany of the other new computers that used a similar hardware bus). Steve Dompierliked to use his Dazzler while running BASIC: it threw up patterns on the screenthat gave a Rorschach-like visual impression of the computer memory at a giventime a cryptic output which gave clues to program operation, much like the auralimpression given of the TX-O's memory by the speaker under the console.Lee's video display module, though, was a more stridently focused piece ofequipment, designed with the eventual re-formation of Community Memory inmind. Its output was black and white, and instead of using dots it actually formedalphanumeric characters. (Lee considered adding another alternative hexagrams,as found in the I Ching but that idea got shelved somehow.) The cleverest thingabout Lee's VDM, though, was the way it used the speed of new microprocessorchips to allow the machine's memory to be shared between computational dutiesand display duties. It worked like a mini-time-sharing system, where the two userswere the video display and the computer itself. The VDM, along with an Altairand other expansion cards, made the promise of the TV Typewriter a reality, and