Levy_S-Hackers-Heroes-Computer-Revolution

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proper stream and go with it until you reached your destination. Almost every oneof the nearly two hundred exhibitors had packed booths. Particularly ProcessorTechnology, which was running Steve Dompier's "Target" game on Solcomputers. People were also pushing into IMSAI's booth to get biorhythmscharted. And right there at the entrance, the wave of the future, was Apple, runninga kaleidoscopic video graphics program on a huge Advent display monitor. "It wascrazy," Randy Wigginton, who was working in the booth with Woz and ChrisEspinosa and the others, later recalled. "Everybody was coming by and asking fordemonstrations, and it was fun because people were excited about it."It wasn't only the Apple that people were excited about. It was the triumph of thehardware hackers in making their passion into an industry. You could see theexcitement as people looked around disbelievingly at their sheer numbers all thesepeople? and there was a huge roar when Jim Warren got on the public-addresssystem and announced the attendance the weekend's total was almost thirteenthousand. He was immediately followed by <strong>Computer</strong> Lib author Ted Nelson,feeling no doubt like a once lonesome guru who in one fell swoop was united witha sea of disciples. "This is Captain Kirk," Nelson said. "Prepare for blastoff!"Warren himself was long past lift-off. He shot around the Faire on a pair of rollerskates, marveling at how far the movement had come. For him, as for the people atApple, Processor Technology, and dozens of other places, this success had verywelcome financial implications; soon after the Faire was over, after recoveringfrom a period of what he would later call "ecstatic collapse," Warren would beconsidering whether to sink his profits into a Mercedes SL. He would finallydecide to buy forty acres of land he was coveting in the hills overlookingWoodside, and within a few years he would have built a huge wooden structurewith a redwood deck and hot tub overlooking the Pacific; it would be his home andcomputerized work quarters, from which a staff of over a dozen would prepare asmall empire of publications and computer shows. Jim Warren understood thefuture.The first <strong>Computer</strong> Faire was to the hardware hackers an event comparable toWoodstock in the movement of the sixties. Like the concert at Max Yasgur's farm,this was both a cultural vindication and a signal that the movement had gotten sobig that it no longer belonged to its progenitors. The latter revelation was slow tosink in. Everyone was flying, moving from booth to booth, seeing all sorts ofground-breaking hardware and mind-blowing software, meeting people you couldswap subroutines and wire-wrapping schemes with, and attending some of thenearly one hundred workshops, which included Lee Felsenstein on the CommunityMemory movement, Tom Pittman on computer languages, Bob Kahn on theLawrence Hall of Science computing program, Marc LeBrun on computer music,and Ted Nelson on the triumphant future.
Nelson was one of the keynote speakers at a banquet held at the nearby St. FrancisHotel. The name of his talk was "Those Unforgettable Next Two Years," andlooking over that mass of people drawn by micros, he opened by saying, "Here weare at the brink of a new world. Small computers are about to remake our society,and you know it." As far as Nelson was concerned, the battle was won the hackershad overthrown the evil Prophet. "IBM will be in disarray," Nelson crowed. It wastruly a wonderful world about to unfold:For now, though, the dinky computers are working magic enough.They will bring about changes in society as radical as those broughtabout by the telephone or the automobile. The little computers arehere, you can buy them on your plastic charge card, and theavailable accessories include disc storage, graphic displays,interactive games, programmable turtles that draw pictures onbutcher paper, and goodness knows what else. Here we have all themakings of a fad, it is fast blossoming into a cult, and soon it willmature into a full-blown consumer market.FAD! CULT! CONSUMER MARKET! The rush will be on. TheAmerican manufacturing publicity machine will go ape. Americansociety will go out of its gourd. And the next two years will beunforgettable.
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HACKERSHeroes of the Computer Revol
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Contents●●●●●●●●●
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hero.Hackers like Richard Greenblat
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Steve DompierHomebrew member who fi
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"Uncle" John McCarthyAbsent-minded
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Dan SokolLong-haired prankster who
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Part OneTrue HackersCambridge:The F
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these machines to punch holes in th
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The clubroom was dominated by the h
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That spring of 1959, a new course w
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of course, was what those Signals a
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officious priests. The technician i
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Deutsch's comments would turn out t
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At that time, only a few people in
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Carroll's poem with the line "The t
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2The Hacker EthicSOMETHING new was
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that easy flow of information.Mistr
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instruction which contained the num
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focus, made their lives adventurous
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occupying valuable space within the
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3SpacewarIN the summer of 1961, Ala
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was a brand-new firm called Digital
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Dennis had written the original of
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The TMRC hackers were not the only
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exerted on others were totally outl
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All of this was actually a signific
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that often formed in the aftermath
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heavy star would be in the center,
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F. J. Corbate, who would seek some
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changed irrevocably the day in 1954
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doing. Then you can see your offspr
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709, or working routines with a new
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hacking them, he would. He would si
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They went back loaded with Chinese
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Though some hackers led somewhat ac
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Despite these odd personal traits,
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impossible was a useful LISP on a P
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opponent could get out of this was
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Dance, phone lines, dance!And the s
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oxes" hardware devices to make ille
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showed up on the ninth floor to wor
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Gosper's forte, and he did some ear
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the companionship of fellow hackers
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master key was a magic sword to wav
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sanctified objects, things you nurt
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6Winners and LosersBY 1966, when Da
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instead of sailing past the end of
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like a pair of antlers. It looked,
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made the same stupid mistake. Only
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"Well, it has them, it's just that
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their PDP-6, and you had one loser
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on a data disk accessible by the co
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system, Greenblatt and the rest exe
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create useful concepts and tools to
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7LIFETHEY would later call it a Gol
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seriously. These were the days of t
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Sometimes the hacker failure to be
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later: "It was sort of necessary fo
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explored in the Adventure world wer
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and weird patterns established in t
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etter program. Greenblatt howled in
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The world.As much as the hackers tr
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mainframe machine in the basement o
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He loved the idea of electronics. H
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But the war was just beginning. For
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month he rented a room. It was belo
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expose people, especially kids, to
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Harbor, about thirty miles south of
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liberal arts colleges. Nelson was a
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I like to think(it has to be!)of a
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9Every Man a GodJ.N June 1974, Lee
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microprocessor.Lee Felsenstein, in
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if he wanted to get involved in bui
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elieve it an acronym for "Man In Th
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kinds of gratification that a human
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would come out of these systems was
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company to help out in the crunch,
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dreaming of things to put in it to
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things done.Bob Albrecht did not li
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Fred Moore had set up a table in th
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charted the musical scale and writt
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Bob Marsh understood that this was
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Page 170 and 171: Moore explicitly identified the pur
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Page 174 and 175: of the concept at work. One person'
Page 176 and 177: themselves to the hacker pursuit of
Page 178 and 179: after the meeting, Solomon was tell
Page 180 and 181: eaders), you would have a way to wr
Page 182 and 183: held at Albuquerque a year after th
Page 184 and 185: you steal your software. Hardware m
Page 186 and 187: fun," he later explained. Knowing s
Page 188 and 189: But by then the possibility of maki
Page 190 and 191: The computer is more interesting th
Page 192 and 193: The convivial approach I suggest wo
Page 194 and 195: amok. Marsh would often interrupt L
Page 196 and 197: profile, its typewriter-style built
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Page 200 and 201: oards); a 30-chip TV display. Skill
Page 202 and 203: He turned to computer programming,
Page 204 and 205: that use one less chip than the las
Page 206 and 207: Years later, the people attending t
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Page 210 and 211: computers. Now that hackers like Wo
Page 212 and 213: "Silicon Gulch," as he called it. O
Page 214 and 215: So the Apple people were prepared t
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Page 220 and 221: The former "Captain Crunch" was in
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Page 224 and 225: energies were divided between that,
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Page 228 and 229: Part ThreeGame HackersThe Sierras:T
Page 230 and 231: faded blue T-shirt. He had driven u
Page 232 and 233: A more important relationship to Ke
Page 234 and 235: Ken had gotten a taste of this more
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Page 238 and 239: For most of her life Roberta Willia
Page 240 and 241: was hard to control the writing mec
Page 242 and 243: Ken and Roberta bought the first co
Page 244 and 245: porno books.An excursion to the loc
Page 246 and 247: player's little tank. Jewell sugges
Page 248 and 249: Margot and Al, in her words, "becam
Page 250 and 251: of its founders. You almost had to
Page 252 and 253: 16The Third GenerationTHERE were st
Page 254 and 255: where you try to get a guy to the t
Page 256 and 257: screen; "user definable characters"
Page 258 and 259: dozens of new software companies th
Page 260 and 261: Ken had. already been marketing a P
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Page 264 and 265: If Ken Williams released a game tha
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law was in a case in which some pri
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virtual copy of Pac-Man!But the jud
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employees. People played a continuo
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peppermint schnapps which was On-Li
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a sort of rehabilitation project on
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At that time Warren was working at
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opportunity and he should take it.
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Ken Williams took the concerns of h
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was really easy to talk to. We talk
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Line community.Ken was hugely proud
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easily as John Harris had lent his
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The instant that John Harris ended
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and patterned after Billboard's rec
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This was quite a step from the earl
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tweaking a marketing plan here, deb
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A week before Dick arrived, Ken was
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whole company to come to the site o
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Line hackers gathered at places lik
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Guinness Book of World Records cham
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magazine show. NBC shot the requisi
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subsidized by some institution. The
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While still in high school, he land
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Ken basically wanted a fairly relia
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Apple bestseller. But when Lord Bri
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estseller. After flying the young a
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important Applefests. For one thing
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This message managed to find its wa
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They noticed right away because Fro
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that the action was switching to tr
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20Wizard vs. WizardsIN December of
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things look good on television. Tat
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now I just spend my time skiing the
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The author of the twelfth bestselli
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even the furniture, upside down wer
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things to Ken about On-Line that he
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The company's energy became focused
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The techniques, algorithms, and cro
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e more precarious than it had first
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hacker paradise, the Tech Square mo
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around the country all because the
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could easily handle the considerabl
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minimum.Noftsker considered this un
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in with the bad guys here. But I'm
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with concern when he spoke of Stall
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Generation hacker. With many more g
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Afterword: Ten Years After"I think
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to avoid attending future Hacker Co
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(though not gender specific) called
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Joseph We-izenbaum, Randy Wigginton
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* Gosper's memo is part of "Hakmem,
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Delta, 1979).* "The winning isn't a
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