Levy_S-Hackers-Heroes-Computer-Revolution

consideration, it was easy to maintain the Hacker Ethic. Now, as majorshareholders of companies supporting hundreds of employees, the hackers foundthings not so simple. All of a sudden, they had secrets to keep."It was amazing to watch the anarchists put on a different shirt," Dan Sokol laterrecalled. "People stopped coming. Homebrew [still moderated by Lee Felsenstein,who kept the hacker fire burning] was still anarchistic: people would ask you aboutthe company, and you'd have to say, 'I can't tell you that.' I solved that the wayother people did 1 didn't go. I didn't want to go and not tell people things. Therewould be no easy way out where you would feel good about that."Homebrew still drew hundreds to its meetings, and its mailing list was over fifteenhundred but there were many novices there, with problems that weren'tchallenging to old hands who'd built machines when machines were nearlyimpossible to build. It no longer was essential to go to meetings. Many of thepeople involved in companies like Apple, Processor Tech, and Cromemco weretoo damned busy. And the companies themselves provided the communitiesaround which to share information.Apple was a good example. Steve Wozniak and his two young friends, Espinosaand Wigginton, were too busy with the young firm to keep going to Homebrew.Chris Espinosa later explained:"[After the Computer Paire] our attendance at Homebrew started dropping off andended completely by the end of the summer of 1977. We, in effect, created ourown computer club [at Apple] that was more focused, more dedicated to producingthings. When we started getting involved with Apple, we found what we wanted towork on and we wanted to spend all our time perfecting it, expanding it, doingmore for it, and we wanted to go into one subject deeper rather than covering thefield and finding out what everybody was doing. And that's how you make acompany."In some senses, the "computer club" at Apple's Cupertino headquarters reflectedthe same community feeling and sharing of Homebrew. The company's formalgoals were traditional making money, growing, gaining market share and somesecretiveness was required even of Steve Wozniak, who considered openness thecentral principle of the Hacker Ethic he fervently subscribed to. But this meant thatthe people within the company could be even closer. They had to depend on eachother to swap suggestions for floating-point BASIC or parallel printer cards. Andsometimes, the community was loose enough to accept some old Homebrewfriends. For instance, in mid-1977, John Draper appeared.