Levy_S-Hackers-Heroes-Computer-Revolution

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Part ThreeGame HackersThe Sierras:The Eighties14The Wizard and the PrincessDRIVING northeast out of Fresno on Route 41 toward the South Gate of Yosemite, you climbedslowly at first, through low fields dotted with huge, pitted boulders. About forty miles out was thetown ofCoarsegold; soon after, the road rose steeply, topping a mountain called Deadwood. Onlyafter beginning the descent from Deadwood did one see how Route 41 formed the center strip ofOakhurst. Population under six thousand. A modem poly-mart named Raley's (everything fromhealth foods to electric blankets). A few fast-food joints, several clusters of specialty stores, twomotels, and a real estate office with a faded brown fiberglass statue of a bear outside it. After a mileor so of Oakhurst, the road continued its climb to Yosemite, thirty miles away.The bear could talk. Push a button on its base, and you got a low, growling welcome to Oakhurst, apitch on the price of land. The bear did not mention the transformation of the town by the personalcomputer. Oakhurst had seen hard times, but in 1982 it boasted one major success story. A companybuilt, in a sense, by the hacker dream, and made possible only by the wizardry of Steve Wozniakand his Apple Computer. A company that symbolized how the products of hacking computerprograms which are works of art had been recognized as such in significant sectors of the RealWorld. The hackers who played Spacewar at MIT did not envision it, but the offspring of that PDP-1 program, now that the hardware hackers had liberated the computer and made it personal, hadspawned a new industry.Not far from Talking Bear was an inconspicuous two-story building constructed for offices andshops. Except for a small beauty parlor, a lawyer's office, and the tiny local office of Pacific Gasand Electric, the entire building was occupied by the Sierra On-Line company. Its main product wascode, lines of assembly-language computer code written on floppy disks which, when inserted intopersonal computers like the Apple, magically turned into fantastic games. A specialty of the
company was "Adventure" games, like that perfected by Don Woods at the Stanford AI lab; thiscompany had figured out how to add pictures to the game. It sold tens of thousands of these disks.As of this August day in 1982, On-Line had around seventy employees. Things changed so quicklythat on any given day it was difficult to give an exact figure, but this was over triple the employeesit had a year ago. A year before that, there were only the two founders, Ken and Roberta Williams,who were, respectively, twenty-five and twenty-six when they started the company in 1980.Ken Williams was sitting in his office. Outside was his red Porsche 928. It was another day to makesome history and have some fun. Ken's office today was relatively neat; the piles of papers on thedesk were only several inches high, the sofa and chairs facing the desk were clear of floppy disksand magazines. On the wall was a lithograph, an homage to Rodin's Thinker: instead of that noblehuman frozen in cerebration was a depiction of a robot contemplating a rainbow-colored Apple.Ken Williams, meanwhile, was characteristically sloppy. He was a burly, big-gutted man, withswollen features that overwhelmed his friendly blue eyes. There was a hole in his red T-shirt and ahole in his jeans. His shoulder-length, dark-blond hair covered his head in an uncombed matting. Hesat draped over his tall, brown executive armchair like some post-counterculture King Cole. In apleasant California cadence punctuated by self-effacing comments that wistfully tripped off histongue, he was explaining his life to a reporter. He had covered the tremendous growth of hiscompany, his pleasure in spreading the gospel of computers to the world through the software hiscompany sold, and now was discussing the changes that had come when the company became big,something much more than an operation of hackers in the hills. He was in touch with Real Worldpower now."The things I do on a daily basis blow my mind," he said. He talked about eventually going public.In 1982, a lot of people who owned companies spawned by the revolution that the hardware hackershad started were talking about this. Computers had become the jewel of the economy, the only areaof real growth in a recessionary period. More and more people were seeing the magic first glimpsedin batch-processed monasteries by the Hands-On visionaries; in the power harnessed by the PDP-1artists; in the accessible mastery of information provided by Ed Roberts and proselytized by LeeFelsenstein. As a result, companies like Sierra On-Line, started on shoestrings, were now bigenough to contemplate public share offerings. Ken Williams' talk was reminiscent of that heardseveral years before, when, using the same self-con-sciously nonchalant cadences, people wouldspeak of one day getting rolfed: in both circumstances, an act once approached with evangelisticgravity was now regarded as somewhat of a delicious inevitability. Going public was something younaturally considered, at least when you had gone from being an ambitious computer programmer toan owner of a $10-million-a-year computer game company in a little over two years.It was a crucial time for Ken Williams' company. It was also a crucial time for the computer gamesindustry, a crucial time for the computer industry as a whole, and a crucial time for America. Theelements had conspired to put Ken Williams, a self-described former hacker, into the driver's seat ofmore than a Porsche 928.Ken Williams left his office and went to a large room two doors down in the same building. Therewere two rows of cubicles in this plaster-walled, industrially carpeted room. In each cubicle was asmall computer and a monitor. This was the programming office, and this was where a younghacker had come to show his game off to Ken Williams. The hacker was a cocky-looking kid; hewas short, had a smile of bravado on a pug-nosed face, and his chest jutted out, bantam-like, under a
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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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Homebrew reviewers would examine ca
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could run some real programs on the
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Moore explicitly identified the pur
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SLAC, he talked of video displays,
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of the concept at work. One person'
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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
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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
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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
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Page 214 and 215: So the Apple people were prepared t
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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
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Page 244 and 245: porno books.An excursion to the loc
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Page 250 and 251: of its founders. You almost had to
Page 252 and 253: 16The Third GenerationTHERE were st
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Page 256 and 257: screen; "user definable characters"
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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
Page 266 and 267: law was in a case in which some pri
Page 268 and 269: virtual copy of Pac-Man!But the jud
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Page 276 and 277: 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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