Levy_S-Hackers-Heroes-Computer-Revolution

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