Levy_S-Hackers-Heroes-Computer-Revolution

A small, chalk-complexioned man with hooded eyes and a contemplative drawl, Sunderlandconsidered himself a natural manager. He had always been interested in the advertising, selling,promoting of things. Psychology fascinated him. And he was especially enamored of the idea ofchoosing the right people to work together so that their joint output dwarfed the measly sum of theirindividual inputs.Dick was trying to do that at Informatics with his new product team. He already had one genuinewizard on the staff, a lean, quiet man in his forties named Jay Sullivan. Jay was a former jazzpianist who had come to Informatics from a more mundane job in his native Chicago. He laterexplained why: "Systems software [at Informatics] was much more interesting. You didn't have toworry about mundane things like applications or payrolls. It was much more real programming tome; you dealt more in the essence of what programming was about. The actual techniques ofprogramming are more important than the specifics of the job at a specific time." In other words, hecould hack there.In his programming, Sullivan worked like a vacationer who, having planned his trip carefully,educating himself on the subtle characteristics of the local scenery, followed the itinerary withenhanced consciousness. Yet he still retained the curiosity to stray from the plan if circumstancesseemed to call for it, and derived pleasure from the careful exploration that such a fork in his pathwould involve, not to mention the sense of accomplishment when the detour proved successful.As with many hackers, Sullivan's immersion in programming had taken its social toll. Sullivan laterexplained that with computers "you can create your own universe, and you can do whatever youwant within that. You don't have to deal with people." So while he was a master in his work,Sullivan had the infuriating kind of programmer personality that led him to get on splendidly withcomputers but not pay much attention to the niceties of human interaction. He would casually insultDick, and nonchalantly go about his business, doing brilliant things with the operating system, butoften would see his innovations die because he was not adept at politicking, a process necessary atthe large company. Dick Sunderland had forced himself to be patient with Sullivan, and eventuallythey had arrived at a seller-inventor relationship which produced two lucrative improvements to theMark 4 line.Dick was looking for more master programmers, calling recruiters and making it quite clear that hewas looking for cream-of-the-crop people, nothing less. One recruiter mentioned Ken Williams tohim. "This kid's a genius type," the recruiter said.Sunderland called in Ken for an interview and made sure that his true genius, Jay Sullivan, wouldbe there to test the mettle of this Williams person. Dick never before had seen anyone stand toe-totoewith Jay Sullivan, and was curious to see what might come of the interview.Dick and Jay were talking about a problem in implementing a new, user-friendly language thatInformatics was working on when Ken showed up, wearing slacks and a sport shirt which fit sobadly that it was obvious T-shirts were his norm. The discussion had been fairly technical, focusingon the problem that to make a language a nonprogrammer would understand a language like Englishone would have to avoid any kind of ambiguous words or acronyms.Suddenly Jay Sullivan turned to Ken and said, "What do you think of the word 'any'?"Without hesitation, Ken correctly asserted that it was a very valuable word, but an ambiguous word