Levy_S-Hackers-Heroes-Computer-Revolution

work, and he left Informatics in 1979, becoming an independent consultant.First there was a guy with a scheme to do tax returns for big companies like General Motors andShell, and then there was some work with Warner Brothers, programming a system for the recordcompany to keep artists' royalties straight. There was a bookkeeping system he constructed forSecurity Pacific Banks, something about foreign tax plans. Ken was becoming a finance guru; thethirty thousand a year he was pulling down looked to be only the beginning, if Ken kept hustling.He and Roberta began weaving a little fantasy. At night the nights Ken wasn't out consulting forsomeone they would sit in the hot tub and talk about splitting the Simi Valley suburban trap andmoving to the woods. Where they would go water skiing, snow skiing... Just goof off. Of coursethere weren't nearly as many hours in a day to make money to turn that kind of trick, no matter howmany companies Ken set up tax programs for. So the fantasy was just that, a fantasy.Until Ken's little brother Larry got an Apple Computer.Larry brought it over to Ken's office one day. To Ken, who had been dealing withtelecommunications networks that handled two thousand people all at once, who had invented entirecomputer languages with mainframe wizards the likes of Jay Sullivan, the idea of this sleek, beigemachine being a computer seemed in one sense ludicrous. "It was a toy compared to the computersI'd been using," he later explained. "A piece of junk, a primeval machine."On the other hand, there were plenty of things that the Apple offered that Ken's Hulking Giants didnot provide. Up till the time he worked at Informatics, his computers had been batch-processed,loading dread punch cards. The Apple at least was interactive. And when you got down to it, it wasfairly powerful, especially compared to the big machines of less than a decade ago. (MIT's MarvinMinsky once estimated that an Apple II had the virtual power of the PDP-1.) And it ran pretty fast,almost comparable to a big machine, because on a time-sharing mainframe you're fighting for CPUtime with eight hundred people all trying to grind their code through at once, with the Dumb Beastsweating silicon trying to parcel out nanoseconds to each user. You shared your Apple with no one.In the middle of the night, it was just sitting there in the house, waiting for you and you alone. KenWilliams decided he had to have one.So in January 1980 he scraped together "every cent I had," as he later told it, and bought an AppleII. But it took a while to understand how significant a machine it was. Ken figured that everybodywith an Apple was like him, a technician or engineer. It seemed logical that what these people reallywanted was a powerful language to run on their computer. No one had yet done FORTRAN for theApple. Hardly anyone had done anything on the Apple at that point, but Ken was thinking like ahacker, unable to envision anything neater than something to use the computer with. The Tools-to-Make-Tools syndrome. (Richard Greenblatt's first big project on the PDP-1 was a FORTRANimplementation, for much the same reason.) At that point Ken was unable to conceive that theApple and small machines like it had opened the field of recreational computing to others besideshackers.The irony of it was that, even as Ken planned to write a FORTRAN for the Apple, this moresignificant revolution in computing was happening right there in his own house.