Levy_S-Hackers-Heroes-Computer-Revolution

You could go on. Roberta approached the game with methodical intensity, drawing elaborate mapsand anticipating what was around every turn. Ken thought it was amazing that one day Robertacouldn't stand computers and the next day he couldn't get her away from the terminal. Finally, aftera month of ratiocination about trolls, axes, misty caverns, and vast halls, Roberta solved Adventure.She was desperate to find more games like it.By then, Ken had bought the Apple. Despite her newfound interest in computers, Roberta was lessthan thrilled at the two-thousand-dollar purchase. If Ken wanted it so badly, she told him, he shouldtry to make money from it. This coincided perfectly with Ken's desires at the time, which were towrite a FORTRAN compiler for the Apple and sell it for bundles of money to the engineers andtechnicians who wanted Tools to Make Took. He hired five part-time programmers to help himimplement the compiler. Ken's house, a typical Simi Valley four-bedroom, two-thousand-squarefoottract home, became headquarters for the FORTRAN project.Meanwhile Roberta had heard that there were some Adventure-style games available for the Apple.Roberta bought some at a computer store in nearby Northridge in the San Fernando Valley, but shefound them too easy. She wanted her newly awakened imagination to be as taxed and teased as itwas before. She began sketching out an adventure game of her own.She started by writing out a story about a "mystery house," and things that happened in it. The storyhad much to do with Agatha Christie's Ten Little Indians another inspiration was the board game"Clue." Instead of just finding treasures as in Adventure, this game would have you do somedetective work. Roberta mapped out the story just as she mapped out an adventure game when sheplayed it. Along the way, she devised puzzles, character traits, events, and landmarks. After acouple of weeks she had a stack of papers with maps and dilemmas and plot turns and twists andshe flopped it down in front of Ken and said, "Look what I did!"Ken told Roberta that her little stack of papers was very nice and she should run along and finish it.No one really wanted to use a personal computer as a game machine they were for engineers whowanted to figure out how to design circuits or solve triple-x exponential equations.Not long after, Ken and Roberta were at the Plank House in the Valley, a redwood-walled steakhouse where they often dined, and there he finally listened to his delicate wife describing how hergame put you in an old Victorian house in which your friends were being killed off one by one. Shedescribed a few of the dilemmas, and told of a secret passageway. It began to sound good to Ken.Ken Williams could usually smell some money to be made, and he thought that there might beenough bread in this for a trip to Tahiti or some new furniture."This sounds great," he told her, "but to really sell you need more. An angle. Something different."As it happened, Roberta had been thinking lately how great it would be if an adventure game wereaccompanied by pictures on the computer screen. You could see where you were instead of justreading it. She had no idea if this was possible on an Apple or any kind of computer. How wouldyou even get a picture into a computer?Ken guessed they could try.As it happened, a device called a VersaWriter had just been released. It was a tablet that you drewon and it registered the shapes into an Apple computer. But it didn't draw very accurately, and it