Levy_S-Hackers-Heroes-Computer-Revolution

Ken and Roberta bought the first country house they looked at, a three-bedroom, rustic, wooden A-frame cabin on Mudge Ranch Road just outside Coarsegold, California.By then, they had finished Roberta's fairy-tale game, "Wizard and the Princess." It was twice aslong as Mystery House, and ran faster thanks to Ken's improvements on the program logic. Ken haddeveloped a whole new assembly-language interpreter for writing adventure games; he called itADL, or Adventure Development Language. Also, this "Hi-Res Adventure #2" had over onehundred and fifty pictures. Ken had devised subroutines that allowed Roberta to enter the picturesinto the computer as easily as if she were drawing on a regular tablet. This time the pictures were incolor; Ken used a technique called "dithering" to blend the six colors of the Apple, mixing dot bydot, to get twenty-one colors. He was performing stunts on the Apple that Steve Wozniak neverdreamed of. Magic stuff.The game's only problem was the first puzzle, where the adventurer, on his way to rescue PrincessPriscilla of Serenia from Wizard Harlin, had to get past a snake. The answer was rather obscure:you had to pick up a rock and use it to kill the snake, but unless you chose a rock in one specificlocation (they all looked alike) you got bit by a scorpion and died. Most people started banging theirheads against the wall at the third or fourth scorpion bite. Eventually, after countless frustratedadventurers made calls to Roberta's kitchen in Coarsegold (East Coast people sometimes would callat 6 A.M. California time), On-Line began supplying a hint to that dilemma in every package.Snake or not. Wizard and the Princess eventually sold over sixty thousand copies at $32.95. Kenand Roberta would sit in the hot tub they'd installed and shake their heads, saying, "Do you believethis?"On December 1 of that first year, after the business had already changed their lives, got them a newhouse, and made them the rising stars of the Apple world, they finally moved the business out of thehouse to a space on the second floor of a two-story building in Oakhurst, seven miles up Route 41.Their neighbor was a religious promoter who was unsuccessfully trying to book Little Richard on anational preaching tour. You could hear him shouting through the thin walls.Early in 1981, less than a year after the company began with a few floppy disks and a $150 ad in alittle magazine, Roberta described the situation in a letter to another small magazine: "We openedan office December 1, 1980, and hired our first employee to help us with the shipping and thephones. Two weeks later, we hired somebody to help her, one week after that we hired somebody tohelp them. We just hired a full-time programmer this week, and we need at least anotherprogrammer. Our business is growing by leaps and bounds, and there's no end in sight."