Levy_S-Hackers-Heroes-Computer-Revolution

porno books.An excursion to the local computer store was a journey to the unknown. Thesalesman, more often than not some kid working at minimum wage, would takeyour measure, as if you were a potential obstacle in an Adventure game, testingyou by tossing off the jargon of Ks, bytes, nibbles, and RAM cards. You would tryto get him to explain, say, why this accounting package ran better than that one,and he would come back with some gibberish about protocols and macros. Finallyyou'd ask him the question that almost every Apple owner asked in 1980 or 1981:"What's the hot new game?" Games were the programs which took greatestadvantage of the machine's power put the user in control of the machine, madehim the god of the bits and bytes inside the box (even if he wasn't sure of thedifference between a bit and a byte). The kid would sigh, nod, reach under thecounter for the current Ziploc-bag phenomenon, and, if you were lucky, boot it onthe screen and race through a few rounds, so you could see what you were buying.Then you would plunk down your twenty or twenty-five or even thirty-five dollarsand go home for what was the essential interface with the Apple. Playing games.In early 1980, the Hot New Game would most likely be written in deadly-slowBASIC. Most of the Apples at that time used cassette recorders; the difficulty ofusing an assembler with a cassette recorder made it nearly impossible to go downinto the deepest recess of the machine, the 6502 chip, to speak in the Apple'sassembly language.This was changing: Steve Wozniak had recently hacked a brilliant design for adisk-drive interface for the Apple, and the company was able to offer low-costfloppy-disk drives which accessed thousands of bytes a second, makingassembling easy for those few who knew how to program on that difficult level.Those infected with the Hands-On Imperative, of course, would soon join that elitein learning the system at its most primal level. Programmers, would-beprogrammers, and even users buying Apples would invariably purchase diskdrives along with them. Since Steve Wozniak's Apple adhered to the Hacker Ethicin that it was a totally "open" machine, with an easily available reference guidethat told you where everything was on the chip and the motherboard, the Applewas an open invitation to roll your sleeves up and get down to the hexadecimalcode of machine level. To hack away.So Ken Williams was not the only one catching the glory train by hacking Applemachine language in the spring of 1980. Technological pioneers all over thecountry were sensing what hackers had known all along: computers could changeyour life. In Sacramento, a Vietnam vet named Jerry Jewell, who had sandy hair, amatching moustache, and a perpetually addled, slightly pissed-off look about him,had bought an Apple to see if he could switch from the insurance business to