Levy_S-Hackers-Heroes-Computer-Revolution

of its founders. You almost had to be a KGB agent to find out the name of one ofits programmers, so terrified was Atari that someone would raid its ranks. And thethought of programmers getting together and comparing notes was even morefrightening. What if one of its programmers realized that he could do bettersomewhere else? No such secrets for the Brotherhood, who in 1981 most oftenpaid their programmers on a 30 percent royalty basis, a rate well known to allthree companies and all the programmers working in the field.The cooperation went deeper than partying. Almost as if they had unconsciouslypledged to adhere to at least part of the Hacker Ethic, there were no secretsbetween them. Almost every day. Ken, Doug, and Jerry would talk on the phone,sharing information about this distributor or that floppy disk manufacturer. If someretailer didn't pay off one of the companies, the others would know immediately,and not deliver to that retailer. "We had this unwritten code," Jerry Jewell laterrecalled. "We would let each other know what we were working on so we wouldn'tdo the same projects. If I was working on a racing car game, we would tell them,so they wouldn't start one."Some might look at this interaction and call it restraint of trade, but that would bean Old Age interpretation. This Brotherhood was no cartel banding together to thedetriment of the user and the technology. The user benefited by getting a widerrange of games. And if a programmer from one of the companies couldn't figureout some assembly-language trick with zero page graphics, the fact that he couldget in touch with a programmer at another company was only the application ofthe Hacker Ethic to commerce. Why hide helpful information? If neat tricks werewidely disseminated, the quality of all the software would rise, and people wouldget more out of computers, and it would be good for all the companies in the longrun.Maybe it was time to scrap the divisive practices of corporate business and adopt amore hacker-like approach, one which might, by its successes in the software field,spread through all of America and revitalize the entire country, long spinning in aDarwinian, litigious, MBA-dominated maelstrom. Substance might then prevailover cloudy "corporate image," in a world free of the insane, anti-productivepractice of owning concepts and trade secrets which could be distributed far andwide. A world without all that destructive, cutthroat seriousness. The attitude inthe Apple World seemed to be "If it's not fun, if it's not creative or new, it's notworth it." That's what you would hear from Ken and Roberta Williams, from Dougand Gary Carlston, from Jerry Jewell.This spirit reached its peak during the summer of 1981 in a scene imbued with allthe gusto of a cola commercial: a white-water raft trip down the Stanislaus River.It was Ken Williams' idea, a joint vacation trip for the whole industry. Ken joked