Levy_S-Hackers-Heroes-Computer-Revolution

where you try to get a guy to the top of a building, avoiding dropped flowerpots,people who close windows on your hand, and a giant gorilla who tries to swat youoff. What impressed him about Crazy Climber was its groundbreaking creation ofa unique and artful scenario. It did something that no one had ever done before.John Harris strove for that level of originality. His attitude toward games wassimilar to his attitude toward computer languages, or his preference for a certaincomputer over another: an intense personal identification, and a tendency to takeoffense at an inefficient, sub-optimal way of doing things. John came to feel thatgames should have a certain degree of innovation, a certain degree of graphicrazzle-dazzle, and a certain degree of challenge. His standards of "playability"were rigid. He took personal offense at cases where a programmer could havemade the game better in some obvious (to John Harris) way, but did not, whetherbecause of technical ignorance, a lapse in perception, or worst of all laziness.Details made a game really great, and John adopted the firm belief that a gameauthor should include every possible frill to make the game more enjoyable. Notneglecting, of course, to perfeet the basic structure of the game so that it wasessentially bug-free.To fulfill his own exacting standards, John needed his own computer. He begansaving money. He even cut down on playing arcade games. John was out of highschool by then, enrolled in a local college in electrical engineering, and working ata bank's data processing center. One of his friends owned the hottest hacker homecomputer around, the Apple, but John did not like the machine's editingcapabilities or its quirky graphics.With money in hand he went computer shopping, for a PET. The salesmen sneeredat him. "The only person who buys a PET is a person down to his last penny," theytold him. "A person who can't afford an Apple II." But John Harris did not wantWozniak's creation. He had seen more of his friend's Apple and was convincedmore than ever that the Apple was severely brain-damaged. His contempt for theApple grew beyond all bounds. "Even the sight of that computer drives me up thewall," he would later say. At the very mention of the machine, Harris would recoiland make the sign of the cross, as if warding off a vampire. He could explain atlength just why he felt this way no full-screen editor, the necessity of loading themachine up with more hardware before it really cooked, the limited keyboard ...but this loathing went beyond reason. Somehow Harris felt the Apple stopped youfrom doing what you wanted to do. Whereas other hackers considered the Apple'slimitations as challenging hurdles to leap over or as a seductive whisper saying,"Take me further," Harris deemed them ridiculous. So he asked the salesman atone of the stores about this other machine, the Atari computer.Atari had just come out with its 800 (and its lower-powered companion, the 400),