Levy_S-Hackers-Heroes-Computer-Revolution

screen; "user definable characters"; and, best of all, something that they wouldlater know as "player-missile graphics," which was no less than an assemblylanguagemethod of accessing a special Atari chip called "Antic" that handledgraphics on its own, letting you run the rest of the program on the main chip. Sinceone of the more difficult aspects of programming games was parceling out theactivities of the main chip between sound, graphics, and game logic, playermissilegraphics gave you a huge advantage. How could a company that didsomething so neat in its machine be so Scrooge-like in letting you know it existed?Harris and his friend had cracked the secrets of the Atari. They wanted to use theirknowledge to liberate the machine, distribute the technical data, break the Atarimarketplace wide open. But around that time some bootleg hardware manualsappeared. It seemed that some pirates inside Atari had procured copies of itsinternal hardware and reference manual, and were distributing them for high pricesto interested parties. The manual, however, was written in such a way that onlypeople who were already the equivalent of Atari design engineers could divine it.As Harris later put it, "It was written in Atari, not in English." So the bootlegmanual wasn't much help except to those people who had integrated the workingsof the Atari 800 into their own mental cosmology. People like John Harris.Eighteen-year-old John Harris used this knowledge to write games. He wrotegames that he would like to play, and his desire to make the games flashy enoughand exciting enough to please him as a player incited him to leam more about theAtari system. As a science-fiction fan who often attended the "Cons" the conclavesof sci-fi nuts, where people lost in technological fantasy were considered normalhe naturally gravitated to space warfare games. He would create spaceships, spacestations, asteroids, and other extraterrestrial phenomena. From his imagination hewould make these shapes appear on his display screen, and then he would controlthem. Putting them up on the screen and controlling them was much moreimportant than the eventual fate of the game itself:John Harris could be careless, and he often lost entire programs by saving files onthe wrong side of the cassette tape, or expanding the code so the program wouldcrash finding out only then that he had failed to make a backup tape. He wouldfeel bad about it, but keep hacking.Hacking was the best thing in his life. He had started working full-time at GammaScientific to support himself. The pay was less than ten thousand dollars a year.He liked the job insofar as it allowed him to work on the computer. At home, hehad his 800, now equipped with a disk drive for fancy assembly-languageprogramming. But without a tightly knit community like the one the MIT hackershad, he found that hacking was not enough. He yearned for more social contact.His relationship to his family was shaky. He later claimed he was "kicked out" of