Levy_S-Hackers-Heroes-Computer-Revolution

his home because his father had expectations John could not quite match. Hedescribes his father as less than enthusiastic about his mania for programminggames on an Atari 800 computer. So Harris moved into a house with a few fellowsci-fi fans. He would attend the Cons with them, wild affairs where they could stayup for days at a stretch, prowling the hotel halls with plastic dartguns. But it oftenseemed to John that his friends were planning some neat excursion withoutinviting him. John Harris was a friendly, loping, puppy-dog youngster, and verysensitive to these apparent rejections.He wanted a girlfriend. The isolated times when he'd been out with members ofthis desirable yet elusive gender always seemed to end in some kind ofdisappointment. His housemates were often involved in romantic intrigue theyjokingly called the house "Peyton Place of Outer Space" but John was rarelyinvolved. There was one girl he saw for a couple of weeks, and had even made aNew Year's Eve date with. But she'd called him just before New Year's. "I don'tknow how to tell you this," she said, "but I met a guy and I'm going to marry him."That was typical.So he kept hacking games. Just like the MIT hackers, or the Homebrewers, hisreward was the satisfaction of doing it. He joined a local Atari users' group andborrowed programs from their library to make them run faster and do neat things.He took, for instance, a version of the arcade game "Missile Command" and spedit up, jazzed up the explosions when one of your ICBMs stopped the enemy nukefrom destroying your city. He'd show his work to others and they'd get a kick outof it. All his hacking automatically reverted to the public domain; ownership was aconcept he never dealt with. When someone in the users' group told John Harristhat he had a little company that sold computer games and he'd like to market agame of John's, Harris' reaction was Sure, why not? It was like giving a gameaway and getting money for it, too.He gave the man a game called "Battle Warp," which was remarkably like the oldMIT Spacewar, a two-player game where ships "fly around and shoot at eachother," as John was later to describe it. Harris made around two hundred dollarsfrom Battle Warp, but it was enough to get him thinking about having his stuffdistributed more widely than through the users' group network.In March of 1981, Harris went to the Computer Faire in San Francisco, primarilyto attend a seminar on programming the Atari, given by one of Atari's bestprogrammers, Chris Crawford. John was extremely impressed with Crawford, amousy fellow who bounced around when he talked and was skillful at explainingthings. John Harris was on a high after that, wandering around the densely packedaisles of Brooks Hall, looking at all the hot new machines, and checking out the