Levy_S-Hackers-Heroes-Computer-Revolution

Ken had. already been marketing a Pac-Man look-alike for the Apple under thename of "Gobbler." The program had been written by a professional scientificprogrammer named Olaf Lubeck, who had sent Williams the game, unsolicited,after seeing the "Authors Wanted" ad. The program was selling around eighthundred copies a month, and Ken had arranged with Lubeck to duplicate it for theAtari home computer.John Harris, though, was appalled at the Apple game. "It didn't look spectacular,no animation," he later explained. "The collision detection is very unforgiving."Harris did not want Olaf to compound the error on his beloved Atari by translatingthe Apple game bit by bit on the 6502 chip, which the Apple and Atari shared.This would mean that none of what John considered the superior Atari features,most of which were housed on separate chips, would be utilized. The thought washorrifying.John insisted that he could do a better-looking game within a month, and KenWilliams took Lubeck off the project. John Harris embarked on a period of intensehacking, often wrapping around till morning. John's style was freewheeling. Heimprovised. "Whatever my mind is doing, I just let it flow with it ... things comeout pretty creative," he later explained. Sometimes John could be sensitive aboutthis, particularly at times when a more traditional programmer, armed withflowcharts and ideas about standard structure and clear documentation, examinedhis code. When John left Gamma Scientific to move to Coarsegold, for example,he worried that his replacement would be someone like that, who would throwaway all his clever code, replacing it with something structured, concise ... andworse. As it turned out, Gamma considered six programmers, five of whom "haddegrees coming out of their ears," John later said. The sixth was a hacker with nodegrees; John begged his bosses to hire the hacker."But he wants as much money as the people who have degrees," the boss toldJohn.John said, "He's worth more." His boss listened. When John broke this newemployee in and explained his system, the new hacker became very emotionalover John's code. "You program like I do!" he said. "I didn't think there wasanyone in the world that does this!"Working with large conceptual blocks and keeping focused, John had a Pac-Manstylegame running on the Atari in a month. He was able to use some of thesubroutines he had developed in earlier efforts. This was a fairly good example ofthe kind of growth that creative copying could encourage: a sort of subroutinereincarnation in which a programmer developed tools that far transcended