Levy_S-Hackers-Heroes-Computer-Revolution

law was in a case in which some printers had insisted that the text to the homily"Desiderata" was in the public domain.During the deposition, John Harris was so nervous he could not keep still. Atari'slawyer began by asking him about his early programming efforts, his job in SanDiego, how he met Ken, how he wrote Jawbreaker ... all questions John couldeasily answer, but because of his tenseness he kept getting entangled andcorrecting himself at one point cutting himself off and saying, "Oh God, thatsounded awkward." John was usually a person who liked to talk about his work,but this was different. He was aware that this lawyer's goal was to make him saysomething he didn't mean, to trip him up. Supposedly a deposition is a search fortruth, where the most effective questions are asked to get the most accurateresponses. It should work like a smooth program in assembly language, where youhave given the fewest instructions to access the 6502 chip, direct information inand out of memory, keep the proper flags on the registers, and, out of thousands ofoperations taking place each second, get your result on the screen. In the RealWorld it did not work that way. The truth that you found in a computer wasworthless here. It was as if the lawyer were feeding John Harris bogus data inhopes of a system crash.While the hacker in John Harris was appalled at the adversarial nature of the legalsystem, the legal system had its difficulties adjusting to him. The rules of evidencewere somewhat more rigorous than John's own archival standards. Ken Williams,in his own deposition, had warned Atari's lawyers of this when they had asked himabout the status of Harris' source code for the program and he had replied: "I knowJohn Harris and I'm positive there's nothing written down. He doesn't work likethat."Doesn't work like that? Impossible! A programmer at Atari, like any"professional" programmer, probably had to submit code regularly, allow forproper supervision. What Atari's lawyers did not realize was that Ed Roberts,Steve Wozniak, and even the designers of their own Atari 800 had wrought aThird Generation of hackers, idiot savants of the microprocessor, kids who didn'tknow a flowchart from Shinola, yet could use a keyboard like a palette and hacktheir way to Picasso-esque peaks.Atari lawyer (to Ken):Isn't it a fact that typically the programmer who's designing these games atleast produces a flow chart and then writes out the source code manuallyprior to punching it in?Ken Williams: