Levy_S-Hackers-Heroes-Computer-Revolution

employees. People played a continuous game of musical chairs to claim desk spaceand use of one of the several Apples. Boxes of disks, discarded computer monitors,and stacks of correspondence were piled on the floor. The disarray was mindboggling.The noise level, routinely intolerable. The dress code, nonexistent. It wasproductive anarchy, reminiscent of the nonstructured atmosphere of the AI lab orthe Homebrew Club. But since it was also a prosperous business, and theparticipants so young, the On-Line office resembled a weird combination of AnimalHouse and The Millionaire.It was indicative of Ken Williams' priorities. He was involved in a new type ofbusiness in a brand-new industry, and was not about to establish the same hateful,claustrophobic, secretive, bureaucratic environment that he despised so much atalmost every company he had worked for. He was the boss, but he would not be thekind of boss Dick Sunderland at Informatics was, obsessed with detail. He was incontrol of the bigger picture. Besides getting rich, something that seemed to befalling neatly into place as his programs regularly placed in the top ten or fifteen ofthe "Top 30 Bestsellers" list published by Softalk each month, Ken felt that he hada dual mission to fulfill at On-Line.The first was to have fun, an element he felt had been lamentably lacking in thedecorum-bound establishments of the Old Age. Ken Williams became, in efiect, thehead counselor in a high-tech Summer Camp. There was Summer Camp fun androwdiness and drinking and dope-smoking. Stoned or not, everyone was on a high,working in a field that felt good, politically and morally. The extended party wasfueled regularly by an influx of envelopes of money.Packages would also arrive containing new games whether games from friendlycompetitors like Sirius or Br0derbund, games from would-be software superstarslooking to get published, or games from one of On-Line's outside authors workingunder Ken's supervision. No matter. Everything stopped for new games. Someonewould run off copies and everyone would take to the Apples, playing the game,making fun of its bugs, admiring its features, and seeing who could get the highestscore. As long as the money kept coming in, and it certainly did, who cared about alittle disorganization, or an excessive tendency to shift into party mode?Outsiders would visit the office and not believe what they saw. Jeff Stephenson, forinstance. At thirty, he was an experienced programmer who had recently workedfor Software Arts, the Cambridge, Massachusetts, company that had written thebestselling Apple program of all time, the financial "spreadsheet" VisiCalc. Thatcompany was also headed by programmers Jeff could recall the two presidents, oneof them a former MIT hacker and the other a meticulous young Orthodox Jew,arguing for half an hour about where a comma should go on some report. Jeff, aquiet, unassuming vegetarian who held a black belt in Korean sword-fighting, had