Levy_S-Hackers-Heroes-Computer-Revolution

peppermint schnapps which was On-Line Systems' beverage of choice. In thecompany vernacular, a lot of steel would get you "sledged." Once they broke outthe steel on Fridays, it could be reasonably assumed that work on Time Zone wouldbe halted while the staff, Ken leading the way, would explore the hazy, timelesszone of sledgedom.Christmas came and went, and Time Zone did not ship until February. Twelvetimes the size of Wizard and the Princess, filling both sides of six floppy disks, itretailed for one hundred dollars. The first person to solve it, a jovial, adventuregamefanatic named Roe Adams (who was also the chief reviewer for Softalk),went virtually without sleep for a week until he vanquished Ramadu and declaredRoberta's creation one of the greatest gaming feats in history.Time Zone, though, did not earn nearly the notoriety of another On-Line adventurewhich was well in keeping with the spirit of the company. The game was called"Softpom." In the Spring of 1981, Ken had met a programmer who had beentalking to publishers about an adventure game he had written and was trying, withlittle success, to market himself. This game was not your usual adventure whereyou quest for jewels, or try to solve a murder, or try to overthrow some evilEmperor Nyquill from the Planet Yvonne. In this game, you were a bachelor whosequest was to find and seduce three women. The programmer had written theprogram as a training exercise to help teach himself about data bases, using thesexual theme to make it interesting. It was the kind of thing that hackers, at leastthe ones who were aware that a thing called sex existed, had been doing for years,and it was rare to find a computer center without its own particular sexual specialty,be it an obscene-joke generator or a program to print out a display of a nakedwoman. The difference was that in 1981, all sorts of things that hackers had beendoing as cosmic technical goofs had a sudden market value in home computertranslations.The program in question was a cleaned-up variation of the original. It would getvile only if you used obscenity in your command. Still, in order to win the gameyou needed to have sex with a prostitute, buy a condom to avoid venereal disease,and engage in sadomasochism with a blonde who insisted on marrying you beforeyou could bed her. If you wanted to do well in this adventure, the replies you typedinto the computer had to be imaginatively seductive. But there were perils: if youcame across the "voluptuous blonde" and typed in EAT BLONDE, the computerwould type out a passage intimating that the blonde was leaning over andperforming oral sex on you. But then she'd flash her gleaming choppers and bite itoff!To those with a sense of humor about that sort of thing, Softporn was a uniquelydesirable Apple game. Most software publishers wanted nothing to do with the