Levy_S-Hackers-Heroes-Computer-Revolution

At that time Warren was working at the Parker Pen Company in his hometown inrural Wisconsin. Though Warren had a talent for math, he stopped his schoolingafter high school. His job at Parker was running an injection molding machine,which consisted of a big mold and a tube where plastic was heated. The hot plasticwould be injected into the mold, and after twenty seconds of cooling Warren wouldopen the door and take out the newly formed pen parts. Then he would shut thedoor again. Warren Schwader considered the job a challenge. He wanted the penparts to be perfect. He would constantly be adjusting the loader, or twisting the key,or tightening the nuts and bolts on the molder. He loved that machine. Years afterleaving Parker, he said with pride that the pen parts from his molder were indeedperfect.He approached programming with the same meticulous compul-siveness. Everyday he would try a different graphics demo. In the morning he would decide whathe wanted to try. During the twenty-second intervals that his molding machineallowed him, he would use pencil and paper to flowchart a program for the demo.At night, he would sit down at the Apple and debug the program until his intendedeffect filled the screen. He was particularly fond of kaleidoscopic, multicoloreddisplays.One of the graphics demos Warren tried appealed to him so much that he decidedto try to expand it into a game. Ever since he first played Pong in arcades. Warrenhad been a videogame fan. He tried to copy a game he'd seen in an arcade: it had apaddle on the bottom of the screen and little bricks at the top of the screen. Youwould hit a blip with the paddle and it would bounce like a pinball machine. Thattook Warren a month of twenty-second intervals and nighttime debugging, andthough it was written in lo-res graphics, which weren't as sharp as the things youcould do in assembly language and hi-res, the game he turned out was good, too.Up until this time Warren had been working on the Apple solely to discover whathe could do on it. He had been absorbed in pure process. But seeing these games onthe screen, games he had created from thin air, games which might have been themost creative things that he had ever accomplished, Warren Schwader began torealize that his computing could actually yield a tangible result. Like a game thatothers might enjoy.This epiphany drove Warren deeper into the machine. He resolved to do anassembly-language game, even if it took him months. There were no books on thesubject, and certainly no one Warren knew in Wisconsin could tell him anythingabout it. Also, the only assembler Warren had was the simple and slowminiassembler that was built into the Apple. None of this stopped WarrenSchwader, who in personality and outlook is much like the fabled turtle who