Levy_S-Hackers-Heroes-Computer-Revolution

18FroggerAS 1982 progressed and the second anniversary of his company rolled around.Ken Williams was beginning to lose patience with John Harris, and with younghackers in general. He no longer had the time, nor the inclination, to give hours oftechnical assistance to his hackers. He began to regard the questions hisprogrammers would ask him (How can I put this on the screen without flicker?How can I scroll objects horizontally? How do I get rid of this bug?) asdistractions from what was becoming his main activity: hacking On-Line Systemsas it grew in logarithmic leaps and bounds. Until now, when a programmer wouldcall Ken and frantically howl that he was stuck in some subroutine, Ken would goover, cry with him, and fiddle with the program, doing whatever it took to makehis hacker happy. Those days were ending.Ken did not see the shift in attitude as making his company any less idealistic. Hestill believed that On-Line was changing lives through the computer, both the livesof its workers and the lives of its customers. It was the beginning of a computermillennium. But Ken Williams was not sure that the hacker would be the centralfigure in this golden age. Especially a hacker like John Harris.The split between Ken Williams and John Harris symbolized something occurringall over the home computer software industry. At first, the artistic goals of thehacker coincided neatly with the marketplace, because the marketplace had noexpectations, and the hackers could blithely create the games they wanted to play,and adorn business programs with the nifty features that displayed their artistry.But as more nontechnical people bought computers, the things that impressedhackers were not as essential. While the programs themselves had to maintain acertain standard of quality, it was quite possible that the most exacting standardsthose applied by a hacker who wanted to add one more feature, or wouldn't let goof a project until it was demonstrably faster than anything else around wereprobably counterproductive. What seemed more important was marketing. Therewere plenty of brilliant programs which no one knew about. Sometimes hackerswould write programs and put them in the public domain, give them away as