Levy_S-Hackers-Heroes-Computer-Revolution

started programming at three in the afternoon. After cranking out code for a while,I looked out and it was still light outside and I thought, 'It seems like I've beentyping for more than a few hours.' And of course it had already been through thenight and that was the next morning."The work went swiftly, and the program was shaping up beautifully. A friend ofJohn's in San Diego had written some routines to generate continuous music, usingthe three-voice sound synthesizer chip in the Atari to mingle the strains of theoriginal Frogger theme with "Camptown Races," all with the gay contrapuntal upbeatof a calliope. Harris' graphic shapes were never better the leaping frog, thelittle hot rods and trucks on the highway, the diving turtles and the goofy-lookingalligators in the water ... every detail lovingly denned on shape tables, worked intoassembly-language subroutines, and expertly integrated into game play-It was thekind of game, Harris believed, that only a person in love with gaming couldimplement. No one but a true hacker would approach it with the lunatic intensityand finicky artistic exactitude of John Harris.It did not turn out to be a quick and dirty three-week project, but no one had reallyexpected it to. Software always takes longer than you expect. Almost two monthsinto the project, though, John was well over the hump. He decided to take off workfor a couple of days to go back to San Diego for Software Expo, a charity benefitfor muscular distrophy. As a leading software artist, John was going to display hiswork, including the nearly completed Frogger. So John Harris packed the prereleaseFrogger into his software collection, and took the whole box with him toSouthern California.When traveling with a cargo as valuable as that, extreme care was called for.Besides including the only version of Frogger, the most important program JohnHarris had ever written (John had a backup copy, of course, but he brought thatalong in case the primary disk didn't boot), John's library included almost everydisk he owned, disks loaded with software utilities self-modified assemblers,routines for modifying files, music generators, animation routines, shape tables ...a young lifetime of tools, the equivalent to him of the entire drawer of paper-tapeprograms for the PDP-1 at MIT. One could not turn one's back on a pricelesscollection like that; one held it in one's hand almost every moment. Otherwise, inthe single moment that one forgot to hold it in one's hand and turned one's back onit for instance, during a moment of rapt conversation with an admirer well, asMurphy's Law holds ("Whatever can go wrong, will"), one's valuable softwarelibrary could be tragically gone.That was precisely what happened to John Harris at the Software Expo.