Levy_S-Hackers-Heroes-Computer-Revolution

This was quite a step from the early days, when all a programmer had to work withwas creativity. Now he could work with a bankable property. If Dark Crystal wasnot quite the big leagues, the next deal was. For this one, Ken Williams wasdealing with the biggest company of all.IBM.International Business Machines, toe-to-toe with the Coarse-gold, California,company that did not exist two years ago. White-shirted, dark-tied, batchprocessedIBM'ers coming to Ken's new corporate headquarters, which consistedof a series of offices in the same building that housed the little office whereOakhursters and Coarsegoldians paid their electric bills, a little furniture store onthe ground floor, and a beauty parlor next to the office where Ken ran marketingand advertising.To On-Liners, hackers, and Oakhurst natives dressed in Summer Camp shorts andT-shirts, IBM's cloak-and-dagger behavior was absurd. Everything was sosolemnly top secret. Before IBM would divulge even an inkling of its intentions,its poker-faced personnel insisted that everyone who might possibly know aboutthe deal and this was to be kept to the smallest number of people possible signlengthy and binding nondisclosure forms which mandated severe tortures andcomplete frontal lobotomies, almost, to anyone leaking the name of the threeinitialcompany or its plans.The predictions of Computer Lib author Ted Nelson and others that the personalcomputer revolution would put IBM "in disarray" had proven a patheticunderestimation of the monolithic firm. The Hulking Giant of computer companieshad proven to be more nimble than anyone had expected. In 1981, it hadannounced its own computer, the IBM "PC," and the very specter of this entry ledmany in the small computer industry to make preparations for rolling over anddropping dead for IBM, which they promptly did when the IBM's PC machine wasput on the marketplace. Even people who hated IBM and its batch-processedphilosophy rolled over and dropped dead, because IBM had done something whichrepresented a virtual turnaround from everything they had previously stood for:they opened their machine up. They encouraged outsiders to write software. Theyeven enlisted outside firms to help design the thing, firms like Microsoft, headedby Bill Gates (the author of the original software piracy letter, directed at theHomebrew Altair BASIC copiers). Gates wrote the IBM operating system whichalmost instantly became a new industry standard. It was almost as if IBM hadstudied the Hacker Ethic and decided that, in this case, it was good business senseto apply it.