Levy_S-Hackers-Heroes-Computer-Revolution

Guinness Book of World Records champion in gold panning. They'd marriedtwenty-six years ago, when Carolyn was fifteen. For the past few years, they'dbeen running a gold-prospecting supply business and searching for gold in thePresno River, which ran in their backyard. The Oakhurst-Coarsegold area was onthe southern rim of the California mother lode, and the gold the Boxes dredged upfrom the river one morning they came up with two thousand dollars' worth in ahalf hour financed their programming courses at a Fresno trade school.They had realized that the gold of the 1980s would be software, and their goal wasto work at On-Line. Though Carolyn Box had been apprehensive about dealingwith a computer, she instantly understood the required concept, as if computerswere a language she'd always been talking. It was almost supernatural. She was thefirst one in the history of the school to get a 4.0 average in her courses. Bob didwell, too: programming was like gold panning, he realized you proceeded inlogical steps, and concentrated while you did it.But when they presented themselves to Ken, he was skeptical. He told them thatprogrammers usually peaked at nineteen and were over the hill at twenty evenKen, at twenty-eight, was just about washed up. (Not that he believed it.) Kenwanted to give the Boxes a chance, though, because they fit right in with thedream he had about On-Line and the great computer future. So he told them to putup something on the screen using assembly language, in thirty days. The Boxes'school had taught them programming in high-level languages on mainframecomputers; they knew nothing about Apple assembly language. But working dayand night, they came up with an 82-line program only five days later. It moved adot around the screen. Ken asked them to try something else, and, again workingalmost every waking hour, the Boxes created a 282-line program with a littleairplane moving around the high-resolution screen. Ken hired them, and set themto work programming a pet project of his, an educational game.Soon the Boxes were hard at work getting a little dog, whom they named Dustyafter their own dog, to walk across the screen. They would proudly explain tovisitors that their hack used a sophisticated technique called exclusive-or-ing,which allowed for zero-flicker animation. They felt they'd given life to Dusty Dog."This dog is like our pet," Carolyn Box would say. When Ken first saw Dusty Dogmove across the screen, the little basset legs moving with steady, non-flickeringfluidity, he almost burst. "It's days like this that make you proud to be in thisbusiness," he told them. Even these middle-aged gold prospectors could besoftware superstars ... and Ken was the Moses who led them to the promisedComputer Land.