Levy_S-Hackers-Heroes-Computer-Revolution

19ApplefestTHE Third Generation lived with compromises in the Hacker Ethic that wouldhave caused the likes of Greenblatt and Gosper to recoil in horror. It all stemmedfrom money. The bottom line of programming was ineluctably tied to the bottomline on a publisher's ledger sheet. Elegance, innovation, and coding pyrotechnicswere much admired, but a new criterion for hacker stardom had crept into theequation: awesome sales figures. Early hackers might have regarded this asheresy: all software all information should be free, they'd argue, and pride shouldbe invested in how many people use your program and how much they areimpressed with it. But the Third Generation hackers never had the sense ofcommunity of their predecessors, and early on they came to see healthy salesfigures as essential to becoming winners.One of the more onerous of the compromises in the Ethic grew out of publishers'desire to protect their sales figures. It involved intentional tampering withcomputer programs to prevent a program from being easily copied by users,perhaps for distribution without further payment to the publisher or author. Thesoftware publishers called this process "copy protection," but a substantialpercentage of true hackers called it war.Crucial to the Hacker Ethic was the fact that computers, by nature, do not considerinformation proprietary. The architecture of a computer benefited from the easiest,most logical flow of information possible. Someone had to substantially alter acomputer process to make data inaccessible to certain users. Using one shortcommand, a user could duplicate an "unprotected" floppy disk down to the lastbyte in approximately thirty seconds. This ease was appalling to softwarepublishers, who dealt with it by "copy-protecting" disks: altering the programs byspecial routines which prevented the computer from acting naturally whensomeone tried to copy a disk. A digital roadblock which did not enhance theprogram's value to the user, but benefited the seller of the program.The publishers had legitimate reason to resort to such unesthetic measures. Theirlivelihood was invested in software. This was not MIT, where software was