Levy_S-Hackers-Heroes-Computer-Revolution

While still in high school, he landed a job at the Byte Shop in Hayward. He lovedworking at the computer shop. He'd do some of everything repairs, sales, andprogramming for the store owner as well as the customers who needed customprograms. The fact that he was getting no more than three dollars an hour didn'tbother him: working with computers was pay enough. He kept working at the shopwhile he attended Cal State at Hayward, where he zipped effortlessly through mathand computer courses. He transferred to Berkeley, and was shocked at therigorousness of the computer science curriculum there. He had developed a hackerattitude: he could work intensely for long periods of time on things that interestedhim, but had little patience for the things that didn't. In fact, he found it virtuallyimpossible to retain what he called "the little nitpicking things that I knew I'dnever need" that were unfortunately essential for success in Berkeley's computerscience department. So like many Third Generation hackers, he did not get thebenefit of the high-level hacking that took place in universities. He dropped out forthe freedom that personal computers would provide, and went back to the ByteShop.An intense circle of pirates hung out at the shop. Some of them had even beeninterviewed in an article about software piracy in Esquire that made them seemlike heroes. Actually, Mark considered them kind of random hackers. Mark,however, was interested in the kinds of discoveries that it took to break down copyprotection, and was fairly proficient at breaking copy-protected disks, though hereally had no need for the programs on the disks. A student of the Hacker Ethic, hedidn't think too much of the idea of being a person who writes copy-protectionschemes.But one day Mark was playing around with the Apple operating system. He oftendid this the common hacker pursuit of wandering around within a system. "My bigthing is discovery," he explained later. Working with computers, he could alwaysunearth something new, and got incredible satisfaction from these finds. Mark wastrying to figure out what turned the disk drive on and off in the operating system,and soon knew what triggered it, spun it, worked the head, moved the motor. Ashe experimented with variations on the usual ways to work the disk drive, herealized that he was on to a very big discovery: a new way to put information on adisk.Mark's scheme involved arranging data in spiraling paths on the disk, soinformation could not be accessed concentrically, like a needle following a record,but in several spiraling paths. That was why Mark called the scheme "Spiradisk."The different arrangement would thwart programs which broke copy protectionand allowed pirates to copy disks. While not being totally pirate-proof (nothing is),Mark's scheme would defy Locksmith, and any other commercial scheme. Andwould take a hell of a long time for even a devoted hacker to crack.