Levy_S-Hackers-Heroes-Computer-Revolution

Ken basically wanted a fairly reliable copy-protect system to work with the FormMaster, a big disk-copying machine On-Line had bought to chum out products.Could Mark come up with a program that could do that? Yes. In half an hour,Duchaineau conceived of a plan, and set about writing code for the next twentyfourhours, finishing with a complete protection scheme that he says "wasn'tincredibly reliable, wasn't very high-quality, but it did work, if you [had] cleandisk drives and normal disk speeds." Over the next few months, Mark used it toprotect about twenty-five products.He also became the official Dungeonmaster for a running Dungeons and Dragonsgame at Hexagon House. Built as a traditional suburban family home, the housewas beginning to show some wear from neglect by a shifting roster of hackerboarders.The walls, the wooden banisters, and the kitchen cabinets all had abattered, war-pocked look. No one had bothered to get furniture, and the mainroom had only a Formica dining table and cheap kitchen chairs, a six-foot-tallsword-dueling arcade game, and a large color TV without a stand, connected to aBetamax that seemed to constantly play Conan the Barbarian. On D&D nights, afew of the programmers would gather around the table, while Mark sat crossleggedon the soiled wall-to-wall carpet surrounded by hardbound D&D guides forrunning games. He would roll dice, ominously predicting that this person ... ortroll, as the case might be ... had a 40 percent chance of getting hit by a lightningbolt cast by a wizard named Zwemif. He'd roll an eighteen-sided die, peer down atit, and look up with those disconcertingly intense eyes and say, already eager forthe next crisis, "You're still alive." Then he'd thumb through the book for anotherlife-and-death confrontation for the role players. Running a D&D game was agreat exercise in control, just as computers were.Mark kept lobbying for Spiradisk. His eagerness to implement the hard-to-crackscheme was not due to a desire to thwart would-be pirates; Duchaineau consideredit a sacrifice to bring about his more altruistic master plan. He hoped Spiradiskwould generate enough royalties for him to begin his own company, one whichwould be guided not by the unproductive standards of commercialism, but by theforward-thinking goals of research and development. Duchaineau's companywould be a hacker paradise, with programmers having every conceivable tool attheir disposal to create awesome software. If a programmer felt the companyneeded a piece of equipment, say some supercalibrated oscilloscope, he would nothave to get permission from unconnected management channels ... he and hisfellow hackers would have a large say in the process. Initially, Mark's companywould write state-of-the-art software Mark himself dreamed of writing theultimate computer version of Dungeons and Dragons.But software was only the beginning. Once revenues could support it, Mark'scompany would get into hardware. The ultimate goal would be to create a