Levy_S-Hackers-Heroes-Computer-Revolution

important Applefests. For one thing, On-Line and its competitors were nowreleasing programs for several machines; the Apple was no longer dominant. Also,the companies were beginning to see the open-to-users shows as drains on time,energy, and money resources which could be spent on what were becoming theessential shows: the big, trade-only Consumer Electronics Shows in Las Vegasand Chicago. Where the hero was not the hacker, but the man who wrote up sales.Still, the show was packed, one more indication of the economic explosion thathad come to computers. Amid Applefest's din of shuffling feet, voices, andelectronic game noises, what emerged was a melody of unprecedented prosperity.Almost everywhere you turned there were millionaires manning booths,millionaires who only two years ago were mired in obscure and unprofitableactivities. Then there were the start-ups, with smaller booths or with no booths atall, dreamers drawn by the thrilling, aphrodisiac scent emanating from the AppleWorld and the related world of home computers.That smell of success was driving people batty. People idly swapped unbelievablestories, with even the most startling high-tech Horatio Alger saga effortlesslytopped by a more startling example of the boom. It was a gold rush, but it was alsotrue that the minimum buy-in for serious prospectors was a more formidable sumthan it had been when Ken Williams began. Venture capital was a necessity,obtained from the men in pinstripe suits who dined at the mediocre Frenchrestaurants in the Valley, uttered In-Pursuit-Of-Excellence koans at industryseminars ("Marketing, Marketing, Marketing"), and solemnly referred tothemselves as "risk-takers." These were intolerable people, carpetbaggers of thehacker dream, but if you could get them to wink at you, the rewards could beendless. No one knew this better than the people at the Applefest who wereworking to start a company called Electronic Arts. Their idea was to bypass whatthey regarded as the already old-fashioned practices of the companies in theBrotherhood, and establish a firm that was even newer than New Age. A companythat took software into another realm entirely.Electronic Arts had denned its mission in a little booklet directed to "softwareartists" they were trying to lure away from their current publishers. Thisprospectus sounded like something penned by an ad copywriter who hadsuccessfully merged the sensibilities of three-piece suits and top-grade Hawaiiandope. It was loaded with one-sentence paragraphs which contained words like"excitement," "vision," and "nontraditional." Its true brilliance lay in the focus ofits appeal aimed directly at the hacker heart of its readers. Electronic Arts knewbetter than to whip up the greed factor by promising hackers enough royalties tobuy cherry-red Trans-Ams and Caribbean trysts with hot-blooded softwaregroupies. It confided instead: "We believe that innovative authors are more likelyto come from people who are independent and won't work in a software 'factory'