Levy_S-Hackers-Heroes-Computer-Revolution

or 'bureaucracy.'" It promised to develop fantastic and powerful tools and utilitiesthat would be available to EA authors. It vowed to maintain the kind of personalvalues that hackers appreciate more than money. What this would result in was "agreat software company." The implication was that as far as creative, honest,foward-thinking programmers with hacker values were concerned, there was atpresent no such company.Electronic Arts was the brainchild of Trip Hawkins, who had quit his job asApple's director of marketing for the LISA project to do this. He started thecompany out of an extra room in the office of a venture capital firm. Hawkinsbrought together a team from Apple, Atari, Xerox PARC, and VisiCorp, and, in acoup sure to charm the heart of any hacker, got Steve Wozniak to agree to sit onthe board of directors.Electronic Arts had no booth at the Applefest, but its presence was felt. It hosted abig party on opening night, and its people worked the show floor like politicians.One of them, a former Apple executive named Pat Mariott, a tall, thin, blondwoman with huge round glasses and a deep tan, was enthusiastically explainingthe company to a reporter. Trip started Electronic Arts, she said, because he sawhow fast the business was starting to happen and he "didn't want to miss thewindow." Pat went with him because she saw it as an opportunity to have fun and,not incidentally, make money."I want to get rich, by the way," she said, explaining how, in Silicon Valley,wealth was omnipresent. Everywhere you looked you saw its artifacts: BMWs,stock options, and, though she didn't mention it, cocaine in snowdrift quantities.This was not your garden-variety, hundred-thousand-dollar-a-year wealth, eitherthis was Croesus Mode, where floating-point arithmetic was barely sufficient tocount the millions. When you saw your friends come into it, you thought, Why notme? So when a window into wealth opened, you naturally leapt through it. Therehas never been a window as inviting as that of the software industry. Pat Mariottsummed it up in a whisper, quoting gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson: "Whenthe going gets weird, the weird turn pro."Pat Mariott hoped to kick into Croesus Mode without compromising her sixtiesshapedpersonal values. She would never, for instance, work for a cutthroatcompany. Pat had been a programmer herself, experiencing hacker culture atBerkeley and the professional milieu at evil IBM. "Berkeley was truth and beauty.IBM was power and money. I wanted both," she said. Electronic Arts seemed theway. The products and philosophy of the company would be troth and beauty, andthe company founders would all be powerful and rich. And the programmers, whowould be treated with the respect they deserved as the artists of the computer age,would be elevated to the status of rock or movie stars.