Levy_S-Hackers-Heroes-Computer-Revolution

are seeing somebody else, then the company's doomed ultimately. It's just a matterof time. I have to get rid of the crybabies."To Ken, software, the magic, messianic, transmogrifying, new-age tool, had cometo that. Business. Cut off from his own hacker roots, he no longer seemed tounderstand that the hackers did not make decisions based on traditional businessterms, that some hackers would not consider working for companies where theydid not get a warm feeling, that some hackers were reluctant to work forcompanies at all.But then, Ken did not care very much at all what hackers thought. Because he wasthrough with them. Ken was seeking professional programmers, the kind of goalorientedpeople who approached a task as responsible engineers, not prima donnaartistes hung up on getting things perfect and impressing their friends. "Good,solid guys who will deliver," was the way Ken put it. "We'll lose our dependenceon programmers. It's silly to think programmers are creative. Instead of waiting forthe mail to come, for guys like John Harris to design something, we're going to getsome damn good implementers who aren't creative, but good."Ken felt he had already found some latent game wizards who'd been buried incorporate programming jobs. One of these goal-oriented pros Ken recruited was alocal programmer for the phone company. Another was a Southern Californiafamily man in his forties who had worked for years doing government contractsusing digital imagery, he said, "with obvious military implications." Another was arural Idaho vegetarian who lived with his family in a wooden geodesic dome.On Ken went, trying to replace the hackers with professionals. He already deemedthe great experiment taking place in the old office on Route 41, where heattempted to turn novices into assembly-language programmers, an overall loser. Ittook too long to train people, and there was really no one around who had both thetime and the technical virtuosity to be a guru. Finding enough assembly-languageprogrammers was tough, and even a dragnet of headhunters and classified adscould not guarantee the winners Ken needed in the next year. He would needmany, since his 1983 game plan was to release over one hundred products. Fewwould involve original creative efforts. On-Line's programming energy insteadwould go into converting its current games to other machines, especially the lowcost,mass-market, ROM-cartridge-based computers, like the VIC-20, or TexasInstruments. On-Line's expectations were stated in its "strategy outline": "Webelieve the home computer market to be so explosive that 'title saturation' isimpossible. The number of new machines competing for the Apple/Atari segmentin 1983 will create a perpetually new market hungry for the winning 1982 titles.We will exploit this opportunity..."