Levy_S-Hackers-Heroes-Computer-Revolution

The techniques, algorithms, and cross-assemblers would, of course, be proprietary.Because of that, Rich and Rich would routinely keep their source code. It wouldbe sequestered at Rich and Rich's offices in Southern California. No matter howbrilliant the tricks were, no matter how elegant the bum, it would not be availablefor hacker reading pleasure. Only the product would be available. Opacity. Peoplebuying programs as product, with the programming deeply hidden, as unimportantas the machinery which makes grooves in records that play music. Likewise, theprogrammers at Rich and Rich would be anonymous. No hacker egos to cope with.Just submit a wish list of games and the assembly line would churn them out.Ken loved the idea. "It will make them rich and make me money," he saidafterward. If the two trial projects he gave to Rich and Rich worked out, he said, "Icould do all my conversions with them! This is much better than John Harris!"Ken was feeling at the top of his game. Besides Rich and Rich, a reporter for TheWall Street Journal was in town, talking to him and Roberta for a piece about thecompany. As he often did in the middle of the day, he rewarded himself by leavingthe office and heading out to the site of his new house. Today, they were loweringthe seven twenty-five-foot-long roof beams which would go over the mammothgame room in the house, not far from the indoor racquetball court. He put a flannelshirt over his ragged, blue Apple T-shirt and he drove over to the muddy site andwatched the hydraulic crane lift the beams, and the twelve-man work crew settleeach one into its niche. It went smoothly, like a well-written subroutine thatworked the first time the code was assembled, and Ken stared with a dazed prideat what he was building. "Isn't it weird?" he kept asking. "Isn't it weird?"The house went on and on, rambling down the hill for a hundred and forty feet; theframe finally filling out, with stairs you could climb and doorways to peepthrough. Right now the house was open to the elements, for wind to blow throughand rain to fall through, and no doors or walls prevented free movement. Aperfect, endless hacker house. But the builders would soon put walls to keep theworld from peering in the house, and doors to keep the people in the house frombursting in and violating a person's privacy. No one in his right mind would wantit any different.The same with hackerism, perhaps ... no one running a business could want itreally run by the Hacker Ethic. Sooner or later you had to cope with reality; youwould yearn for those old, familiar walls and doors which were always consideredso natural that only madmen would eliminate them. Only in a computer simulationmaybe, using the computer to hack Utopia, could you preserve that sort ofidealism. Maybe that was the only place you could preserve a dream. In acomputer.Ken walked around the house a few times, talked to the builder, and then was