Levy_S-Hackers-Heroes-Computer-Revolution

The LISP machine was a significant achievement. But Greenblatt realized thatsomething beyond making a few machines and hacking on them would benecessary. This LISP machine was an ultimately flexible world-builder, anembodiment of the hacker dream ... but its virtues as a "thinking machine" alsomade it a tool for America to maintain its technological lead in the artificialintelligence race with the Japanese. The LISP machine had implications biggerthan the AI lab, certainly, and technology like this would be best disseminatedthrough the commercial sector. Greenblatt: "I generally realized during this wholeprocess that we [were] probably gonna start a company some day and eventuallymake these LISP machines commercially. [It was a] sooner-or-later-it's-gonnahappenkind of thing. So as the machine got to be more complete we startedpoking around."That was how Russell Noftsker got into the situation. The former AI labadministrator had left his post under duress in 1973 and gone to California to gointo business. Every so often he would come back to Cambridge and stop by thelab, see what the AI workers were up to. He liked the idea of LISP machines andexpressed interest in helping the hackers form a company."Initially pretty much everyone was against him," Greenblatt later recalled. "At thetime that Noftsker left the lab I was on considerably better terms with him thananyone else. Most of the people really hated this guy. He had done a bunch ofthings that were really very paranoid. But I said, 'Well, give him a chance.'"People did, but it soon became clear that Noftsker and Greenblatt had differentideas of what a company should be. Greenblatt was too much a hacker to accept atraditional business construct. What he wanted was something "towards the AIpattern." He did not want a load of venture capital. He preferred a bootstrapapproach, where the company would get an order for a machine, build it, then keepa percentage of the money and put it back into the company. He hoped that hisfirm could maintain a steady tie to MIT; he even envisioned a way where theycould all remain affiliated with the AI lab. Greenblatt himself was loath to leave;he had firmly set out the parameters for his universe. While his imagination hadfree rein inside a computer, his physical world was still largely bounded by hiscluttered office with terminal on the ninth floor and the room he had rented sincethe mid-sixties from a retired dentist (now deceased) and the dentist's wife. Hewould travel all over the world to go to artificial intelligence conferences, but thediscussions in these remote places would be continuations of the same technicalissues he would debate in the lab, or in ARPAnet computer mail. He was verymuch defined by the hacker community, and though he knew thatcommercialization to some extent was necessary to spread the gospel of the LISPmachine, he wanted to avoid any unnecessary compromise of the Hacker Ethic:like lines of code in a systems program, compromise should be bummed to the