Levy_S-Hackers-Heroes-Computer-Revolution

focus, made their lives adventurous. It had made them masters of a certain slice offate. Peter Samson later said, "We did it twenty-five to thirty percent for the sakeof doing it because it was something we could do and do well, and sixty percentfor the sake of having something which was in its metaphorical way alive, ouroffspring, which would do things on its own when we were finished. That's thegreat thing about programming, the magical appeal it has... Once you fix abehavioral problem [a computer or program] has, it's fixed forever, and it isexactly an image of what you meant."Like Aladdin's lamp, you could get it to do your bidding.Surely everyone could benefit from experiencing this power. Surely everyonecould benefit from a world based on the Hacker Ethic. This was the implicit beliefof the hackers, and the hackers irreverently extended the conventional point ofview of what computers could and should do leading the world to a new way oflooking and interacting with computers.This was not easily done. Even at such an advanced institution as MIT, someprofessors considered a manic affinity for computers as frivolous, even demented.TMRC hacker Bob Wagner once had to explain to an engineering professor what acomputer was. Wagner experienced this clash of computer versus anti-computereven more vividly when he took a Numerical Analysis class in which the professorrequired each student to do homework using rattling, clunky electromechanicalcalculators. Kotok was in the same class, and both of them were appalled at theprospect of working with those lo-tech machines. "Why should we," they asked,"when we've got this computer?"So Wagner began working on a computer program that would emulate thebehavior of a calculator. The idea was outrageous. To some, it was amisappropriation of valuable machine time. According to the standard thinking oncomputers, their time was so precious that one should only attempt things whichtook maximum advantage of the computer, things that otherwise would takeroomfuls of mathematicians days of mindless calculating. Hackers felt otherwise:anything that seemed interesting or fun was fodder for computing and usinginteractive computers, with no one looking over your shoulder and demandingclearance for your specific project, you could act on that belief. After two or threemonths of tangling with intricacies of floating-point arithmetic (necessary to allowthe program to know where to place the decimal point) on a machine that had nosimple method to perform elementary multiplication, Wagner had written threethousand lines of code that did the job. He had made a ridiculously expensivecomputer perform the function of a calculator that cost a thousand times less. Tohonor this irony, he called the program Expensive Desk Calculator, and proudlydid the homework for his class on it.