Levy_S-Hackers-Heroes-Computer-Revolution

exerted on others were totally outlandish," Bob Wagner later recalled. "You weresimulating a violation of natural law!" Minsky called the hack a "Tri-Pos: Three-Position Display" program, but the hackers affectionately renamed it theMinskytron.Slug Russell was inspired by this. At the Higham Institute sessions some monthsback, he and his friends had discussed the criteria for the ultimate display hack.Since they had been fans of trashy science fiction, particularly the space operanovels of E. E. "Doc" Smith, they somehow decided that the PDP-1 would be aperfect machine to make a combination grade-B movie and $120,000 toy. A gamein which two people could face each other in an outer-space showdown. AHigham Institute Study Group on Space Warfare was duly organized, and itsconclusion strongly implied that Slug Russell should be the author of this historichack.But months later, Russell hadn't even started. He would watch the Minskytronmake patterns, he'd flip switches to see new patterns develop, and every so oftenhe'd flip more switches when the program got wedged into inactivity. He wasfascinated, but thought the hack too abstract and mathematical. "This demo is acrock," he finally decided only thirty-two or so instructions, and it didn't really doanything.Slug Russell knew that his war-in-outer-space game would do something. In itsown kitschy, sci-fi terms, it would be absorbing the way no previous hack had everbeen. The thing that got Slug into computers in the first place was the feeling ofpower you got from running the damn things. You can tell the computer what todo, and it fights with you, but it finally does what you tell it to. Of course it willreflect your own stupidity, and often what you tell it to do will result in somethingdistasteful. But eventually, after tortures and tribulations, it will do exactly whatyou want. The feeling you get then is unlike any other feeling in the world. It canmake you a junkie. It made Slug Russell a junkie, and he could see that it had donethe same thing to the hackers who haunted the Kluge Room until dawn. It was thatfeeling that did it, and Slug Russell guessed the feeling was power.Slug got sort of a similar, though less intense, feeling from Doc Smith's novels. Helet his imagination construct the thrill of roaring across space in a white rocketship ... and wondered if that same excitement could be captured while sittingbehind the console of the PDP-1. That would be the Spacewar he dreamed about.Once again he vowed to do it.Later.