Levy_S-Hackers-Heroes-Computer-Revolution

after twenty minutes of protecting your place in the king-of-the-hill-structuredcontest, even a master Spacewarrior would get a bit blurry-eyed and slower on thedraw, and most everybody got a chance to play Spacewar more than was probablysensible. Peter Samson, second only to Saunders in Spacewarring, realized thisone night when he went home to Lowell. As he stepped out of the train, he staredupward into the crisp, clear sky. A meteor flew overhead. Where's the spaceship?Samson thought as he instantly swiveled back and grabbed the air for a controlbox that wasn't there.In May 1962, at the annual MIT Open House, the hackers fed the paper tape withtwenty-seven pages worth of PDP-1 assembly language code into the machine, setup an extra display screen actually a giant oscilloscope and ran Spacewar all dayto a public that drifted in and could not believe what they saw. The sight of it ascience-fiction game written by students and controlled by a computer was somuch on the verge of fantasy that no one dared predict that an entire genre ofentertainment would eventually be spawned from it.It wasn't till years later, when Slug Russell was at Stanford University, that herealized that the game was anything but a hacker aberration. After working lateone night, Russell and some friends went to a local bar which had some pinballmachines. They played until closing time; then, instead of going home, Russelland his co-workers went back to their computer, and the first thing his friends didwas run Spacewar. Suddenly it struck Steve Russell: "These people just stoppedplaying a pinball machine and went to play Spacewar by gosh, it is a pinballmachine." The most advanced, imaginative, expensive pinball machine the worldhad seen.Like the hackers' assemblers and the music program, Spacewar was not sold. Likeany other program, it was placed in the drawer for anyone to access, look at, andrewrite as they saw fit. The group effort that stage by stage had improved theprogram could have stood for an argument for the Hacker Ethic: an urge to getinside the workings of the thing and make it better had led to measurableimprovement. And of course it was all a huge amount of fun. It was no wonderthat other PDP-1 owners began to hear about it, and the paper tapes holdingSpacewar were freely distributed. At one point the thought crossed Slug Russell'smind that maybe someone should be making money from this, but by then therewere already dozens of copies circulating. DEC was delighted to get a copy, andthe engineers there used it as a final diagnostic program on PDP-1s before theyrolled them out the door. Then, without wiping the computer memory clean, they'dshut the machine off. The DEC sales force knew this, and often, when machineswere delivered to new customers, the salesman would turn on the power, check tomake sure no smoke was pouring out the back, and hit the "VY" location whereSpacewar resided. And if the machine had been carefully packed and shipped, the