Levy_S-Hackers-Heroes-Computer-Revolution

The planners were also extremely concerned about getting the power of computersinto the hands of more researchers, scientists, statisticians, and students. Someplanners worked on making computers easier to use; John Kemeny of Dartmouthshowed how this could be done by writing an easier-to-use computer languagecalled BASIC programs written in BASIC ran much slower than assemblylanguage and took up more memory space, but did not require the almost monasticcommitment that machine language demanded. MIT planners concentrated onextending actual computer access to more people. There were all sorts ofjustifications for this, not the least being the projected scale of economy one thatwas glaringly preferable to the then current system, in which even seconds ofcomputer time were valuable commodities (though you would not know it aroundthe Spacewar-playing PDP-1). If more people used computers, more expertprogrammers and theoreticians would emerge, and the science of computing yes,these aggressive planners were calling it a science could only benefit by that newtalent. But there was something else involved in this. It was something any hackercould understand the belief that computing, in and of itself, was positive. JohnMcCarthy illustrated that belief when he said that the natural state of man was tobe online to a computer all the time. "What the user wants is a computer that hecan have continuously at his beck and call for long periods of time."The man of the future. Hands on a keyboard, eyes on a CRT, in touch with thebody of information and thought that the world had been storing since historybegan. It would all be accessible to Computational Man.None of this would occur with the batch-processed IBM 704. Nor would it occurwith the TX-0 and PDP-1, with their weekly log sheets completely filled in withinhours of being posted on the wall. No, in order to do this, you'd have to haveseveral people use the computer at once. (The thought of each person having his orher own computer was something only a hacker would think worthwhile.) Thismulti-user concept was called time-sharing, and in 1960 the heaviest of the MITplanners began the Long-Range Computer Study Group. Among the memberswere people who had watched the rise of the MIT hacker with amusement andassent, people like Jack Dennis, Marvin Minsky, and Uncle John McCarthy. Theyknew how important it was for people to actually get their hands on those things.To them, it was not a question of whether to time-share or not it was a question ofhow to do it.Computer manufacturers, particularly IBM, were not enthusiastic. It was clear thatMIT would have to go about it pretty much on its own. (The research firm of BoltBeranek and Newman was also working on time-sharing.) Eventually two projectsbegan at MIT: one was Jack Dennis' largely solo effort to write a timesharingsystem for the PDP-1. The other was undertaken by a professor named