Levy_S-Hackers-Heroes-Computer-Revolution

4Greenblatt and GosperRICKY Greenblatt was a hacker waiting to happen. Years later, when he wasknown throughout the nation's computer centers as the archetypal hacker, when thetales of his single-minded concentration were almost as prolific as the millions oflines of assembly language code he'd hacked, someone would ask him how it allstarted. He'd twist back in his chair, looking not as rumpled as he did back as anundergraduate, when he was cherub-faced and dark-haired and painfully awkwardof speech; the question, he figured, came down to whether hackers were born ormade, and out came one of the notorious non sequiturs which came to be known asBlattisms: "If hackers are bom, then they're going to get made, and if they're madeinto it, they were bom." But Greenblatt would admit that he was a born hacker. Notthat his first encounter with the PDP-1 had changed his life. He was interested, allright. It had been freshman rush week at MIT, and Ricky Greenblatt had some timeon his hands before tackling his courses, ready for academic glory. He visited theplaces that interested him most: the campus radio station WTBS (MIT's wasperhaps the only college radio station in the country with a surfeit of student audioengineers and a shortage of disc jockeys), the Tech Model Railroad Club, and theKluge Room in Building 26 which held the PDP-1. Some hackers were playingSpacewar.It was the general rule to play the game with all the room lights turned off, so thepeople crowded around the console would have their faces eerily illuminated bythis display of spaceships and heavy stars. Rapt faces lit by the glow of thecomputer. Ricky Greenblatt was impressed. He watched the cosmic clashes for awhile, then went next door to look over the TX-0, with its racks of tubes andtransistors, its fancy power supplies, its lights and switches. His high school mathclub back in Columbia, Missouri, had visited the state university's batch-processedcomputer, and he'd seen a giant card-sorting machine at a local insurance company.But nothing like this. Still, despite being impressed with the radio station, theModel Railroad Club, and especially the computers, he set about making dean's list.This scholastic virtue could not last. Greenblatt, even more than your normal MITstudent, was a willing conscript of the Hands-On Imperative. His life had been