Levy_S-Hackers-Heroes-Computer-Revolution

doing. Then you can see your offspring come to life. How can something ascontrived as an engineering class compare to that? Chances are that yourengineering professor has never done anything half as interesting as the problemsyou are solving every day on the PDP-1. Who's right?By Greenblatt's sophomore year, the computer scene around the PDP-1 waschanging considerably. Though a few more of the original TX-0 hackers haddeparted, there was new talent arriving, and the new, ambitious setup, funded bythe benevolent Department of Defense, nicely accommodated their hacking. Asecond PDP-1 had arrived; its home was the new, nine-story rectangular buildingon Main Street a building of mind-numbing dullness, with no protuberances andsill-less windows that looked painted onto its off-white surface. The building wascalled Tech Square, and among the MIT and corporate clients moving in wasProject MAC. The ninth floor of this building, where the computers were, would behome to a generation of hackers, and none would spend as much time there asGreenblatt.Greenblatt was getting paid (sub-minimum wages) for hacking as a studentemployee, as were several hackers who worked on the system or were starting todevelop some of the large programs that would do artificial intelligence. Theystarted to notice that this awkwardly polite sophomore was a potential PDP-1superstar.He was turning out an incredible amount of code, hacking as much as he could, orsitting with a stack of printouts, marking them up. He'd shuttle between the PDP-1and TMRC, with his head fantastically wired with the structures of the program hewas working on, or the system of relays he'd hacked under the TMRC layout. Tohold that concentration for a long period of time, he lived, as did several of hispeers, the thirty-hour day. It was conducive to intense hacking, since you had anextended block of waking hours to get going on a program, and, once you werereally rolling, little annoyances like sleep need not bother you. The idea was toburn away for thirty hours, reach total exhaustion, then go home and collapse fortwelve hours. An alternative would be to collapse right there in the lab. A minordrawback of this sort of schedule was that it put you at odds with the routineswhich everyone else in the world used to do things like keep appointments, eat, andgo to classes. Hackers could accommodate this one would commonly ask questionslike "What phase is Greenblatt in?" and someone who had seen him recently wouldsay, "I think he's in a night phase now, and should be in around nine or so."Professors did not adjust to those phases so easily, and Greenblatt "zorched" hisclasses.He was placed on academic probation, and his mother came to Massachusetts toconfer with the dean. There was some explaining to do. "His mom was concerned,"