Levy_S-Hackers-Heroes-Computer-Revolution

his roommate Beeler would later say. "Her idea was that he was here to get adegree. But the things he was doing on the computer were completely state-of-theartno one was doing them yet. He saw additional things to be done. It was verydifficult to get excited about classes." To Greenblatt, it wasn't really important thathe was in danger of flunking out of college. Hacking was paramount: it was whathe did best and what made him happiest.His worst moment came when he was so "out of phase" that he slept past a finalexam. It only hastened his exit from the student body of MIT. Flunking outprobably wouldn't have made any difference at all in his life had it not been for arule that you couldn't be a student employee when you were an exiled student. SoGreenblatt went looking for work, fully intending to get a daytime programmingjob that would allow him to spend his nights at the place he wanted to spend histime the ninth floor at Tech Square. Hacking. And that is exactly what he did.There was an equally impressive hacker who had mastered the PDP-1 in a differentmanner. More verbal than Greenblatt, he was better able to articulate his vision ofhow the computer had changed his life, and how it might change all our lives. Thisstudent was named Bill Gosper. He had begun MIT a year before Greenblatt, buthad been somewhat slower at becoming a habitue of the PDP-1. Gosper was thin,with birdlike features covered by thick spectacles and an unruly head of kinkybrown hair. But even a brief meeting with Gosper was enough to convince you thathere was someone whose brilliance put things like physical appearance into theirproperly trivial perspective. He was a math genius. It was actually the idea ofhacking the world of mathematics, rather than hacking systems, that attractedGosper to the computer, and he was to serve as a long-time foil to Greenblatt andthe other systems-oriented people in the society of brilliant foot soldiers nowforming around brand-new Project MAC.Gosper was from Pennsauken, New Jersey, across the river from Philadelphia, andhis pre-MIT experience with computers, like Greenblatt's, was limited to watchingHulking Giants operate from behind a pane of glass. He could vividly recall seeingthe Univac at Philadelphia's Franklin Institute churn out pictures of BenjaminFranklin on its line printer. Gosper had no idea what was going on, but it lookedlike great fun.He tasted that fun himself for the first time in his second MIT semester. He'd takena course from Uncle John McCarthy open only to freshmen who'd gottendisgustingly high grade point averages the previous term. The course began withFORTRAN, went on to IBM machine language, and wound up on the PDP-1. Theproblems were non-trivial, things like tracing rays through optical systems with the