Levy_S-Hackers-Heroes-Computer-Revolution

variations like those generated by the bell on the teletype. Those times, whensomeone made a mistake with TECO, the bell would ring, and the machine wouldbe thrown into randomness. The computer would be out of control; it would typespastically, ringing the bell, and most unsettling, turning the room lights on and off.The computer had run amok! Science-fiction Armageddon! The hackers consideredthis extremely humorous. The people in charge of the lab, particularly MarvinMinsky, were very understanding about these things. Marvin, as the hackers calledhim (they invariably called each other by last name), knew that the Hacker Ethicwas what kept the lab productive, and he was not going to tamper with one of thecrucial components of hackerism. On the other hand, there was Stew Nelson,constantly at odds with the rules, a hot potato who got hotter when he waseventually caught red-handed at phone hacking. Something had to be done. SoMinsky called up his good friend Ed Fredkin, and told him he had this problemwith an incredibly brilliant nineteen-year old who had a penchant for getting intosophisticated mischief. Could Fredkin hire him?Besides being a close friend of Marvin Minsky and the founder of InformationInternational Incorporated (Triple-I), Ed Fredkin considered himself the greatestprogrammer in the world.A dark-haired man with warm brown eyes behind glasses that rested on a nose witha slight intellectual hook, Fredkin had never finished college. He'd learnedcomputers in the Air Force in 1956, as one of the first men working on the SAGEcomputer air defense system, then reputed to be the most complicated systemknown to man. Fredkin and nineteen others began an intensive course in thebudding field of computation memory drums, logic, communications, andprogramming. Fredkin later recalled, in his soothing, story-teller voice, "After aweek, everyone dropped out but me."Ed Fredkin did not fall into computers head-over-heels as had Kotok, Samson,Greenblatt, or Gosper in some ways he was a very measured man, too much anintellectual polyglot to fixate solely on computers. But he was intensely curiousabout them, so after leaving the service he took a job at MIT-affiliated LincolnLab, where he soon earned the reputation of top program bummer around. Hecould consistently come up with original algorithms, some of which became wellknown as standard programming protocols. He also was one of the first to see thesignificance of the PDP-1 he knew about it before the prototype was built, andordered the very first one. He was talked out of the purchase by Bolt Beranek andNewman, who instead hired him to program the machine and write an assembler.Fredkin did so and modestly considered it a masterpiece of programming. Besidessystems work, Fredkin engaged in the kind of math hacking that would later be Bill