Levy_S-Hackers-Heroes-Computer-Revolution

Fredkin wanted Nelson to work on, but for some reason Nelson couldn't getmotivated. Fredkin's company also needed at the same time a design for aninterface between a certain computer and a disk drive for data storage. Fredkinconsidered the latter a six man-month project, and wanted the other task done first.Nelson promised him that he'd get some results during the weekend. That nextMonday, Nelson came in with a giant piece of paper almost completely coveredwith tiny scrawlings, long lines connecting one block of scribblings to another, andevidence of frantic erasing and write-overs. It was not the PDP-7 program Fredkinhad asked for, but the entire disk-drive interface. Nelson had tried it as aconstructive escape from the assigned task. Fredkin's company built the piece ofequipment straight from that piece of paper, and it worked.Fredkin was delighted, but he still wanted the PDP-7 problem done, too. So hesaid, "Nelson, you and I are going to sit down and program this together. You writethis routine, and I'll write that." Since they did not have a PDP-7 around, they satdown at tables to write their pre-debugged assembly code. They began hackingaway. Maybe it was about then that Ed Fredkin realized, once and for all, that hewas not the best programmer in the world. Nelson was racing along as if it werejust a matter of how fast he could get his scribbles on paper. Fredkin was finallyovercome with curiosity and looked at Nelson's program. He couldn't believe it. Itwas bizarre. Totally non-obvious, a crazy quilt of interlacing subroutines. And itwas clear that it would work. "Stew," Fredkin burst out, "why on earth are youwriting it this way?" Nelson explained that he had once written something similaron the PDP-6, and instead of thinking about it he was merely transliterating theprevious routines, from memory, into PDP-7 code. A perfect example of the wayNelson's mind worked. He had his own behavior down to the point where he couldbum mental instructions, and minimize the work he did.It was clearly an approach that was better suited to working with machines than itwas to human interaction. Nelson was extremely shy, and Fredkin probably actedlike a father figure to the young hacker. He would later recall being startled oneday when Nelson marched into his office and said, "Guess what? I'm gettingmarried!"Fredkin would have judged that Nelson did not know how to go about asking afemale for a date, let alone tender a proposal of marriage. "Fantastic!" he said."Who's the lucky girl?""Oh, I don't know," said Nelson. "I just decided it would be a good thing to do."Fifteen years later, Nelson was still in Bachelor Mode.While women might not have been much of a presence in his life, Nelson did have