Levy_S-Hackers-Heroes-Computer-Revolution

master key was a magic sword to wave away evil. Evil, of course, was a lockeddoor. Even if no tools were behind locked doors, the locks symbolized the powerof bureaucracy, a power that would eventually be used to prevent fullimplementation of the Hacker Ethic. Bureaucracies were always threatened bypeople who wanted to know how things worked. Bureaucrats knew their survivaldepended on keeping people in ignorance, by using artificial means like locks tokeep people under control. So when an administrator upped the ante in this war byinstalling a new lock, or purchasing a Class Two safe (government-certified forclassified material), the hackers would immediately work to crack the lock, openthe safe. In the latter case, they went to a super-ultra-techno surplus yard in Taunton,found a similar Class Two safe, took it back to the ninth floor, and opened it upwith acetylene torches to find out how the locks and tumblers worked.With all this lock hacking, the AI lab was an administrator's nightmare. RussNoftsker knew; he was the administrator. He had arrived at Tech Square in 1965with an engineering degree from the University of Mexico, an interest in artificialintelligence, and a friend who worked at Project MAC. He met Minsky, whoseprime grad student-administrator, Dan Edwards, had just left the lab. Minsky,notoriously uninterested in administration, needed someone to handle thepaperwork of the AI lab, which was eventually to split from Project MAC into aseparate entity with its own government funding. So Marvin hired Noftsker, who inturn officially hired Greenblatt, Nelson, and Gosper as full-time hackers.Somehow, Noftsker had to keep this electronic circus in line with the values andpolicy of the Institute.Noftsker, a compactly built blond with pursed features and blue eyes which couldalternatively look dreamy or troubled, was no stranger to weird technologicalexploits: when he was in school, he had hacked explosives with a friend. Theyworked for a high-tech company and took their salaries in primacord (a highlycombustible material) or dynamite, and set off explosions in caves to see howmany spiders they could blow out, or see how much primacord it took to split asixty-five-gallon drum in half. Noftsker's friend once was melting thirty pounds ofTNT late one night in his mother's oven when it caught fire the oven andrefrigerator actually melted, and the boy was in the awkward position of having togo to the next-door neighbors' and say, "Excuse me, uh, I think it would be a goodidea if you kind of, uh, moved down the street a little ways..." Noftsker knew he'dbeen lucky to survive those days; yet, according to Gosper, Noftsker later wouldcook up a plan for clearing snow from his sidewalk with primacord, until his wifeput a stop to the idea. Noftsker also shared the hacker aversion to cigarette smoke,and would sometimes express his displeasure by shooting a jet of pure oxygenfrom a canister he kept for that purpose; the astonished smoker would find his orher cigarette bursting into a fierce orange blur. Obviously, Noftsker understood theconcept of technological extremism to maintain a convivial environment.