Levy_S-Hackers-Heroes-Computer-Revolution

sanctified objects, things you nurture and preserve and ultimately hand over to yourgrandchildren. "I'm a fanatic," he would later explain. "A tool should be in its rightplace, cleaned and ready to use." So he not only locked up all his tools but wouldforbid the hackers to even enter his work space, which he cordoned off by settingup a rope fence and painting stripes on the floor.Bennett could not prevent the inevitable result of drawing a line and telling hackersthey could not cross. He would come in and see his tools had been used, and wouldcomplain to Minsky. He would threaten to quit; Noftsker recalls him threatening tobooby-trap his area. He would especially demand that Minsky take vengeance onNelson, whom he apparently saw as the worst offender. Minsky or Noftsker mightgo through the motions of reprimanding Nelson, but privately they considered thedrama rather amusing. Eventually Noftsker would come up with the idea of givingeach hacker his own toolbox, with responsibility for his own tools, but that didn'twork out particularly well. When a hacker wants something on a machine adjusted,or wants to create a quick hardware hack, he'll use anything available, whether itbelongs to a friend or whether it is one of Bill Bennett's pampered possessions. Onetime Nelson used the latter, a screwdriver, and in the course of his work marked itup somewhat. When Bennett came in the next day and found a damagedscrewdriver, he went straight for Nelson.Nelson was normally very quiet, but at times he would explode. Gosper laterdescribed it: "Nelson was an incredible arguer. If you cornered Nelson, he wouldturn from this mousy little guy to a complete savage." So, Gosper later recalled,Nelson and Bennett got into a shouting match, and during the course of it Nelsonsaid that the screwdriver was just about "used up," anyway.Used up? It was an incredibly offensive philosophy to Bennett. "This causedsmoke to come out of Bennett's ears," Gosper later recounted. "He just blew up."To people like Bennett, things are not passed along from person to person untilthey are no longer useful. They are not like a computer program which you writeand polish, then leave around so others without asking your permission can workon it, add new features, recast it in their own image, and then leave it for the nextperson to improve, the cycle repeating itself all over when someone builds fromscratch a gorgeous new program to do the same thing. That might be what hackersbelieved, but Bill Bennett thought that tools were something you owned, somethingprivate. These hackers actually thought that a person was entitled to use a tool justbecause he thought he could do something useful with it. And when they werefinished, they would just toss it away, saying it was ... used up!Considering these diametrically opposed philosophies, it was no surprise thatBennett blew up at Nelson. Bennett would later say that his outbursts were alwaysquick, and followed by the usual good will that existed between himself and the