Levy_S-Hackers-Heroes-Computer-Revolution

6Winners and LosersBY 1966, when David Silver took his first elevator ride to the ninth floor of TechSquare, the AI lab was a showcase community, working under the hallowedprecepts of the Hacker Ethic. After a big Chinese dinner, the hackers would go at ituntil dawn, congregating around the PDP-6 to do what was most important in theworld to them. They would waddle back and forth with their printouts and theirmanuals, kibitzing around whoever was using the terminal at that time,appreciating the flair with which the programmer wrote his code. Obviously, thekey to the lab was cooperation and a joint belief in the mission of hacking. Thesepeople were passionately involved in technology, and as soon as he saw themDavid Silver wanted to spend all his time there.David Silver was fourteen years old. He was in the sixth grade, having been leftback twice. He could hardly read. His classmates often taunted him. Later, peoplewould reflect that his problem had been dyslexia; Silver would simply say that he"wasn't interested" in the teachers, the students, or anything that went on in school.He was interested in building systems.From the time he was six or so, he had been going regularly to Eli Heffron'sjunkyard in Cambridge (where TMRC hackers also scavenged) and recovering allsorts of fascinating things. Once, when he was around ten, he came back with aradar dish, tore it apart, and rebuilt it so that it could pick up sounds he rigged it asa parabolic reflector, stuck in a microphone, and was able to pick up conversationsthousands of feet away. Mostly he used to listen to faraway cars, or birds, orinsects. He also built a lot of audio equipment, and dabbled in time-lapsephotography. Then he got interested in computers.His father was a scientist, a friend of Minsky's and a teacher at MIT. He had aterminal in his office connected to the Compatible Time-sharing System on theIBM 7094. David began working with it his first program was written in LISP, andtranslated English phrases into pig Latin. Then he began working on a program thatwould control a tiny robot he called it a "bug" which he built at home, out of oldtelephone relays that he got at Eli's. He hooked the bug to the terminal, and