Levy_S-Hackers-Heroes-Computer-Revolution

instead of sailing past the end of a table it suddenly curved down, and when theopponent tried to hit it the ball would be spinning so furiously that it would fly offtoward the ceiling. Or he would chop at a ball to increase the spin so much that italmost flattened out, nearly exploding in mid-air from the centrifugal force. "Therewere times when in games I was having," Gosper would later say, "a ball would dosomething in mid-air, something unphysical, that would cause spectators to gasp. Ihave seen inexplicable things happen in mid-air. Those were interesting moments."Gosper was obsessed for a while with the idea of a robot playing the game. Thehackers actually did get the robot to hold a paddle and take a good swat at a balllobbed in its direction. Bill Bennett would later recall a time when Minsky steppedinto the robot arm's area, floodlit by the bright lights required by the vidiconcamera; the robot, seeing the glare reflecting from Minsky's bald dome, mistookthe professor for a large Ping-Pong ball and nearly decapitated him.Gosper wanted to go all the way, have the robot geared to move around and makeclever shots, perhaps with the otherworldly spin of a good Gosper volley. ButMinsky, who had actually done some of the hardware design for the ball-catchingmachine, did not think it an interesting problem. He considered it no different fromthe problem of shooting missiles out of the sky with other missiles, a task that theDefense Department seemed to have under control. Minsky dissuaded Gosper fromgoing ahead on the Ping-Pong project, and Gosper would later insist that that robotcould have changed history.Of course, the idea that a project like that was even considered was thrilling toDavid Silver. Minsky had allowed Silver to hang out on the ninth floor, and soonSilver had dropped out of school totally, so he could spend his time moreconstructively at Tech Square. Since hackers care less about people's age thanabout someone's potential contribution to hacking, fourteen-year-old David Silverwas accepted, at first as sort of a mascot.He immediately proved himself of some value by volunteering to do some tediouslock-hacking tasks. It was a time when the administration had installed a tough newsystem of high-security locks. Sometimes the slightly built teen-ager would spend awhole night crawling over false ceilings, to take apart a hallway's worth of locks,study them to see how the mastering system worked, and painstakingly reconstructthem before the administrators returned in the morning. Silver was very good atworking with machinist's tools, and he machined a certain blank which could befashioned into a key to open a particularly tough new lock. The lock was on a doorprotecting a room with a high-security safe which held ... keys. Once the hackersgot to that, the system "unraveled," in Silver's term.Silver saw the hackers as his teachers he could ask them anything about computers