Levy_S-Hackers-Heroes-Computer-Revolution

or machines, and they would toss him enormous chunks of knowledge. This wouldbe transmitted in the colorful hacker jargon, loaded with odd, teddy-bearishvariations on the English language. Words like winnitude, Greenblattful, gronk,and foo were staples of the hacker vocabulary, shorthand for relatively nonverbalpeople to communicate exactly what was on their minds.Silver had all sorts of questions. Some of them were very basic: What are thevarious pieces computers are made of? What are control systems made of? But ashe got more deeply into robotics he found that the questions you had to ask weredouble-edged. You had to consider things in almost cosmic terms before you couldcreate reality for a robot. What is a point? What is velocity? What is acceleration?Questions about physics, questions about numbers, questions about information,questions about the representation of things ... it got to the point. Silver realizedlater, where he was "asking basic philosophical questions like what am I, what isthe universe, what are computers, what can you use them for, and how does thatrelate? At that time all those questions were interesting, because it was the firsttime I had started to contemplate. And started to know enough about computers,and was relating biological-, human-, and animal-type functions, and starting torelate them to science and technology and computers. I began to realize that therewas this idea that you could do things with computers that are similar to the thingsintelligent beings do."Silver's guru was Bill Gosper. They would often go off to one of the dorms for Ping-Pong, go out for Chinese food, or talk about computers and math. All the while,Silver was soaking up knowledge in this Xanadu above Cambridge. It was a schoolno one else knew about, and for the first time in his life he was happy.The computer and the community around it had freed him, and soon David Silverfelt ready to do serious work on the PDP-6. He wanted to write a big, complicatedprogram: he wanted to modify his little robot "bug" so that it would use thetelevision camera to actually "fetch" things that people would toss on the floor. Thehackers were not fazed at the fact that no one, even experienced people with accessto all sorts of sophisticated equipment, had really done anything similar. Silverwent about it in his usual inquisitive style, going to ten or twenty hackers andasking each about a specific section of the vision part of the program. High-techTom Sawyer, painting a fence with assembly code. Hardware problems, he'd askNelson. Systems problems, Greenblatt. For math formulas, Gosper. And then he'dask people to help him with a subroutine on that problem. When he got all thesubroutines, he worked to put the program together, and he had his vision program.The bug itself was a foot long and seven inches wide, made of two small motorsstrapped together with a plastic harness. It had erector-set wheels on either end, anerector-set bar going across the top, and copper welding bars sticking out in front,