Levy_S-Hackers-Heroes-Computer-Revolution

made the same stupid mistake. Only this time, on the display screen, he saw thatthe program was not looping, but displaying the part of his code which had gonewrong. Right in the middle of it, pointing to the illegal instruction he'd put in, was ahuge, gleaming, phosphorescent arrow. And flashing on the screen was the legend,"Fubar, you lose again!"Fubar did not respond graciously. He wailed about his program being vandalized.He was so incensed that he completely ignored the information that Nelson's hackhad given him about what he was doing wrong, and what he might do to fix it. Hewas not, as the hackers had somehow hoped, thankful that this wonderful featurehad been installed to help him find the error of his ways. The brilliance of the hackhad been wasted on him.The hackers had a word to describe those graduate students. It was the same wordthey used to describe almost anyone who pretended to know something aboutcomputers and could not back it up with hacker-level expertise. The word was"loser." The hackers were "winners." It was a binary distinction: people around theAI lab were one or the other. The sole criterion was hacking ability. So intense wasthe quest to improve the world by understanding and building systems that almostall other human traits were disregarded. You could be fourteen years old anddyslexic, and be a winner. Or you could be bright, sensitive, and willing to learn,and still be considered a loser.To a newcomer, the ninth floor was an intimidating, seemingly impenetrablepassion palace of science. Just standing around the likes of Greenblatt or Gosper orNelson could give you goose bumps. They would seem the smartest people in theworld. And since only one person at a time could use the PDP-6, it took a lot ofguts to sit down and learn things interactively. Still, anybody who had the hackerspirit in him would be so driven to compute that he would set self-doubt aside andbegin writing programs.Tom Knight, who drifted up to the the ninth floor as a startlingly tall and skinnyseventeen-year-old freshman in 1965, went through that process, eventuallyearning winner status. To do that, he later recalled, "You have to pretty much buryyourself in that culture. Long nights looking over the shoulder of people who weredoing interesting things that you didn't understand." What kept him going was hisfascination with the machine, how it let you build complicated systems completelyunder your control. In that sense, Knight later reflected, you had the same kind ofcontrol that a dictator had over a political system. But Knight also felt thatcomputers were an infinitely flexible artistic medium, one in which you couldexpress yourself by creating your own little universe. Knight later explained: "Here