Levy_S-Hackers-Heroes-Computer-Revolution

is this object you can tell what to do, and with no questions asked, it's doing whatyou tell it to. There are very few institutions where an eighteen-year-old person canget that to happen for him."People like Knight and Silver hacked so intensely and so well that they becamewinners. Others faced a long uphill climb, because once hackers felt that you werean obstacle to the general improvement of the overall system, you were a loser inthe worst sense and should be either cold-shouldered or told to leave outright.To some, that seemed cruel. A sensitive hacker named Brian Harvey wasparticularly upset at the drastically enforced standard. Harvey successfully passedmuster himself. While working on the computer he discovered some bugs in theTECO editor, and when he pointed them out, people said, fine now go fix them. Hedid, realized that the process of debugging was more fun than using a programyou'd debugged, and set about looking for more bugs to fix. One day while he washacking TECO, Greenblatt stood behind him, stroking his chin as Harveyhammered in some code, and said, "I guess we ought to start paying you." That wasthe way you were hired in the lab. Only winners were hired.But Harvey did not like it when other people were fingered as losers, treated likepariahs simply because they were not brilliant. Harvey thought that Marvin Minskyhad a lot to do with promulgating that attitude. (Minsky later insisted that all he didwas allow the hackers to run things themselves "the system was open and literallyencouraged people to try it out, and if they were harmful or incompetent, they'd beencouraged to go away.") Harvey recognized that, while on the one hand the AIlab, fueled by the Hacker Ethic, was "a great intellectual garden," on the other handit was flawed by the fact that who you were didn't matter as much as what kind ofhacker you were.Some people fell right into a trap of trying so hard to be a winner on the machinethat they were judged instantly as losers: for instance, Gerry Sussman, who arrivedat MIT as a cocky seventeen year-old. Having been an adolescent electronicsjunkie and high school computer fan, the first thing he did when he arrived at MITwas to seek a computer. Someone pointed him to Tech Square. He asked a personwho seemed to belong there if he could play with the computer. Richard Greenblattsaid, go ahead, play with it.So Sussman began working on a program. Not long after, this odd-looking baldguy came over. Sussman figured the guy was going to boot him out, but instead theman sat down, asking, "Hey, what are you doing?" Sussman talked over hisprogram with the man, Marvin Minsky. At one point in the discussion, Sussmantold Minsky that he was using a certain randomizing technique in his programbecause he didn't want the machine to have any preconceived notions. Minsky said,