Levy_S-Hackers-Heroes-Computer-Revolution

HACKERSHeroes of the Computer RevolutionSTEVEN LEVYTo TeresaA Delta BookPublished byDell Publishinga division ofBantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc.1540 BroadwayNew York, New York 10036"All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace" excerptedfrom The Pill Versus the Springhill Mine Disaster by RichardBrautigan.Copyright © 1968 by Richard Brautigan.Reprinted with permission of Delacorte Press.Copyright © 1984 by Steven LevyAfterword copyright © 1994 by Steven LevyAll rights are ours. No part of this book may be reproduced ortransmitted in any form or by any means, electronic ormechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by anyinformation storage and retrieval system, without the writtenpermission of the Publisher, except where permitted by

conscience. For information address Doubleday, New York,New York.The trademark Delta® is registered in the U.S. Patent andTrademark Office.ISBN: 0-385-31210-5Manufactured in the United States of America Publishedsimultaneously in CanadaFebruary 199410 987654321 RRH

Contents●●●●●●●●●PrefaceWho's WhoPart One: True Hackers1. The Tech Model Railroad Club2. The Hacker Ethic3. Spacewar4. Greenblatt and Gosper5. The Midnight Computer Wiring Society6. Winners and Losers7. LIFEPart Two: Hardware Hackers8. Revolt in 21009. Every Man a God10. The Homebrew Computer Club11. Tiny BASIC12. Woz13. SecretsPart Three: Game Hackers14. The Wizard and the Princess15. The Brotherhood16. The Third Generation17. Summer Camp18. Frogger19. Applefest20. Wizard vs. WizardsEpilogue: The Last of the True HackersAfterwordAcknowledgmentsNotes

PrefaceI was first drawn to writing about hackers those computer programmers anddesigners who regard computing as the most important thing in the world becausethey were such fascinating people. Though some in the field used the term"hacker" as a form of derision, implying that hackers were either nerdy socialoutcasts or "unprofessional" programmers who wrote dirty, "nonstandard"computer code, I found them quite different. Beneath their often unimposingexteriors, they were adventurers, visionaries, risk-takers, artists ... and the oneswho most clearly saw why the computer was a truly revolutionary tool. Amongthemselves, they knew how far one could go by immersion into the deepconcentration of the hacking mind-set: one could go infinitely far. I came tounderstand why true hackers consider the term an appellation of honor rather thana pejorative.As I talked to these digital explorers, ranging from those who tamed multimilliondollarmachines in the 1950s to contemporary young wizards who masteredcomputers in their suburban bedrooms, I found a common element, a commonphilosophy which seemed tied to the elegantly flowing logic of the computer itself.It was a philosophy of sharing, openness, decentralization, and getting your handson machines at any cost to improve the machines, and to improve the world. ThisHacker Ethic is their gift to us: something with value even to those of us with nointerest at all in computers.It is an ethic seldom codified, but embodied instead in the behavior of hackersthemselves. I would like to introduce you to these people who not only saw butlived the magic in the computer, and worked to liberate the magic so it couldbenefit us all. The people include the true hackers of the MIT artificial intelligencelab in the fifties and sixties; the populist, less sequestered hardware hackers inCalifornia in the seventies; and the young game hackers who made their mark inthe personal computer age of the eighties.This is in no way a formal history of the computer era, or of the particular arenas Ifocus upon. Indeed, many of the people you will meet here are not the mostfamous names (certainly not the most wealthy) in the annals of computing.Instead, these are the backroom geniuses who understood the machine at its mostprofound levels, and presented us with a new kind of life-style and a new kind of

hero.Hackers like Richard Greenblatt, Bill Gosper, Lee Felsenstein, and John Harris arethe spirit and soul of computing itself. I believe their story their vision, theirintimacy with the machine itself, their experiences inside their peculiar world, andtheir sometimes dramatic, sometimes absurd "interfaces" with the outside world isthe real story of the computer revolution.

Who's Who: The Wizards and theirMachinesBob AlbrechtFounder of People's Computer Company who took visceral pleasure inexposing youngsters to computers.Altair 8800The pioneering microcomputer that galvanized hardware hackers. Buildingthis kit made you learn hacking. Then you tried to figure out what to dowith it.Apple IISteve Wozniak's friendly, flaky, good-looking computer, wildly successfuland the spark and soul of a thriving industry.Atari 800This home computer gave great graphics to game hackers like John Harris,though the company that made it was loath to tell you how it worked.Bob and Carolyn BoxWorld-record-holding gold prospectors turned software stars, working forSierra On-Line.Doug CarlstonCorporate lawyer who chucked it all to form the Broderbund softwarecompany.Bob DavisLeft job in liquor store to become bestselling author of Sierra On-Linecomputer game "Ulysses and the Golden Fleece." Success was hisdownfall.Peter DeutschBad in sports, brilliant at math, Peter was still in short pants when hestumbled on the TX-0 at MIT and hacked it along with the masters.

Steve DompierHomebrew member who first made Altair sing, and later wrote the "Target"game on the Sol which entranced Tom Snyder.John DraperThe notorious "Captain Crunch" who fearlessly explored phone systems,got jailed, later hacked microcomputers. Cigarettes made him violent.Mark DuchaineauThe young Dungeonmaster who copy-protected On-Line's disks at hiswhim.ChrisEspinosa Fourteen-year-old follower of Steve Wozniak and early Appleemployee.Lee FelsensteinFormer "military editor" of Berkeley Barb, and hero of an imaginaryscience-fiction novel, he designed computers with "junkyard" approach andwas central figure in Bay Area hardware hacking in the seventies.Ed FredkinGentle founder of Information International, thought himself world'sgreatest programmer until he met Stew Nelson. Father figure to hackers.Gordon FrenchSilver-haired hardware hacker whose garage held not cars but hishomebrewed Chicken Hawk computer, then held the first HomebrewComputer Club meeting.Richard GarriottAstronaut's son who, as Lord British, created the Ultima world on computerdisks.Bill GatesCocky wizard, Harvard dropout who wrote Altair BASIC, and complainedwhen hackers copied it.Bill GosperHorowitz of computer keyboards, master math and LIFE hacker at MIT AIlab, guru of the Hacker Ethic and student of Chinese restaurant menus.

Richard GreenblattSingle-minded, unkempt, prolific, and canonical MIT hacker who went intonight phase so often that he zorched his academic career. The hacker'shacker.John HarrisThe young Atari 800 game hacker who became Sierra On-Line's starprogrammer, but yearned for female companionship.IBM PCIBM's entry into the personal computer market which amazingly included abit of the Hacker Ethic, and took over.IBM704 IBM was The Enemy, and this was its machine, the Hulking Giantcomputer in MIT's Building 26. Later modified into the IBM 709, then theIBM 7090. Batch-processed and intolerable. Jerry Jewell Vietnam vetturned programmer who founded Sirius Software.Steven JobsVisionary, beaded, non-hacking youngster who took Wozniak's Apple II,made lots of deals, and formed a company that would make a billiondollars.Tom KnightAt sixteen, an MIT hacker who would name the Incompatible Time-sharingSystem. Later, a Greenblatt nemesis over the LISP machine schism.Alan KotokThe chubby MIT student from Jersey who worked under the rail layout atTMRC, learned the phone system at Western Electric, and became alegendary TX-0 and PDP-1 hacker.Efrem LipkinHacker-activist from New York who loved machines but hated their uses.Co-founded Community Memory; friend of Felsenstein.LISP MachineThe ultimate hacker computer, invented mostly by Greenblatt and subjectof a bitter dispute at MIT.

"Uncle" John McCarthyAbsent-minded but brilliant MIT (later Stanford) professor who helpedpioneer computer chess, artificial intelligence, LISP.Bob MarshBerkeley-ite and Homebrewer who shared garage with Felsenstein andfounded Processor Technology, which made the Sol computer.Roger MelenHomebrewer who co-founded Cromemco company to make circuit boardsfor Altair. His "Dazzler" played LIFE program on his kitchen table.Louis MertonPseudonym for the AI chess hacker whose tendency to go catatonic broughtthe hacker community together.Jude MilhonMet Lee Felsenstein through a classified ad in the Berkeley Barb, andbecame more than a friend a member of the Community Memorycollective.Marvin MinskyPlayful and brilliant MIT prof who headed AI lab and allowed the hackersto run free.Fred MooreVagabond pacifist who hated money, loved technology, and co-foundedHomebrew Club.Stewart NelsonBuck-toothed, diminutive, but fiery AI lab hacker who connected the PDP-1 computer to hack the phone system. Later co-founded Systems Conceptscompany.Ted NelsonSelf-described "innovator" and noted curmudgeon who self-published theinfluential Computer Lib book.Russell NoftskerHarried administrator of MIT AI lab in late sixties; later president ofSymbolics company.

Adam OsborneBangkok-born publisher-turned-computer-manufacturer who consideredhimself a philosopher. Founded Osborne Computer Company to make"adequate" machines.PDP-1Digital Equipment's first minicomputer, and in 1961 an interactive godsendto the MIT hackers and a slap in the face to IBM fascism.PDP-6Designed in part by Kotok, this mainframe computer was cornerstone of AIlab, with its gorgeous instruction set and sixteen sexy registers.Tom PittmanThe religious Homebrew hacker who lost his wife but kept the faith withhis Tiny BASIC.Ed RobertsEnigmatic founder of MITS company who shook the world with his Altaircomputer. He wanted to help people build mental pyramids.Steve (Slug) RussellMcCarthy's "coolie," who hacked the Spacewar program, first videogame,on the PDP-1. Never made a dime from it.Peter SamsonMIT hacker, one of the first, who loved systems, trains, TX-0, music,parliamentary procedure, pranks, and hacking.Bob Saunders Jollybalding TMRC hacker who married early, hacked till late at night eating"lemon gunkies," and mastered the "CBS strategy" on Spacewar.Warren SchwaderBig blond hacker from rural Wisconsin who went from the assembly line tosoftware stardom but couldn't reconcile the shift with his devotion toJehovah's Witnesses.David SilverLeft school at fourteen to be mascot of AI lab; maker of illicit keys andbuilder of a tiny robot that did the impossible.

Dan SokolLong-haired prankster who reveled in revealing technological secrets atHomebrew Club. Helped "liberate" Altair BASIC program on paper tape.Sol ComputerLee Felsenstein's terminal-and-computer, built in two frantic months,almost the computer that turned things around. Almost wasn't enough.Les SolomonEditor of Popular Eletronics, the puller of strings who set the computerrevolution into motion.Marty SpergelThe Junk Man, the Homebrew member who supplied circuits and cablesand could make you a deal for anything.Richard StallmanThe Last of the Hackers, who vowed to defend the principles of hackerismto the bitter end. Remained at MIT until there was no one to eat Chinesefood with.Jeff StephensonThirty-year-old martial arts veteran and hacker who was astounded thatjoining Sierra On-Line meant enrolling in Summer Camp.Jay SullivanMaddeningly calm wizard-level programmer at Informatics who impressedKen Williams by knowing the meaning of the word "any."Dick SunderlandChalk-complexioned MBA who believed that firm managerial bureaucracywas a worthy goal, but as president of Sierra On-Line found that hackersdidn't think that way. Gerry Sussman Young MIT hacker branded "loser"because he smoked a pipe and "munged" his programs; later became"winner" by algorithmic magic.Margot TommervikWith her husband Al, long-haired Margot parlayed her game showwinnings into a magazine that deified the Apple Computer.Tom Swift TerminalLee Felsenstein's legendary, never-to-be-built computer terminal which

would give the user ultimate leave to get his hands on the world.TX-0Filled a small room, but in the late fifties this $3 million machine wasworld's first personal computer for the community of MIT hackers thatformed around it.Jim WarrenPortly purveyor of "techno-gossip" at Homebrew, he was first editor ofhippie-styled Dr. Dobbs Journal, later started the lucrative Computer Faire.Randy WiggintonFifteen-year-old member of Steve Wozniak's kiddie corps, he helped Woztrundle the Apple II to Homebrew. Still in high school when he becameApple's first software employee.Ken WilliamsArrogant and brilliant young programmer who saw the writing on the CRTand started Sierra On-Line to make a killing and improve society by sellinggames for the Apple computer.Roberta WilliamsKen Williams' timid wife who rediscovered her own creativity by writing"Mystery House," the first of her many bestselling computer games.Stephen "Woz" WozniakOpenhearted, technologically daring hardware hacker from San Josesuburbs, Woz built the Apple Computer for the pleasure of himself andfriends.

Part OneTrue HackersCambridge:The Fifties and Sixties1The Tech Model Railroad ClubJUST why Peter Samson was wandering around in Building 26 in the middle of thenight is a matter that he would find difficult to explain. Some things are not spoken.If you were like the people whom Peter Samson was coming to know and befriendin this, his freshman year at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the winterof 1958-59, no explanation would be required. Wandering around the labyrinth oflaboratories and storerooms, searching for the secrets of telephone switching inmachine rooms, tracing paths of wires or relays in subterranean steam tunnels ... forsome, it was common behavior, and there was no need to justify the impulse, whenconfronted with a closed door with an unbearably intriguing noise behind it, toopen the door uninvited. And then, if there was no one to physically bar access towhatever was making that intriguing noise, to touch the machine, start flickingswitches and noting responses, and eventually to loosen a screw, unhook atemplate, jiggle some diodes and tweak a few connections. Peter Samson and hisfriends had grown up with a specific relationship to the world, wherein things hadmeaning only if you found out how they worked. And how would you go aboutthat if not by getting your hands on them?

It was in the basement of Building 26 that Samson and his friends discovered theEAM room. Building 26 was a long glass-and-steel structure, one of MIT'sbuildings, contrasting with the venerable pillared structures that fronted theInstitute on Massachusetts Avenue. In the basement of this building void ofpersonality, the EAM room. Electronic Accounting Machinery. A room that housedmachines which ran like computers.Not many people in 1959 had even seen a computer, let alone touched one.Samson, a wiry, curly-haired redhead with a way of extending his vowels so that itwould seem he was racing through lists of possible meanings of statements in midword,had viewed computers on his visits to MIT from his hometown of Lowell,Massachusetts, less than thirty miles from campus. This made him a "Cambridgeurchin," one of dozens of science-crazy high schoolers in the region who weredrawn, as if by gravitational pull, to the Cambridge campus. He had even tried torig up his own computer with discarded parts of old pinball machines: they werethe best source of logic elements he could find.Logic elements: the term seems to encapsulate what drew Peter Samson, son of amill machinery repairman, to electronics. The subject made sense. When you growup with an insatiable curiosity as to how things work, the delight you find upondiscovering something as elegant as circuit logic, where all connections have tocomplete their loops, is profoundly thrilling. Peter Samson, who early onappreciated the mathematical simplicity of these things, could recall seeing atelevision show on Boston's public TV channel, WGBH, which gave a rudimentaryintroduction to programming a computer in its own language. It fired hisimagination: to Peter Samson, a computer was surely like Aladdin's lamp rub it,and it would do your bidding. So he tried to learn more about the field, builtmachines of his own, entered science project competitions and contests, and wentto the place that people of his ilk aspired to: MIT. The repository of the verybrightest of those weird high school kids with owl-like glasses and underdevelopedpectorals who dazzled math teachers and flunked PE, who dreamed not of scoringon prom night, but of getting to the finals of the General Electric Science Faircompetition. MIT, where he would wander the hallways at two o'clock in themorning, looking for something interesting, and where he would indeed discoversomething that would help draw him deeply into a new form of creative process,and a new life-style, and would put him into the forefront of a society envisionedonly by a few science-fiction writers of mild disrepute. He would discover acomputer that he could play with.The EAM room which Samson had chanced on was loaded with large keypunchmachines the size of squat file cabinets. No one was protecting them: the room wasstaffed only by day, when a select group who had attained official clearance wereprivileged enough to submit long manila cards to operators who would then use

these machines to punch holes in them according to what data the privileged oneswanted entered on the cards. A hole in the card would represent some instruction tothe computer, telling it to put a piece of data somewhere, or perform a function ona piece of data, or move a piece of data from one place to another. An entire stackof these cards made one computer program, a program being a series of instructionswhich yield some expected result, just as the instructions in a recipe, whenprecisely followed, lead to a cake. Those cards would be taken to yet anotheroperator upstairs who would feed the cards into a "reader" that would note wherethe holes were and dispatch this information to the IBM 704 computer on the firstfloor of Building 26. The Hulking Giant.The IBM 704 cost several million dollars, took up an entire room, needed constantattention from a cadre of professional machine operators, and required special airconditioningso that the glowing vacuum tubes inside it would not heat up to datadestroyingtemperatures. When the air-conditioning broke down a fairly commonoccurrence a loud gong would sound, and three engineers would spring from anearby office to frantically take covers off the machine so its innards wouldn't melt.All these people in charge of punching cards, feeding them into readers, andpressing buttons and switches on the machine were what was commonly called aPriesthood, and those privileged enough to submit data to those most holy priestswere the official acolytes. It was an almost ritualistic exchange.Acolyte:Oh machine, would you accept my offer of information so you may run myprogram and perhaps give me a computation?Priest (on behalf of the machine):We will try. We promise nothing.As a general rule, even these most privileged of acolytes were not allowed directaccess to the machine itself, and they would not be able to see for hours, sometimesfor days, the results of the machine's ingestion of their "batch" of cards.This was something Samson knew, and of course it frustrated the hell out ofSamson, who wanted to get at the damn machine. For this was what life was allabout.What Samson did not know, and was delighted to discover, was that the EAMroom also had a particular keypunch machine called the 407. Not only could itpunch cards, but it could also read cards, sort them, and print them on listings. Noone seemed to be guarding these machines, which were computers, sort of. Ofcourse, using them would be no picnic: one needed to actually wire up what wascalled a plug board, a two-inch-by-two-inch plastic square with a mass of holes in

it. If you put hundreds of wires through the holes in a certain order, you would getsomething that looked like a rat's nest but would fit into this electromechanicalmachine and alter its personality. It could do what you wanted it to do.So, without any authorization whatsoever, that is what Peter Samson set out to do,along with a few friends of his from an MIT organization with a special interest inmodel railroading. It was a casual, unthinking step into a science-fiction future, butthat was typical of the way that an odd subculture was pulling itself up by itsbootstraps and growing to underground prominence to become a culture that wouldbe the impolite, unsanctioned soul of computerdom. It was among the firstcomputer hacker escapades of the Tech Model Railroad Club, or TMPC.Peter Samson had been a member of the Tech Model Railroad Club since his firstweek at MIT in the fall of 1958. The first event that entering MIT freshmenattended was a traditional welcoming lecture, the same one that had been given foras long as anyone at MIT could remember. Look at the person to your left ... look atthe person to your right ... one of you three will not graduate from the Institute.The intended effect of the speech was to create that horrid feeling in the back of thecollective freshman throat that signaled unprecedented dread. All their lives, thesefreshmen had been almost exempt from academic pressure. The exemption hadbeen earned by virtue of brilliance. Now each of them had a person to the right anda person to the left who was just as smart. Maybe even smarter.But to certain students this was no challenge at all. To these youngsters, classmateswere perceived in a sort of friendly haze: maybe they would be of assistance in theconsuming quest to find out how things worked, and then to master them. Therewere enough obstacles to learning already why bother with stupid things likebrown-nosing teachers and striving for grades? To students like Peter Samson, thequest meant more than the degree.Sometime after the lecture came Freshman Midway. All the campus organizationsspecial-interest groups, fraternities, and such set up booths in a large gymnasium totry to recruit new members. The group that snagged Peter was the Tech ModelRailroad Club. Its members, bright-eyed and crew-cutted upperclass-men whospoke with the spasmodic cadences of people who want words out of the way in ahurry, boasted a spectacular display of HO gauge trains they had in a permanentclubroom in Building 20. Peter Samson had long been fascinated by trains,especially subways. So he went along on the walking tour to the building, a shinglecladtemporary structure built during World War II. The hallways were cavernous,and even though the clubroom was on the second floor it had the dank, dimly litfeel of a basement.

The clubroom was dominated by the huge train layout. It just about filled the room,and if you stood in the little control area called "the notch" you could see a littletown, a little industrial area, a tiny working trolley line, a papier-mache mountain,and of course a lot of trains and tracks. The trains were meticulously Grafted toresemble their full-scale counterparts, and they chugged along the twists and turnsof track with picture-book perfection.And then Peter Samson looked underneath the chest-high boards which held thelayout. It took his breath away. Underneath this layout was a more massive matrixof wires and relays and crossbar switches than Peter Samson had ever dreamedexisted. There were neat regimental lines of switches, and achingly regular rows ofdull bronze relays, and a long, rambling tangle of red, blue, and yellow wirestwisting and twirling like a rainbow-colored explosion of Einstein's hair. It was anincredibly complicated system, and Peter Samson vowed to find out how it worked.The Tech Model Railroad Club awarded its members a key to the clubroom afterthey logged forty hours of work on the layout. Freshman Midway had been on aFriday. By Monday, Peter Samson had his key.There were two factions of TMRC. Some members loved the idea of spending theirtime building and painting replicas of certain trains with historical and emotionalvalue, or creating realistic scenery for the layout. This was the knife-and-paintbrushcontingent, and it subscribed to railroad magazines and booked the club for trips onaging train lines. The other faction centered on the Signals and PowerSubcommittee of the club, and it cared far more about what went on under thelayout. This was The System, which worked something like a collaborationbetween Rube Goldberg and Wemher von Braun, and it was constantly beingimproved, revamped, perfected, and sometimes "gronked" in club jargon, screwedup. S&P people were obsessed with the way The System worked, its increasingcomplexities, how any change you made would affect other parts, and how youcould put those relationships between the parts to optimal use.Many of the parts for The System had been donated by the Western ElectricCollege Gift Plan, directly from the phone company. The club's faculty advisor wasalso in charge of the campus phone system, and had seen to it that sophisticatedphone equipment was available for the model railroaders. Using that equipment asa starting point, the Railroaders had devised a scheme which enabled severalpeople to control trains at once, even if the trains were at different parts of the sametrack. Using dials appropriated from telephones, the TMRC "engineers" could

specify which block of track they wanted control of, and run a train from there.This was done by using several types of phone company relays, including crossbarexecutors and step switches which let you actually hear the power being transferredfrom one block to another by an otherworldly chunka-chunka-chunka sound.It was the S&P group who devised this fiendishly ingenious scheme, and it was theS&P group who harbored the kind of restless curiosity which led them to rootaround campus buildings in search of ways to get their hands on computers. Theywere lifelong disciples of a Hands-On Imperative. Head of S&P was an upperclassmannamed Bob Saunders, with ruddy, bulbous features, an infectious laugh,and a talent for switch gear. As a child in Chicago, he had built a high-frequencytransformer for a high school project; it was his six-foot-high version of a Teslacoil, something devised by an engineer in the 1800s which was supposed to sendout furious waves of electrical power. Saunders said his coil project managed toblow out television reception for blocks around. Another person who gravitated toS&P was Alan Kotok, a plump, chinless, thick-spectacled New Jerseyite inSamson's class. Kotok's family could recall him, at age three, prying a plug out of awall with a screwdriver and causing a hissing shower of sparks to erupt. When hewas six, he was building and wiring lamps. In high school he had once gone on atour of the Mobil Research Lab in nearby Haddonfield, and saw his first computerthe exhilaration of that experience helped him decide to enter MIT. In his freshmanyear, he earned a reputation as one of TMRC's most capable S&P people.The S&P people were the ones who spent Saturdays going to Eli Heffron'sjunkyard in Somerville scrounging for parts, who would spend hours on their backsresting on little rolling chairs they called "bunkies" to get underneath tight spots inthe switching system, who would work through the night making the whollyunauthorized connection between the TMRC phone and the East Campus.Technology was their playground.The core members hung out at the club for hours; constantly improving TheSystem, arguing about what could be done next, developing a jargon of their ownthat seemed incomprehensible to outsiders who might chance on these teen-agedfanatics, with their checked short-sleeve shirts, pencils in their pockets, chinopants, and, always, a bottle of Coca-Cola by their side. (TMRC purchased its ownCoke machine for the then forbidding sum of $165; at a tariff of five cents a bottle,the outlay was replaced in three months; to facilitate sales, Saunders built a changemachine for Coke buyers that was still in use a decade later.) When a piece ofequipment wasn't working, it was "losing"; when a piece of equipment was ruined,it was "munged" (Mash Until No Good); the two desks in the comer of the roomwere not called the office, but the "orifice"; one who insisted on studying forcourses was a "tool"; garbage was called "cruft"; and a project undertaken or aproduct built not solely to fulfill some constructive goal, but with some wild

That spring of 1959, a new course was offered at MIT. It was the first course inprogramming a computer that freshmen could take. The teacher was a distant manwith a wild shock of hair and an equally unruly beard John McCarthy. A mastermathematician, McCarthy was a classically absent-minded professor; storiesabounded about his habit of suddenly answering a question hours, sometimes evendays after it was first posed to him. He would approach you in the hallway, andwith no salutation would begin speaking in his robotically precise diction, as if thepause in conversation had been only a fraction of a second, and not a week. Mostlikely, his belated response would be brilliant.McCarthy was one of a very few people working in an entirely new form ofscientific inquiry with computers. The volatile and controversial nature of his fieldof study was obvious from the very arrogance of the name that McCarthy hadbestowed upon it: Artificial Intelligence. This man actually thought that computerscould be smart. Even at such a science-intensive place as MIT, most peopleconsidered the thought ridiculous: they considered computers to be useful, ifsomewhat absurdly expensive, tools for number-crunching huge calculations andfor devising missile defense systems (as MIT's largest computer, the Whirlwind,had done for the early-warning SAGE system), but scoffed at the thought thatcomputers themselves could actually be a scientific field of study. ComputerScience did not officially exist at MIT in the late fifties, and McCarthy and hisfellow computer specialists worked in the Electrical Engineering Department,which offered the course, No. 641, that Kotok, Samson, and a few other TMRCmembers took that spring.McCarthy had started a mammoth program on the IBM 704 the Hulking Giant thatwould give it the extraordinary ability to play chess. To critics of the budding fieldof Artificial Intelligence, this was just one example of the boneheaded optimism ofpeople like John McCarthy. But McCarthy had a certain vision of what computerscould do, and playing chess was only the beginning.All fascinating stuff, but not the vision that was driving Kotok and Samson and theothers. They wanted to learn how to work the damn machines, and while this newprogramming language called LISP that McCarthy was talking about in 641 wasinteresting, it was not nearly as interesting as the act of programming, or thatfantastic moment when you got your printout back from the Priesthood word fromthe source itself! and could then spend hours poring over the results of the program,what had gone wrong with it, how it could be improved. The TMRC hackers weredevising ways to get into closer contact with the IBM 704, which soon wasupgraded to a newer model called the 709. By hanging out at the computationcenter in the wee hours of the morning, and by getting to know the Priesthood, andby bowing and scraping the requisite number of times, people like Kotok were

eventually allowed to push a few buttons on the machine, and watch the lights as itworked. There were secrets to those IBM machines that had been painstakinglylearned by some of the older people at MIT with access to the 704 and friendsamong the Priesthood. Amazingly, a few of these programmers, grad studentsworking with McCarthy, had even written a program that utilized one of the rowsof tiny lights: the lights would be lit in such an order that it looked like a little ballwas being passed from right to left: if an operator hit a switch at just the right time,the motion of the lights could be reversed Computer Ping-Pong! This obviouslywas the kind of thing that you'd show off to impress your peers, who would thentake a look at the actual program you had written and see how it was done.To top the program, someone else might try to do the same thing with fewerinstructions a worthy endeavor, since there was so little room in the small"memory" of the computers of those days that not many instructions could fit intothem. John McCarthy had once noticed how his graduate students who loiteredaround the 704 would work over their computer programs to get the most out of thefewest instructions, and get the program compressed so that fewer cards wouldneed to be fed to the machine. Shaving off an instruction or two was almost anobsession with them. McCarthy compared these students to ski bums. They got thesame kind of primal thrill from "maximizing code" as fanatic skiers got fromswooshing frantically down a hill. So the practice of taking a computer programand trying to cut off instructions without affecting the outcome came to be called"program bumming," and you would often hear people mumbling things like"Maybe I can bum a few instructions out and get the octal correction card loaderdown to three cards instead of four."McCarthy in 1959 was turning his interest from chess to a new way of talking tothe computer, the whole new "language" called LISP. Alan Kotok and his friendswere more than eager to take over the chess project. Working on the batchprocessedIBM, they embarked on the gargantuan project of teaching the 704, andlater the 709, and even after that its replacement the 7090, how to play the game ofkings. Eventually Kotok's group became the largest users of computer time in theentire MIT computation center.Still, working with the IBM machine was frustrating. There was nothing worsethan the long wait between the time you handed in your cards and the time yourresults were handed back to you. If you had misplaced as much as one letter in oneinstruction, the program would crash, and you would have to start the wholeprocess over again. It went hand in hand with the stifling proliferation of goddamnrules that permeated the atmosphere of the computation center. Most of the ruleswere designed to keep crazy young computer fans like Samson and Kotok andSaunders physically distant from the machine itself. The most rigid rule of all wasthat no one should be able to actually touch or tamper with the machine itself. This,

of course, was what those Signals and Power people were dying to do more thananything else in the world, and the restrictions drove them mad.One priest a low-level sub-priest, really on the late-night shift was particularlynasty in enforcing this rule, so Samson devised a suitable revenge. While pokingaround at Eli's electronic junk shop one day, he chanced upon an electrical boardprecisely like the kind of board holding the clunky vacuum tubes which residedinside the IBM. One night, sometime before 4 A.M., this particular sub-prieststepped out for a minute; when he returned, Samson told him that the machinewasn't working, but they'd found the trouble and held up the totally smashedmodule from the old 704 he'd gotten at Eli's.The sub-priest could hardly get the words out. "W-where did you get that?"Samson, who had wide green eyes that could easily look maniacal, slowly pointedto an open place on the machine rack where, of course, no board had ever been, butthe space still looked sadly bare.The sub-priest gasped. He made faces that indicated his bowels were about to giveout. He whimpered exhortations to the deity. Visions, no doubt, of a million-dollardeduction from his paycheck began flashing before him. Only after his supervisor,a high priest with some understanding of the mentality of these young wiseguysfrom the Model Railroad Club, came and explained the situation did he calm down.He was not the last administrator to feel the wrath of a hacker thwarted in the questfor access.One day a former TMRC member who was now on the MIT faculty paid a visit tothe clubroom. His name was Jack Dennis. When he had been an undergraduate inthe early 1950s, he had worked furiously underneath the layout. Dennis lately hadbeen working a computer which MIT had just received from Lincoln Lab, amilitary development laboratory affiliated with the Institute. The computer wascalled the TX-0, and it was one of the first transistor-run computers in the world.Lincoln Lab had used it specifically to test a giant computer called the TX-2, whichhad a memory so complex that only with this specially built little brother could itsills be capably diagnosed. Now that its original job was over, the three-milliondollarTX-0 had been shipped over to the Institute on "long-term loan," andapparently no one at Lincoln Lab had marked a calendar with a return date. Dennisasked the S&P people at TMRC whether they would like to see it. Hey you nuns!Would you like to meet the Pope? The TX-0 was in Building 26, in the second-

floor Research Laboratory of Electronics (RLE), directly above the first-floorComputation Center which housed the hulking IBM 704. The RLE lab resembledthe control room of an antique spaceship. The TX-0, or Tixo, as it was sometimescalled, was for its time a midget machine, since it was one of the first computers touse finger-size transistors instead of hand-size vacuum tubes. Still, it took up muchof the room, along with its fifteen tons of supporting air-conditioning equipment.The TX-0's workings were mounted on several tall, thin chassis, like rugged metalbookshelves, with tangled wires and neat little rows of tiny, bottle-like containersin which the transistors were inserted. Another rack had a solid metal frontspeckled with grim-looking gauges. Facing the racks was an L-shaped console, thecontrol panel of this H. G. Wells spaceship, with a blue countertop for your elbowsand papers. On the short arm of the L stood a Flexowriter, which resembled atypewriter converted for tank warfare, its bottom anchored in a military grayhousing. Above the top were the control panels, boxlike protrusions painted aninstitutional yellow. On the sides of the boxes which faced the user were a fewgauges, several lines of quarter-inch blinking lights, a matrix of steel toggleswitches the size of large grains of rice, wid, best of all, an actual cathode ray tubedisplay, round and smoke-gray.The TMRC people were awed. This machine did not use cards. The user wouldfirst punch in a program onto a long, thin paper tape with a Flexowriter (there werea few extra Flexowriters in an adjoining room), then sit at the console, feed in theprogram by running the tape through a reader, and be able to sit there while theprogram ran. If something went wrong with the program, you knew immediately,and you could diagnose the problem by using some of the switches, or checking outwhich of the lights were blinking or lit. The computer even had an audio output:while the program ran, a speaker underneath the console would make a sort ofmusic, like a poorly tuned electric organ whose notes would vibrate with a fuzzy,ethereal din. The chords on this "organ" would change, depending on what data themachine was reading at any given microsecond; after you were familiar with thetones, you could actually hear what part of your program the computer wasworking on. You would have to discern this, though, over the clacking of theFlexowriter, which could make you think you were in the middle of a machine-gunbattle.Even more amazing was that, because of these "interactive" capabilities, and alsobecause users seemed to be allowed blocks of time to use the TX-0 all bythemselves, you could even modify a program while sitting at the computer. Amiracle!There was no way in hell that Kotok, Saunders, Samson, and the others were goingto be kept away from that machine. Fortunately, there didn't seem to be the kind ofbureaucracy surrounding the TX-0 that there was around the IBM 704. No cadre of

officious priests. The technician in charge was a canny white-haired Scotsmannamed John McKenzie. While he made sure that graduate students and thoseworking on funded projects Officially Sanctioned Users maintained access to themachine, McKenzie tolerated the crew of TMRC madmen who began to hang outin the RLE lab, where the TX-0 stood.Samson, Kotok, Saunders, and a freshman named Bob Wagner soon figured outthat the best time of all to hang out in Building 26 was at night, when no person inhis right mind would have signed up for an hour-long session on the piece of paperposted every Friday beside the air conditioner in the RLE lab. The TX-0 as a rulewas kept running twenty-four hours a day computers back then were too expensivefor their time to be wasted by leaving them idle through the night, and besides, itwas a hairy procedure to get the thing up and running once it was turned off. So theTMRC hackers, who soon were referring to themselves as TX-0 hackers, changedtheir life-style to accommodate the computer. They laid claim to what blocks oftime they could, and would "vulture time" with nocturnal visits to the lab on the offchance that someone who was scheduled for a 3 A.M. session might not show up."Oh!" Samson would say delightedly, a minute or so after someone failed to showup at the time designated in the logbook. "Make sure it doesn't go to waste!"It never seemed to, because the hackers were there almost all the time. If theyweren't in the RLE lab waiting for an opening to occur, they were in the classroomnext to the TMRC clubroom, the Tool Room, playing a "hangman"-style wordgame that Samson had devised called "Come Next Door," waiting for a call fromsomeone who was near the TX-0, monitoring it to see if someone had not shown upfor a session. The hackers recruited a network of informers to give advance noticeof potential openings at the computer if a research project was not ready with itsprogram in time, or a professor was sick, the word would be passed to TMRC andthe hackers would appear at the TX-0, breathless and ready to jam into the spacebehind the console.Though Jack Dennis was theoretically in charge of the operation, Dennis wasteaching courses at the time, and preferred to spend the rest of his time actuallywriting code for the machine. Dennis played the role of benevolent godfather to thehackers: he would give them a brief hands-on introduction to the machine, pointthem in certain directions, be amused at their wild programming ventures. He hadlittle taste for administration, though, and was just as happy to let John McKenzierun things. McKenzie early on recognized that the interactive nature of the TX-0was inspiring a new form of computer programming, and the hackers were itspioneers. So he did not lay down too many edicts.The atmosphere was loose enough in 1959 to accommodate the strays science-mad

people whose curiosity bumed like a hunger, who like Peter Samson would beexploring the uncharted maze of laboratories at MIT. The noise of the airconditioning,the audio output, and the drill-hammer Flexowriter would lure thesewanderers, who'd poke their heads into the lab like kittens peering into baskets ofyam.One of those wanderers was an outsider named Peter Deutsch. Even beforediscovering the TX-0, Deutsch had developed a fascination for computers. It beganone day when he picked up a manual that someone had discarded, a manual for anobscure form of computer language for doing calculations. Something about theorderliness of the computer instructions appealed to him: he would later describethe feeling as the same kind of eerily transcendent recognition that an artistexperiences when he discovers the medium that is absolutely right for him. This iswhere I belong. Deutsch tried writing a small program, and, signing up for timeunder the name of one of the priests, ran it on a computer. Within weeks, he hadattained a striking proficiency in programming. He was only twelve years old.He was a shy kid, strong in math and unsure of most everything else. He wasuncomfortably overweight, deficient in sports, but an intellectual star performer.His father was a professor at MIT, and Peter used that as his entree to explore thelabs.It was inevitable that he would be drawn to the TX-0. He first wandered into thesmall "Kluge Room" (a "kluge" is a piece of inelegantly constructed equipment thatseems to defy logic by working properly), where three on-line Flexowriters wereavailable for punching programs onto paper tape which would later be fed into theTX-0. Someone was busy punching in a tape. Peter watched for a while, then beganbombarding the poor soul with questions about that weird-looking little computerin the next room. Then Peter went up to the TX-0 itself, examined it closely, notinghow it differed from other computers: it was smaller, had a CRT display, and otherneat toys. He decided right then to act as if he had a perfect right to be there. He gothold of a manual and soon was startling people by spouting actual make-sensecomputer talk, and eventually was allowed to sign up for night and weekendsessions, and to write his own programs.McKenzie worried that someone might accuse him of running some sort of summercamp, with this short-pants little kid, barely tall enough to stick his head over theTX-0's console, staring at the code that an Officially Sanctioned User, perhapssome self-important graduate student, would be hammering into the Flexowriter,and saying in his squeaky, preadolescent voice something like "Your problem isthat this credit is wrong over here ... you need this other instruction over there," andthe self-important grad student would go crazy who is this little worm? and startscreaming at him to go out and play somewhere. Invariably, though, Peter

Deutsch's comments would turn out to be correct. Deutsch would also brazenlyannounce that he was going to write better programs than the ones currentlyavailable, and he would go and do it.Samson, Kotok, and the other hackers accepted Peter Deutsch: by virtue of hiscomputer knowledge he was worthy of equal treatment. Deutsch was not such afavorite with the Officially Sanctioned Users, especially when he sat behind themready to spring into action when they made a mistake on the Flexowriter.These Officially Sanctioned Users appeared at the TX-0 with the regularity ofcommuters. The programs they ran were statistical analyses, cross correlations,simulations of an interior of the nucleus of a cell. Applications. That was fine forUsers, but it was sort of a waste in the minds of the hackers. What hackers had inmind was getting behind the console of the TX-0 much in the same way as gettingin behind the throttle of a plane. Or, as Peter Samson, a classical music fan, put it,computing with the TX-0 was like playing a musical instrument: an absurdlyexpensive musical instrument upon which you could improvise, compose, and, likethe beatniks in Harvard Square a mile away, wail like a banshee with total creativeabandon.One thing that enabled them to do this was the programming system devised byJack Dennis and another professor, Tom Stockman. When the TX-0 arrived atMIT, it had been stripped down since its days at Lincoln Lab: the memory hadbeen reduced considerably, to 4,096 "words" of eighteen bits each. (A "bit" is abinary digit, either a one or zero. These binary numbers are the only thingcomputers understand. A series of binary numbers is called a "word.") And the TX-0 had almost no software. So Jack Dennis, even before he introduced the TMRCpeople to the TX-0, bad been writing "systems programs" the software to help usersutilize the machine.The first thing Dennis worked on was an assembler. This was something thattranslated assembly language which used three-letter symbolic abbreviations thatrepresented instructions to the machine into machine language, which consisted ofthe binary numbers 0 and 1. The TX-0 had a rather limited assembly language:since its design allowed only two bits of each eighteen-bit word to be used forinstructions to the computer, only four instructions could be used (each possibletwo-bit variation 00, 01, 10, and 11 represented an instruction). Everything thecomputer did could be broken down to the execution of one of those fourinstructions: it took one instruction to add two numbers, but a series of perhapstwenty instructions to multiply two numbers. Staring at a long list of computercommands written as binary numbers for example, 10011001100001 could makeyou into a babbling mental case in a matter of minutes. But the same command inassembly language might look like this: ADD Y. After loading the computer with

the assembler that Dennis wrote, you could write programs in this simpler symbolicform, and wait smugly while the computer did the translation into binary for you.Then you'd feed that binary "object" code back into the computer. The value of thiswas incalculable: it enabled programmers to write in something that looked likecode, rather than an endless, dizzying series of ones and zeros.The other program that Dennis worked on with Stockman was something evennewer a debugger. The TX-0 came with a debugging program called UT-3, whichenabled you to talk to the computer while it was running by typing commandsdirectly into the Flexowriter. But it had terrible problems for one thing, it onlyaccepted typed-in code that used the octal numeric system. "Octal" is a base-eightnumber system (as opposed to binary, which is base two, and Arabic ours which isbase ten), and it is a difficult system to use. So Dennis and Stockman decided towrite something better than UT-3 which would enable users to use the symbolic,easier-to-work-with assembly language. This came to be called FLIT, and itallowed users to actually find program bugs during a session, fix them, and keepthe program running. (Dennis would explain that "FLIT" stood for FlexowriterThterrogation Tape, but clearly the name's real origin was the insect spray with thatbrand name.) FLIT was a quantum leap forward, since it liberated programmers toactually do original composing on the machine just like musicians composing ontheir musical instruments. With the use of the debugger, which took up one third ofthe 4,096 words of the TX-0's memory, hackers were free to create a new, moredaring style of programming.And what did these hacker programs do? Well, sometimes, it didn't matter much atall what they did. Peter Samson hacked the night away on a program that wouldinstantly convert Arabic numbers to Roman numerals, and Jack Dennis, afteradmiring the skill with which Samson had accomplished this feat, said, "My God,why would anyone want to do such a thing?" But Dennis knew why. There wasample justification in the feeling of power and accomplishment Samson got whenhe fed in the paper tape, monitored the lights and switches, and saw what wereonce plain old blackboard Arabic numbers coming back as the numerals theRomans had hacked with.In fact it was Jack Dennis who suggested to Samson that there were considerableuses for the TX-0's ability to send noise to the audio speaker. While there were nobuilt-in controls for pitch, amplitude, or tone character, there was a way to controlthe speaker sounds would be emitted depending on the state of the fourteenth bit inthe eighteen-bit words the TX-0 had in its accumulator in a given microsecond.The sound was on or off depending on whether bit fourteen was a one or zero. SoSamson set about writing programs that varied the binary numbers in that slot indifferent ways to produce different pitches.

At that time, only a few people in the country had been experimenting with using acomputer to output any kind of music, and the methods they had been usingrequired massive computations before the machine would so much as utter a note.Samson, who reacted with impatience to those who warned he was attempting theimpossible, wanted a computer playing music right away. So he learned to controlthat one bit in the accumulator so adeptly that he could command it with theauthority of Charlie Parker on the saxophone. In a later version of this musiccompiler, Samson rigged it so that if you made an error in your programmingsyntax, the Flexowriter would switch to a red ribbon and print "To err is human toforgive divine."When outsiders heard the melodies of Johann Sebastian Bach in a single-voice,monophonic square wave, no harmony, they were universally unfazed. Big deal!Three million dollars for this giant hunk of machinery, and why shouldn't it do atleast as much as a five-dollar toy piano? It was no use to explain to these outsidersthat Peter Samson had virtually bypassed the process by which music had beenmade for eons. Music had always been made by directly creating vibrations thatwere sound. What happened in Samson's program was that a load of numbers, bitsof information fed into a computer, comprised a code in which the music resided.You could spend hours staring at the code, and not be able to divine where themusic was. It only became music while millions of blindingly brief exchanges ofdata were taking place in the accumulator sitting in one of the metal, wire, andsilicon racks that comprised the TX-0. Samson had asked the computer, which hadno apparent knowledge of how to use a voice, to lift itself in song and the TX-0 hadcomplied.So it was that a computer program was not only metapliorically a musicalcomposition it was literally a musical composition! It looked like and was the samekind of program which yielded complex arithmetical computations and statisticalanalyses. These digits that Samson had jammed into the computer were a universallanguage which could produce anything a Bach fugue or an antiaircraft system.Samson did not say any of this to the outsiders who were unimpressed by his feat.Nor did the hackers themselves discuss this it is not even clear that they analyzedthe phenomenon in such cosmic terms. Peter Samson did it, and his colleaguesappreciated it, because it was obviously a neat hack. That was justification enough.To hackers like Bob Saunders balding, plump, and merry disciple of the TX-0,president of TMRC's S&P group, student of systems it was a perfect existence.Saunders had grown up in the suburbs of Chicago, and for as long as he couldremember the workings of electricity and telephone circuitry had fascinated him.

Before beginning MIT, Saunders had landed a dream summer job, working for thephone company installing central office equipment. He would spend eight blissfulhours with soldering iron and pliers in hand, working in the bowels of varioussystems, an idyll broken by lunch hours spent in deep study of phone companymanuals. It was the phone company equipment underneath the TMRC layout thathad convinced Saunders to become active in the Model Railroad Club.Saunders, being an upperclassman, had come to the TX-0 later in his college careerthan Kotok and Samson: he had used the breathing space to actually lay thefoundation for a social life, which included courtship of and eventual marriage toMarge French, who had done some non-hacking computer work for a researchproject. Still, the TX-0 was the center of his college career, and he shared thecommon hacker experience of seeing his grades suffer from missed classes. Itdidn't bother him much, because he knew that his real education was occurring inRoom 240 of Building 26, behind the Tixo console. Years later he would describehimself and the others as "an elite group. Other people were off studying, spendingtheir days up on four-floor buildings making obnoxious vapors or off in the physicslab throwing particles at things or whatever it is they do. And we were simply notpaying attention to what other folks were doing because we had no interest in it.They were studying what they were studying and we were studying what we werestudying. And the fact that much of it was not on the officially approvedcurriculum was by and large immaterial."The hackers came out at night. It was the only way to take full advantage of thecrucial "off-hours" of the TX-0. During the day, Saunders would usually manage tomake an appearance in a class or two. Then some time spent performing "basicmaintenance" things like eating and going to the bathroom. He might see Marge fora while. But eventually he would filter over to Building 26. He would go over someof the programs of the night before, printed on the nine-and-a-half-inch-wide paperthat the Flexowriter used. He would annotate and modify the listing to update thecode to whatever he considered the next stage of operation. Maybe then he wouldmove over to the Model Railroad Club, and he'd swap his program with someone,checking simultaneously for good ideas and potential bugs. Then back to Building26, to the Kluge Room next to the TX-0, to find an off-line Flexowriter on which toupdate his code. All the while he'd be checking to see if someone had canceled aone-hour session on the machine; his own session was scheduled at something liketwo or three in the morning. He'd wait in the Kluge Room, or play some bridgeback at the Railroad Club, until the time came.Sitting at the console, facing the metal racks that held the computer's transistors,each transistor representing a location that either held or did not hold a bit ofmemory, Saunders would set up the Flexowriter, which would greet him with theword "WALRUS." This was something Samson had hacked, in honor of Lewis

Carroll's poem with the line "The time has come, the Walrus said..." Saundersmight chuckle at that as he went into the drawer for the paper tape which held theassembler program and fed that into the tape reader. Now the computer would beready to assemble his program, so he'd take the Flexowriter tape he'd been workingon and send that into the computer. He'd watch the lights go on as the computerswitched his code from "source" (the symbolic assembly language) to "object" code(binary), which the computer would punch out into another paper tape. Since thattape was in the object code that the TX-0 understood, he'd feed it in, hoping thatthe program would run magnificently.There would most probably be a few fellow hackers kibitzing behind him, laughingand joking and drinking Cokes and eating some junk food they'd extracted from themachine downstairs. Saunders preferred the lemon jelly wedges that the otherscalled "lemon gunkies." But at four in the morning, anything tasted good. Theywould all watch as the program began to run, the lights going on, the whine fromthe speaker humming in high or low register depending on what was in Bit 14 inthe accumulator, and the first thing he'd see on the CRT display after the programhad been assembled and run was that the program had crashed. So he'd reach intothe drawer for the tape with the FLIT debugger and feed that into the computer.The computer would then be a debugging machine, and he'd send the program backin. Now he could start trying to find out where things had gone wrong, and maybeif he was lucky he'd find out, and change things by putting in some commands byflicking some of the switches on the console in precise order, or hammering insome code on the Flexowriter. Once things got running and it was alwaysincredibly satisfying when something worked, when he'd made that roomful oftransistors and wires and metal and electricity all meld together to create a preciseoutput that he'd devised he'd try to add the next advance to it. When the hour wasover someone already itching to get on the machine after him Saunders would beready to spend the next few hours figuring out what the heck had made the programgo belly-up.The peak hour itself was tremendously intense, but during the hours before, andeven during the hours afterward, a hacker attained a state of pure concentration.When you programmed a computer, you had to be aware of where all the thousandsof bits of information were going from one instruction to the next, and be able topredict and exploit the effect of all that movement. When you had all thatinformation glued to your cerebral being, it was almost as if your own mind hadmerged into the environment of the computer. Sometimes it took hours to build upto the point where your thoughts could contain that total picture, and when you didget to that point, it was such a shame to waste it that you tried to sustain it bymarathon bursts, alternatively working on the computer or poring over the codethat you wrote on one of the offline Flexowriters in the Kluge Room. You wouldsustain that concentration by "wrapping around" to the next day.

Inevitably, that frame of mind spilled over to what random shards of existence thehackers had outside of computing. The knife-and-paintbrush contingent at TMRCwere not pleased at all by the infiltration of Tixo-mania into the club: they saw it asa sort of Trojan horse for a switch in the club focus, from railroading to computing.And if you attended one of the club meetings held every Tuesday at five-fifteen,you could see the concern: the hackers would exploit every possible thread ofparliamentary procedure to create a meeting as convoluted as the programs theywere hacking on the TX-0. Motions were made to make motions to make motions,and objections ruled out of order as if they were so many computer errors. A notein the minutes of the meeting on November 24, 1959, suggests that "we frown oncertain members who would do the club a lot more good by doing more S&P-ingand less reading Robert's Rules of Order." Samson was one of the worst offenders,and at one point an exasperated TMRC member made a motion "to purchase a corkfor Samson's oral diarrhea."Hacking parliamentary procedure was one thing, but the logical mind-framerequired for programming spilled over into more commonplace activities. Youcould ask a hacker a question and sense his mental accumulator processing bitsuntil he came up with a precise answer to the question you asked. Marge Saunderswould drive to the Safeway every Saturday morning in the Volkswagen and uponher return ask her husband, "Would you like to help me bring in the groceries?"Bob Saunders would reply, "No." Stunned, Marge would drag in the groceriesherself. After the same thing occurred a few times, she exploded, hurling curses athim and demanding to know why he said no to her question."That's a stupid question to ask," he said. "Of course I won't like to help you bringin the groceries. If you ask me if I'll help you bring them in, that's another matter."It was as if Marge had submitted a program into the TX-0, and the program, asprograms do when the syntax is improper, had crashed. It was not until shedebugged her question that Bob Saunders would allow it to run successfully on hisown mental computer.

2The Hacker EthicSOMETHING new was coalescing around the TX-0: a new way of life, with aphilosophy, an ethic, and a dream.There was no one moment when it started to dawn on the TX-0 hackers that bydevoting their technical abilities to computing with a devotion rarely seen outsideof monasteries they were the vanguard of a daring symbiosis between man andmachine. With a fervor like that of young hot-rodders fixated on souping upengines, they came to take their almost unique surroundings for granted. Even asthe elements of a culture were forming, as legends began to accrue, as theirmastery of programming started to surpass any previous recorded levels of skill,the dozen or so hackers were reluctant to acknowledge that their tiny society, onintimate terms with the TX-0, had been slowly and implicitly piecing together abody of concepts, beliefs, and mores.The precepts of this revolutionary Hacker Ethic were not so much debated anddiscussed as silently agreed upon. No manifestos were issued. No missionariestried to gather converts. The computer did the converting, and those who seemedto follow the Hacker Ethic most faithfully were people like Samson, Saunders, andKotok, whose lives before MIT seemed to be mere preludes to that moment whenthey fulfilled themselves behind the console of the TX-0. Later there would comehackers who took the implicit Ethic even more seriously than the TX-0 hackersdid, hackers like the legendary Greenblatt or Gosper, though it would be someyears yet before the tenets of hackerism would be explicitly delineated.Still, even in the days of the TX-0, the planks of the platform were in place. TheHacker Ethic:Access to computers and anything which might teach yousomething about the way the world works should be unlimitedand total. Always yield to the Hands-On Imperative!Hackers believe that essential lessons can be learned about the systems about the

world from taking things apart, seeing how they work, and using this knowledge tocreate new and even more interesting things. They resent any person, physicalbarrier, or law that tries to keep them from doing this.This is especially true when a hacker wants to fix something that (from his point ofview) is broken or needs improvement. Imperfect systems infuriate hackers, whoseprimal instinct is to debug them. This is one reason why hackers generally hatedriving cars the system of randomly programmed red lights and oddly laid out onewaystreets causes delays which are so goddamned unnecessary that the impulse isto rearrange signs, open up traffic-light control boxes ... redesign the entire system.In a perfect hacker world, anyone pissed off enough to open up a control box neara traffic light and take it apart to make it work better should be perfectly welcometo make the attempt. Rules which prevent you from taking matters like that intoyour own hands are too ridiculous to even consider abiding by. This attitudehelped the Model Railroad Club start, on an extremely informal basis, somethingcalled the Midnight Requisitioning Committee. When TMRC needed a set ofdiodes, or some extra relays, to build some new feature into The System, a fewS&P people would wait until dark and find their way into the places where thosethings were kept. None of the hackers, who were as a rule scrupulously honest inother matters, seemed to equate this with "stealing." A willful blindness.All information should be free.If you don't have access to the information you need to improve things, how canyou fix them? A free exchange of information, particularly when the informationwas in the form of a computer program, allowed for greater overall creativity.When you were working on a machine like the TX-0, which came with almost nosoftware, everyone would furiously write systems programs to make programmingeasier Tools to Make Tools, kept in the drawer by the console for easy access byanyone using the machine. This prevented the dread, time-wasting ritual ofreinventing the wheel: instead of everybody writing his own version of the sameprogram, the best version would be available to everyone, and everyone would befree to delve into the code and improve on that. A world studded with feature-fullprograms, bummed to the minimum, debugged to perfection.The belief, sometimes taken unconditionally, that information should be free was adirect tribute to the way a splendid computer, or computer program, works thebinary bits moving in the most straightforward, logical path necessary to do theircomplex job. What was a computer but something which benefited from a freeflow of information? If, say, the accumulator found itself unable to get informationfrom the input/output (i/o) devices like the tape reader or the switches, the wholesystem would collapse. In the hacker viewpoint, any system could benefit from

that easy flow of information.Mistrust Authority Promote Decentralization.The best way to promote this free exchange of information is to have an opensystem, something which presents no boundaries between a hacker and a piece ofinformation or an item of equipment that he needs in his quest for knowledge,improvement, and time on-line. The last thing you need is a bureaucracy.Bureaucracies, whether corporate, government, or university, are flawed systems,dangerous in that they cannot accommodate the exploratory impulse of truehackers. Bureaucrats hide behind arbitrary rules (as opposed to the logicalalgorithms by which machines and computer programs operate): they invoke thoserules to consolidate power, and perceive the constructive impulse of hackers as athreat.The epitome of the bureaucratic world was to be found at a very large companycalled International Business Machines IBM. The reason its computers were batchprocessedHulking Giants was only partially because of vacuum tube technology.The real reason was that IBM was a clumsy, hulking company which did notunderstand the hacking impulse. If IBM had its way (so the TMRC hackersthought), the world would be batch-processed, laid out on those annoying littlepunch cards, and only the most privileged of priests would be permitted to actuallyinteract with the computer.All you had to do was look at someone in the IBM world, and note the buttondownwhite shirt, the neatly pinned black tie, the hair carefully held in place, andthe tray of punch cards in hand. You could wander into the Computation Center,where the 704, the 709, and later the 7090 were stored the best IBM had to offerand see the stifling orderliness, down to the roped-off areas beyond which nonauthorizedpeople could not venture. And you could compare that to the extremelyinformal atmosphere around the TX-0, where grungy clothes were the norm andalmost anyone could wander in.Now, IBM had done and would continue to do many things to advance computing.By its sheer size and mighty influence, it had made computers a permanent part oflife in America. To many people, the words IBM and computer were virtuallysynonymous. IBM's machines were reliable workhorses, worthy of the trust thatbusinessmen and scientists invested in them. This was due in part to IBM'sconservative approach: it would not make the most technologically advancedmachines, but would rely on proven concepts and careful, aggressive marketing.As IBM's dominance of the computer field was established, the company becamean empire unto itself, secretive and smug.

What really drove the hackers crazy was the attitude of the IBM priests and subpriests,who seemed to think that IBM had the only "real" computers, and the restwere all trash. You couldn't talk to those people they were beyond convincing.They were batch-processed people, and it showed not only in their preference ofmachines, but in their idea about the way a computation center, and a world,should be run. Those people could never understand the obvious superiority of adecentralized system, with no one giving orders: a system where people couldfollow their interests, and if along the way they discovered a flaw in the system,they could embark on ambitious surgery. No need to get a requisition form. Just aneed to get something done.This antibureaucratic bent coincided neatly with the personalities of many of thehackers, who since childhood had grown accustomed to building science projectswhile the rest of their classmates were banging their heads together and learningsocial skills on the field of sport. These young adults who were once outcastsfound the computer a fantastic equalizer, experiencing a feeling, according to PeterSamson, "like you opened the door and walked through this grand new universe..."Once they passed through that door and sat behind the console of a million-dollarcomputer, hackers had power. So it was natural to distrust any force which mighttry to limit the extent of that power.Hackers should be judged by their hacking, not bogus criteriasuch as degrees, age, race, or position.The ready acceptance of twelve-year-old Peter Deutsch in the TX-0 community(though not by non-hacker graduate students) was a good example. Likewise,people who trotted in with seemingly impressive credentials were not takenseriously until they proved themselves at the console of a computer. Thismeritocratic trait was not necessarily rooted in the inherent goodness of hackerhearts it was mainly that hackers cared less about someone's superficialcharacteristics than they did about his potential to advance the general state ofhacking, to create new programs to admire, to talk about that new feature in thesystem.You can create art and beauty on a computer.Samson's music program was an example. But to hackers, the art of the programdid not reside in the pleasing sounds emanating from the on-line speaker. The codeof the program held a beauty of its own. (Samson, though, was particularlyobscure in refusing to add comments to his source code explaining what he wasdoing at a given time. One well-distributed program Samson wrote went on forhundreds of assembly language instructions, with only one comment beside an

instruction which contained the number 1750. The comment was RIPJSB, andpeople racked their brains about its meaning until someone figured out that 1750was the year Bach died, and that Samson had written an abbreviation for Rest InPeace Johann Sebastian Bach.)A certain esthetic of programming style had emerged. Because of the limitedmemory space of the TX-0 (a handicap that extended to all computers of that era),hackers came to deeply appreciate innovative techniques which allowed programsto do complicated tasks with very few instructions. The shorter a program was, themore space you had left for other programs, and the faster a program ran.Sometimes when you didn't need speed or space much, and you weren't thinkingabout art and beauty, you'd hack together an ugly program, attacking the problemwith "brute force" methods. "Well, we can do this by adding twenty numbers,"Samson might say to himself, "and it's quicker to write instructions to do that thanto think out a loop in the beginning and the end to do the same job in seven oreight instructions." But the latter program might be admired by fellow hackers, andsome programs were bummed to the fewest lines so artfully that the author's peerswould look at it and almost melt with awe.Sometimes program bumming became competitive, a macho contest to proveoneself so much in command of the system that one could recognize elegantshortcuts to shave off an instruction or two, or, better yet, rethink the wholeproblem and devise a new algorithm which would save a whole block ofinstructions. (An algorithm is a specific procedure which one can apply to solve acomplex computer problem; it is sort of a mathematical skeleton key.) This couldmost emphatically be done by approaching the problem from an offbeat angle thatno one had ever thought of before but that in retrospect made total sense. Therewas definitely an artistic impulse residing in those who could utilize this geniusfrom-Marstechnique a black-magic, visionary quality which enabled them todiscard the stale outlook of the best minds on earth and come up with a totallyunexpected new algorithm.This happened with the decimal print routine program. This was a subroutine aprogram within a program that you could sometimes integrate into many differentprograms to translate binary numbers that the computer gave you into regulardecimal numbers. In Saunders' words, this problem became the "pawn's ass ofprogramming if you could write a decimal print routine which worked you knewenough about the computer to call yourself a programmer of sorts." And if youwrote a great decimal print routine, you might be able to call yourself a hacker.More than a competition, the ultimate bumming of the decimal print routinebecame a sort of hacker Holy Grail.Various versions of decimal print routines had been around for some months. If

you were being deliberately stupid about it, or if you were a genuine moron an outand-out"loser" it might take you a hundred instructions to get the computer toconvert machine language to decimal. But any hacker worth his salt could do it inless, and finally, by taking the best of the programs, bumming an instruction hereand there, the routine was diminished to about fifty instructions.After that, things got serious. People would work for hours, seeking a way to dothe same thing in fewer lines of code. It be came more than a competition; it was aquest. For all the effort expended, no one seemed to be able to crack the fifty-linebarrier. The question arose whether it was even possible to do it in less. Was therea point beyond which a program could not be bummed?Among the people puzzling with this dilemma was a fellow named Jensen, a tall,silent hacker from Maine who would sit quietly in the Kluge Room and scribble onprintouts with the calm demeanor of a backwoodsman whittling. Jensen wasalways looking for ways to compress his programs in time and space his code wasa completely bizarre sequence of intermingled Boolean and arithmetic functions,often causing several different computations to occur in different sections of thesame eighteen-bit "word." Amazing things, magical stunts.Before Jensen, there had been general agreement that the only logical algorithmfor a decimal print routine would have the machine repeatedly subtracting, using atable of the powers of ten to keep the numbers in proper digital columns. Jensensomehow figured that a powers-of-ten table wasn't necessary; he came up with analgorithm that was able to convert the digits in a reverse order but, by some digitalsleight of hand, print them out in the proper order. There was a complexmathematical justification to it that was clear to the other hackers only when theysaw Jensen's program posted on a bulletin board, his way of telling them that hehad taken the decimal print routine to its limit. Forty-six instructions. Peoplewould stare at the code and their jaws would drop. Marge Saunders remembers thehackers being unusually quiet for days afterward."We knew that was the end of it," Bob Saunders later said. "That was Nirvana."Computers can change your life for the better.This belief was subtly manifest. Rarely would a hacker try to impose a view of themyriad advantages of the computer way of knowledge to an outsider. Yet thispremise dominated the everyday behavior of the TX-0 hackers, as well as thegenerations of hackers that came after them.Surely the computer had changed their lives, enriched their lives, given their lives

focus, made their lives adventurous. It had made them masters of a certain slice offate. Peter Samson later said, "We did it twenty-five to thirty percent for the sakeof doing it because it was something we could do and do well, and sixty percentfor the sake of having something which was in its metaphorical way alive, ouroffspring, which would do things on its own when we were finished. That's thegreat thing about programming, the magical appeal it has... Once you fix abehavioral problem [a computer or program] has, it's fixed forever, and it isexactly an image of what you meant."Like Aladdin's lamp, you could get it to do your bidding.Surely everyone could benefit from experiencing this power. Surely everyonecould benefit from a world based on the Hacker Ethic. This was the implicit beliefof the hackers, and the hackers irreverently extended the conventional point ofview of what computers could and should do leading the world to a new way oflooking and interacting with computers.This was not easily done. Even at such an advanced institution as MIT, someprofessors considered a manic affinity for computers as frivolous, even demented.TMRC hacker Bob Wagner once had to explain to an engineering professor what acomputer was. Wagner experienced this clash of computer versus anti-computereven more vividly when he took a Numerical Analysis class in which the professorrequired each student to do homework using rattling, clunky electromechanicalcalculators. Kotok was in the same class, and both of them were appalled at theprospect of working with those lo-tech machines. "Why should we," they asked,"when we've got this computer?"So Wagner began working on a computer program that would emulate thebehavior of a calculator. The idea was outrageous. To some, it was amisappropriation of valuable machine time. According to the standard thinking oncomputers, their time was so precious that one should only attempt things whichtook maximum advantage of the computer, things that otherwise would takeroomfuls of mathematicians days of mindless calculating. Hackers felt otherwise:anything that seemed interesting or fun was fodder for computing and usinginteractive computers, with no one looking over your shoulder and demandingclearance for your specific project, you could act on that belief. After two or threemonths of tangling with intricacies of floating-point arithmetic (necessary to allowthe program to know where to place the decimal point) on a machine that had nosimple method to perform elementary multiplication, Wagner had written threethousand lines of code that did the job. He had made a ridiculously expensivecomputer perform the function of a calculator that cost a thousand times less. Tohonor this irony, he called the program Expensive Desk Calculator, and proudlydid the homework for his class on it.

His grade zero. "You used a computer!" the professor told him. "This can't beright."Wagner didn't even bother to explain. How could he convey to his teacher that thecomputer was making realities out of what were once incredible possibilities? Orthat another hacker had even written a program called Expensive Typewriter thatconverted the TX-0 to something you could write text on, could process yourwriting in strings of characters and print it out on the Flexowriter could youimagine a professor accepting a classwork report written by the computer? Howcould that professor how could, in fact, anyone who hadn't been immersed in thisuncharted man-machine universe understand how Wagner and his fellow hackerswere routinely using the computer to simulate, according to Wagner, "strangesituations which one could scarcely envision otherwise"? The professor wouldlearn in time, as would everyone, that the world opened up by the computer was alimitless one.If anyone needed further proof, you could cite the project that Kotok was workingon in the Computation Center, the chess program that bearded AI professor"Uncle" John McCarthy, as he was becoming known to his hacker students, hadbegun on the IBM 704. Even though Kotok and the several other hackers helpinghim on the program had only contempt for the IBM batch-processing mentalitythat pervaded the machine and the people around it, they had managed to scroungesome late-night time to use it interactively, and had been engaging in an informalbattle with the systems programmers on the 704 to see which group would beknown as the biggest consumer of computer time. The lead would bounce backand forth, and the white-shirt-and-black-tie 704 people were impressed enough toactually let Kotok and his group touch the buttons and switches on the 704: raresensual contact with a vaunted IBM beast.Kotok's role in bringing the chess program to life was indicative of what was tobecome the hacker role in Artificial Intelligence: a Heavy Head like McCarthy orlike his colleague Marvin Minsky would begin a project or wonder aloud whethersomething might be possible, and the hackers, if it interested them, would setabout doing it.The chess program had been started using FORTRAN, one of the early computerlanguages. Computer languages look more like English than assembly language,are easier to write with, and do more things with fewer instructions; however, eachtime an instruction is given in a computer language like FORTRAN, the computermust first translate that command into its own binary language. A program called acompiler does this, and the compiler takes up time to do its job, as well as

occupying valuable space within the computer. In effect, using a computerlanguage puts you an extra step away from direct contact with the computer, andhackers generally preferred assembly or, as they called it, "machine" language toless elegant, "higher-level" languages like FORTRAN.Kotok, though, recognized that because of the huge amounts of numbers thatwould have to be crunched in a chess program, part of the program would have tobe done in FORTRAN, and part in assembly. They hacked it part by part, with"move generators," basic data structures, and all kinds of innovative algorithms forstrategy. After feeding the machine the rules for moving each piece, they gave itsome parameters by which to evaluate its position, consider various moves, andmake the move which would advance it to the most advantageous situation. Kotokkept at it for years, the program growing as MIT kept upgrading its IBMcomputers, and one memorable night a few hackers gathered to see the programmake some of its first moves in a real game. Its opener was quite respectable, butafter eight or so exchanges there was real trouble, with the computer about to becheckmated. Everybody wondered how the computer would react. It took a while(everyone knew that during those pauses the computer was actually "thinking," ifyour idea of thinking included mechanically considering various moves,evaluating them, rejecting most, and using a predefined set of parameters toultimately make a choice). Finally, the computer moved a pawn two squaresforward illegally jumping over another piece. A bug! But a clever one it got thecomputer out of check. Maybe the program was figuring out some new algorithmwith which to conquer chess.At other universities, professors were making public proclamations that computerswould never be able to beat a human being in chess. Hackers knew better. Theywould be the ones who would guide computers to greater heights than anyoneexpected. And the hackers, by fruitful, meaningful association with the computer,would be foremost among the beneficiaries.But they would not be the only beneficiaries. Everyone could gain something bythe use of thinking computers in an intellectually automated world. And wouldn'teveryone benefit even more by approaching the world with the same inquisitiveintensity, skepticism toward bureaucracy, openness to creativity, unselfishness insharing accomplishments, urge to make improvements, and desire to build as thosewho followed the Hacker Ethic? By accepting others on the same unprejudicedbasis by which computers accepted anyone who entered code into a Flexowriter?Wouldn't we benefit if we learned from computers the means of creating a perfectsystem, and set about emulating that perfection in a human system? If everyonecould interact with computers with the same innocent, productive, creative impulsethat hackers did, the Hacker Ethic might spread through society like a benevolentripple, and computers would indeed change the world for the better.

In the monastic confines of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, people hadthe freedom to live out this dream the hacker dream. No one dared suggest that thedream might spread. Instead, people set about building, right there at MIT, ahacker Xanadu the likes of which might never be duplicated.

3SpacewarIN the summer of 1961, Alan Kotok and the other TMRC hackers learned that anew company was soon to deliver to MIT, absolutely free, the next step incomputing, a machine that took the interactive principles of the TX-0 several stepsfurther. A machine that might be even better for hackers than the TX-0 was.The PDP-1. It would change computing forever. It would make the still hazyhacker dream come a little closer to reality.Alan Kotok had distinguished himself as a true wizard on the TX-0, so much sothat he, along with Saunders, Samson, Wagner, and a few others, had been hiredby Jack Dennis to be the Systems Programming Group of the TX-0. The paywould be a munificent $1.60 an hour. For a few of the hackers, the job was onemore excuse not to go to classes some hackers, like Samson, would nevergraduate, and be too busy hacking to really regret the loss. Kotok, though, wasable not only to manage his classes, but to establish himself as a "canonical"hacker. Around the TX-0 and TMRC, he was acquiring legendary status. Onehacker who was just arriving at MIT that year remembers Kotok givingnewcomers a demonstration of how the TX-0 worked: "I got the impression hewas hyperthyroid or something," recalled Bill Gosper, who would become acanonical hacker himself, "because he spoke very slowly and he was chubby andhis eyes were half-closed. That was completely and utterly the wrong impression.[Around the TX-0] Kotok had infinite moral authority. He had written the chessprogram. He understood hardware." (This last was not an inconsiderablecompliment "understanding hardware" was akin to fathoming the Tao of physicalnature.)The summer that the word came out about the PDP-1, Kotok was working forWestern Electric, kind of a dream job, since of all possible systems the phonesystem was admired most of all. The Model Railroad Club would often go on toursof phone company exchanges, much in the way that people with an interest inpainting might tour a museum. Kotok found it interesting that at the phonecompany, which had gotten so big in its decades of development, only a few of the

engineers had a broad knowledge of the interrelations within that system.Nevertheless, the engineers could readily provide detail on specific functions ofthe system, like cross-bar switching and step-relays; Kotok and the others wouldhound these experts for information, and the flattered engineers, probably havingno idea that these ultra-polite college kids would actually use the information,would readily comply.Kotok made it a point to attend those tours, to read all the technical material hecould get his hands on, and to see what he could get by dialing different numberson the complex and little-understood MIT phone system. It was basic exploration,just like exploring the digital back alleys of the TX-0. During that previous winterof 1960-61, the TMRC hackers had engaged in an elaborate "telephone networkfingerprinting," charting all the places you could reach by MIT's system of tielines. Though not connected to general telephone lines, the system could take youto Lincoln Lab, and from there to defense contractors all over the country. It was amatter of mapping and testing. You would start with one access code, add differentdigits to it, see who might answer, ask whoever answered where they were, thenadd digits to that number to piggyback to the next place. Sometimes you couldeven reach outside lines in the suburbs, courtesy of the unsuspecting phonecompany. And, as Kotok would later admit, "If there was some design flaw in thephone system such that one could get calls that weren't intended to get through, Iwasn't above doing that, but that was their problem, not mine."Still, the motive was exploration, not fraud, and it was considered bad form toprofit illegally from these weird connections. Sometimes outsiders could notcomprehend this. Samson's roommates in the Burton Hall dorm, for instance, werenon-hackers who thought it was all right to exploit system bugs without the holyjustification of system exploration. After they pressured Samson for days, hefinally gave in and handed them a twenty-digit number that he said would accessan exotic location. "You can dial this from the hall phone," he told them, "but Idon't want to be around." As they anxiously began dialing, Samson went to adownstairs phone, which rang just as he reached it. "This is the Pentagon," heboomed in his most official voice. "What is your security clearance, please?" Fromthe phone upstairs, Samson heard terrified gasps, and the click of a phone beinghung up.Network fingerprinting was obviously a pursuit limited to hackers, whose desire toknow the system overruled any fear of getting nailed.But as much as phone company esoterica fascinated Kotok, the prospect of thePDP-1 took precedence. Perhaps he sensed that nothing, even phone hacking,would be the same afterward. The people who designed and marketed this newmachine were not your ordinary computer company button-downs. The company

was a brand-new firm called Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC), and some ofthe TX-0 users knew that DEC'S first products were special interfaces madespecifically for that TX-0. It was exciting enough that some of DEC'S foundershad a view of computing that differed from the gray-flannel, batch-processed IBMmentality; it was positively breathtaking that the DEC people seemed to havelooked at the freewheeling, interactive, improvisational, hands-on-über-alles styleof the TX-0 community, and designed a computer that would reinforce that kind ofbehavior. The PDP-1 (the initials were short for Programmed Data Processor, aterm considered less threatening than "computer," which had all kinds of hulkinggiantconnotations) would become known as the first minicomputer, designed notfor huge number-crunching tasks but for scientific inquiry, mathematicalformulation ... and hacking. It would be so compact that the whole setup was nolarger than three refrigerators it wouldn't require as much air-conditioning, andyou could even turn it on without a whole crew of sub-priests being needed tosequence several power supplies in the right order or start the time-base generator,among other exacting tasks. The retail price of the computer was an astoundinglylow $120,000 cheap enough so people might stop complaining about how preciousevery second of computer time was. But the machine, which was the second PDP-1 manufactured (the first one was sold to the nearby scientific firm of BoltBeranek and Newman, or BBN), cost MIT nothing: it was donated by DEC to theRLE lab. So it was clear that hackers would have even more time on it than theydid on the TX-0.The PDP-1 would be delivered with a simple collection of systems software whichthe hackers considered completely inadequate. The TX-0 hackers had becomeaccustomed to the most advanced interactive software anywhere, a dazzling set ofsystems programs, written by hackers themselves and implicitly tailored to theirrelentless demands for control of the machine. Young Peter Deutsch, the twelveyear-oldwho had discovered the TX-0, had made good on his promise to write aspinier assembler, and Bob Saunders had worked up a smaller, faster version ofthe FLIT debugger called Micro-FLIT. These programs had benefited from anexpanded instruction set: one day, after considerable planning and designing bySaunders and Jack Dennis, the TX-0 had been turned off, and a covey of engineersexposed its innards and began hard-wiring new instructions into the machine. Thisformidable task expanded the assembly language by several instructions. When thepliers and screwdrivers were put away and the computer carefully turned on,everyone madly set about revamping programs and bumming old programs usingthe new instructions.The PDP-1's instruction set, Kotok learned, was not too different from that of theexpanded TX-0, so Kotok naturally began writing systems software for the PDP-1that very summer, using all the spare time he could manage. Figuring thateveryone would jump in and begin writing as soon as the machine got there, he

worked on a translation of the Micro-FLIT debugger so that writing the softwarefor the "One" would be easier. Samson promptly named Kotok's debugger "DDT,"and the name would stick, though the program itself would be modified countlesstimes by hackers who wanted to add features or bum instructions out of it.Kotok was not the only one preparing for the arrival of the PDP-1. Like a motleycollection of expectant parents, other hackers were busily weaving softwarebooties and blankets for the new baby coming into the family, so this heralded heirto the computing throne would be welcome as soon as it was delivered in lateSeptember.The hackers helped bring the PDP-1 into its new home, the Kluge Room next doorto the TX-0. It was a beauty: sitting behind a console half as long as the Tixo's,you'd look at one compact panel of toggle switches and lights; next to that was thedisplay screen, encased in a bright blue, six-sided, quasi-deco housing; behind itwere the tall cabinets, the size of a refrigerator and three times as deep, with thewires, boards, switches, and transistors entry to that, of course, was forbidden.There was a Flexowriter connected for on-line input (people complained about thenoise so much that the Flexowriter was eventually replaced by a modified IBMtypewriter which didn't work nearly so well) and a highspeed paper-tape reader,also for input. All in all, a downright heavenly toy.Jack Dennis liked some of the software written by BBN for the prototype PDP-1,particularly the assembler. Kotok, though, felt like retching when he saw thatassembler run the mode of operation didn't seem to fit the on-the-fly style he likedso he and a few others told Dennis that they wanted to write their own. "That's abad idea," said Dennis, who wanted an assembler up and running right away, andfigured that it would take weeks for the hackers to do it.Kotok and the others were adamant. This was a program that they'd be living with.It had to be just perfect. (Of course no program ever is, but that never stopped ahacker.)"I'll tell you what," said Kotok, this twenty-year-old Buddha-shaped wizard, to theskeptical yet sympathetic Jack Dennis. "If we write this program over the weekendand have it working, would you pay us for the time?"The pay scale at that time was such that the total would be something under fivehundred dollars. "That sounds like a fair deal," said Dennis.Kotok, Samson, Saunders, Wagner, and a couple of others began on a Friday nightlate in September. They figured they would work from the TX-0 assembler that

Dennis had written the original of and that twelve-year-old Peter Deutsch, amongothers, had revamped. They wouldn't change inputs or outputs, and they wouldn'tredesign algorithms; each hacker would take a section of the TX-0 program andconvert it to PDP-1 code. And they wouldn't sleep. Six hackers worked aroundtwo hundred and fifty man-hours that weekend, writing code, debugging, andwashing down take-out Chinese food with massive quantities of Coca-Colashipped over from the TMRC clubroom. It was a programming orgy, and whenJack Dennis came in that Monday he was astonished to find an assembler loadedinto the PDP-1, which as a demonstration was assembling its own code intobinary.By sheer dint of hacking, the TX-0 no, the PDP-1 hackers had turned out aprogram in a weekend that it would have taken the computer industry weeks,maybe even months to pull off. It was a project that would probably not beundertaken by the computer industry without a long and tedious process ofrequisitions, studies, meetings, and executive vacillating, most likely withconsiderable compromise along the way. It might never have been done at all. Theproject was a triumph for the Hacker Ethic.The hackers were given even more access to this new machine than they hadmanaged to get on the TX-0, and almost all of them switched their operations tothe Kluge Room. A few stubbornly stuck to the Tixo, and to the PDP-1 hackersthis was grounds for some mild ridicule. To rub it in, the PDP-1 hackers developeda little demonstration based on the mnemonics of the instruction set of this boldnew machine, which included such exotic instructions as DAC (DepositAccumulator), LIO (Load Input-Output), DPY (Deplay), and JMP. The PDP-1group would stand in a line and shout in unison:LAC,DAC,DIPPY DAP,LIO,DIO,JUMP!When they chanted that last word "Jump!" they would all jump to the right. Whatwas lacking in choreography was more than compensated for by enthusiasm: theywere supercharged by the beauty of the machine, by the beauty of computers.The same kind of enthusiasm was obvious in the even more spontaneousprogramming occurring on the PDP-1, ranging from serious systems programs, toprograms to control a primitive robot arm, to whimsical hacks. One of the latter

took advantage of a hacked-up connection between the PDP-1 and the TX-0 a wirethrough which information could pass, one bit at a time, between the twomachines. According to Samson, the hackers called in the venerable AI pioneerJohn McCarthy to sit by the PDP-1. "Professor McCarthy, look at our new chessprogram!" And then they called another professor to sit by the TX-0. "Here's thechess program! Type in your move!" After McCarthy typed his first move, and itappeared on the Flexowriter on the TX-0, the hackers told the other professor thathe had just witnessed the TX-0's opening move. "Now make yours!" After a fewmoves, McCarthy noticed that the computer was outputting the moves one letter ata time, sometimes with a suspicious pause between them. So McCarthy followedthe wire to his flesh-and-blood opponent. The hackers rocked with mirth. But itwould not be long before they would come up with programs for computers nojoke to actually play tournament chess.The PDP-1 beckoned the hackers to program without limit. Samson was casuallyhacking things like the Mayan calendar (which worked on a base-twenty numbersystem) and working overtime on a version of his TX-0 music program that tookadvantage of the PDP-1's extended audio capabilities to create music in threevoices three-part Bach fugues, melodies interacting ... computer music eruptingfrom the old Kluge Room! The people at DEC had heard about Samson's programand asked him to complete it on the PDP-1, so Samson eventually worked it sothat someone could type a musical score into the machine by a simple translationof notes into letters and digits, and the computer would respond with a three-voiceorgan sonata. Another group coded up Gilbert and Sullivan operettas.Samson proudly presented the music compiler to DEC to distribute to anyone whowanted it. He was proud that other people would be using his program. The teamthat worked on the new assembler felt likewise. For instance, they were pleased tohave paper tape bearing the program in the drawer so anyone using the machinecould access it, try to improve it, bum a few instructions from it, or add a featureto it. They felt honored when DEC asked for the program so it could oner it toother PDP-1 owners. The question of royalties never came up. To Samson and theothers, using the computer was such a joy that they would have paid to do it. Thefact that they were getting paid the princely sum of $1.60 an hour to work on thecomputer was a bonus. As for royalties, wasn't software more like a gift to theworld, something that was reward in itself? The idea was to make a computermore usable, to make it more exciting to users, to make computers so interestingthat people would be tempted to play with them, explore them, and eventuallyhack on them. When you wrote a fine program you were building a community,not churning out a product.Anyway, people shouldn't have to pay for software information should be free!

The TMRC hackers were not the only ones who had been devising plans for thenew PDP-1. During that summer of 1961, a plan for the most elaborate hack yet avirtual showcase of what could come out of a rigorous application of the HackerEthic was being devised. The scene of these discussions was a tenement buildingon Higham Street in Cambridge, and the original perpetrators were three itinerantprogrammers in their mid-twenties who'd been hanging around variouscomputation centers for years. Two of the three lived in the tenement, so in honorof the pompous proclamations emanating from nearby Harvard University the triomockingly referred to the building as the Higham Institute.One of the Fellows of this bogus institution was Steve Russell, nicknamed, forunknown reasons, Slug. He had that breathless-chipmunk speech pattern socommon among hackers, along with thick glasses, modest height, and a fanatictaste for computers, bad movies, and pulp science fiction. All three interests wereshared by the resident attendees at those bull sessions on Higham Street.Russell had long been a "coolie" (to use a TMRC term) of Uncle John McCarthy.McCarthy had been trying to design and implement a higher-level language thatmight be sufficient for artificial intelligence work. He thought he had found it inLISP. The language was named for its method of List Processing; by simple yetpowerful commands, LISP could do many things with few lines of code; it couldalso perform powerful recursions references to things within itself which wouldallow programs written in that language to actually "learn" from what happened asthe program ran. The problem with LISP at that time was that it took up an awfulamount of space on a computer, ran very slowly, and generated voluminousamounts of extra code as the programs ran, so much so that it needed its own"garbage collection" program to periodically clean out the computer memory.Russell was helping Uncle John write a LISP interpreter for the Hulking GiantIBM 704. It was, in his words, "a horrible engineering job," mostly due to thebatch-processing tedium of the 704.Compared to that machine, the PDP-1 looked like the Promised Land to SlugRussell. More accessible than the TX-0, and no batch-processing! Although itdidn't seem big enough to do LISP, it had other marvelous capabilities, some ofwhich were objects of discussion of the Higham Institute. What particularlyintrigued Russell and his friends was the prospect of making up some kind ofelaborate "display hack" on the PDP-1, using the CRT screen. After considerablemidnight discourse, the three-man Higham Institute put itself on record as insistingthat the most effective demonstration of the computer's magic would be a visually

striking game.There had been several attempts to do this kind of thing on the TX-0. One of themwas a hack called Mouse in the Maze the user first constructed a maze with thelight pen, and a blip on the screen representing a mouse would tentatively poke itsway through the maze in search of another set of blips in the shape of cheesewedges. There was also a "VIP version" of the game, in which the mouse wouldseek martini glasses. After it got to the glass, it would seek another, until it ran outof energy, too drunk to continue. When you flicked the switches to run the mousethrough the maze a second time, though, the mouse would "remember" the path tothe glasses, and like an experienced barfly would unhesitatingly scurry toward thebooze. That was as far as display hacks would go on the TX-0.But already on the PDP-1, which had a screen that was easier to program than theTX-0's, there had been some significant display hacks. The most admired effortwas created by one of the twin gurus of artificial intelligence at MIT, MarvinMinsky. (The other one was, of course, McCarthy.) Minsky was more outgoingthan his fellow AI guru, and more willing to get into the hacker mode of activity.He was a man with very big ideas about the future of computing he really believedthat one day machines would be able to think, and he would often create a big stirby publicly calling human brains "meat machines," implying that machines notmade of meat would do as well some day. An elfish man with twinkling eyesbehind thick glasses, a starkly bald head, and an omnipresent turtleneck sweater,Minsky would say this with his usual dry style, geared simultaneously tomaximize provocation and to leave just a hint that it was all some cosmic goof ofcourse machines can't think, heh-heh. Marvin was the real thing; the PDP-1hackers would often sit in on his course, Intro to AI 6.544, because not only wasMinsky a good theoretician, but he knew his stuff. By the early 1960s, Minsky wasbeginning to organize what would come to be the world's first laboratory inartificial intelligence; and he knew that, to do what he wanted, he would needprogramming geniuses as his foot soldiers so he encouraged hackerism in any wayhe could.One of Minsky's contributions to the growing canon of interesting hacks was adisplay program on the PDP-1 called the Circle Algorithm. It was discovered bymistake, actually while trying to bum an instruction out of a short program tomake straight lines into curves or spirals, Minsky inadvertently mistook a "Y"character for a "Y prime," and instead of the display squiggling into inchoatespirals as expected, it drew a circle: an incredible discovery, which was later foundto have profound mathematical implications. Hacking further, Minsky used theCircle Algorithm as a stepping-off point for a more elaborate display in whichthree particles influenced each other and made fascinating, swirling patterns on thescreen, self-generating roses with varying numbers of leaves. "The forces particles

exerted on others were totally outlandish," Bob Wagner later recalled. "You weresimulating a violation of natural law!" Minsky called the hack a "Tri-Pos: Three-Position Display" program, but the hackers affectionately renamed it theMinskytron.Slug Russell was inspired by this. At the Higham Institute sessions some monthsback, he and his friends had discussed the criteria for the ultimate display hack.Since they had been fans of trashy science fiction, particularly the space operanovels of E. E. "Doc" Smith, they somehow decided that the PDP-1 would be aperfect machine to make a combination grade-B movie and $120,000 toy. A gamein which two people could face each other in an outer-space showdown. AHigham Institute Study Group on Space Warfare was duly organized, and itsconclusion strongly implied that Slug Russell should be the author of this historichack.But months later, Russell hadn't even started. He would watch the Minskytronmake patterns, he'd flip switches to see new patterns develop, and every so oftenhe'd flip more switches when the program got wedged into inactivity. He wasfascinated, but thought the hack too abstract and mathematical. "This demo is acrock," he finally decided only thirty-two or so instructions, and it didn't really doanything.Slug Russell knew that his war-in-outer-space game would do something. In itsown kitschy, sci-fi terms, it would be absorbing the way no previous hack had everbeen. The thing that got Slug into computers in the first place was the feeling ofpower you got from running the damn things. You can tell the computer what todo, and it fights with you, but it finally does what you tell it to. Of course it willreflect your own stupidity, and often what you tell it to do will result in somethingdistasteful. But eventually, after tortures and tribulations, it will do exactly whatyou want. The feeling you get then is unlike any other feeling in the world. It canmake you a junkie. It made Slug Russell a junkie, and he could see that it had donethe same thing to the hackers who haunted the Kluge Room until dawn. It was thatfeeling that did it, and Slug Russell guessed the feeling was power.Slug got sort of a similar, though less intense, feeling from Doc Smith's novels. Helet his imagination construct the thrill of roaring across space in a white rocketship ... and wondered if that same excitement could be captured while sittingbehind the console of the PDP-1. That would be the Spacewar he dreamed about.Once again he vowed to do it.Later.

Slug was not as driven as some of the other hackers. Sometimes he needed a push.After he made the mistake of opening up his big mouth about this program he wasgoing to write, the PDP-1 hackers, always eager to see another hack added to thegrowing pile of paper tapes in the drawer, urged him to do it. After mumblingexcuses for a while, he said he would, but he'd first have to figure out how to writethe elaborate sine-cosine routines necessary to plot the ships' motion.Kotok knew that hurdle could be easily solved. Kotok at that point had beengetting fairly cozy with the people at DEC, several miles away at Maynard. DECwas informal, as computer manufacturers went, and did not regard MIT hackers asthe grungy, frivolous computer-joyriders that IBM might have taken them for. Forinstance, one day when a piece of equipment v/as broken, Kotok called upMaynard and told DEC about it; they said, Come up and get a replacement. By thetime Kotok got up there, it was well after five and the place was closed. But thenight watchman let him go in, find the desk of the engineer he'd been talking to,and root through the desk until he found the part. Informal, the way hackers like it.So it was no problem for Kotok to go up to Maynard one day, where he waspositive someone would have a routine for sine and cosine that would run on thePDP-1. Sure enough, someone had it, and since information was free, Kotok tookit back to Building 26."Here you are, Russell," Kotok said, paper tapes in hand. "Now what's yourexcuse?"At that point, Russell had no excuse. So he spent his off-hours writing this fantasyPDP-1 game the likes of which no one had seen before. Soon he was spending his"on" hours working on the game. He began in early December, and whenChristmas came he was still hacking. When the calendar wrapped around to 1962,he was still hacking. By that time, Russell could produce a dot on the screen whichyou could manipulate: by nicking some of the tiny toggle switches on the controlpanel you could make the dots accelerate and change direction.He then set about making the shapes of the two rocket ships: both were classiccartoon rockets, pointed at the top and blessed with a set of fins at the bottom. Todistinguish them from each other, he made one chubby and cigar-shaped, with abulge in the middle, while the second he shaped like a thin tube. Russell used thesine and cosine routines to figure out how to move those shapes in differentdirections. Then he wrote a subroutine to shoot a "torpedo" (a dot) from the rocketnose with a switch on the computer. The computer would scan the position of thetorpedo and the enemy ship; if both occupied the same area, the program wouldcall up a subroutine that replaced the unhappy ship with a random splatter of dotsrepresenting an explosion. (That process was called "collision detection.")

All of this was actually a significant conceptual step toward more sophisticated"real-time" programming, where what happens on a computer matches the frameof reference in which human beings are actually working. In another sense,Russell was emulating the on-line, interactive debugging style that the hackerswere championing the freedom to see what instruction your program stopped deadon, and to use switches or the Flexowriter to jimmy in a different instruction, allwhile the program was running along with the DDT debugger. The gameSpacewar, a computer program itself, helped show how all games and maybeeverything else worked like computer programs. When you went a bit astray, youmodified your parameters and fixed it. You put in new instructions. The sameprinciple applied to target shooting, chess strategy, and MIT course work.Computer programming was not merely a technical pursuit, but an approach to theproblems of living.In the later stages of programming, Saunders helped Slug Russell out, and theyhacked a few intense six-to-eight-hour sessions. Sometime in February, Russellunveiled the basic game. There were the two ships, each with thirty-one torpedoes.There were a few random dots on the screen representing stars in this celestialbattlefield. You could maneuver the ships by flicking four switches on the consoleof the PDP-1, representing Clockwise turn, Counterclockwise turn, Accelerate,and Fire torpedo.Slug Russell knew that by showing a rough version of the game, and dropping apaper tape with the program into the box with the PDP-1 system programs, he waswelcoming unsolicited improvements. Spacewar was no ordinary computersimulation you could actually be a rocket-ship pilot. It was Doc Smith come tolife. But the same power that Russell had drawn on to make his program the powerthat the PDP-1 lent a programmer to create his own little universe was alsoavailable to other hackers, who naturally felt free to improve Slug Russell'suniverse. They did so instantly.The nature of the improvements might be summed up by the general hackerreaction to the original routine Slug Russell used for his torpedoes. Knowing thatmilitary weapons in real life aren't always perfect, Russell figured that he'd makethe torpedoes realistic. Instead of having them go in a straight line until they ranout of steam and exploded, he put in some random variations in the direction andvelocity. Instead of appreciating this verisimilitude, the hackers denounced it.They loved smooth-running systems and reliable tools, so the fact that they wouldbe stuck with something that didn't work right drove them crazy. Russell laterfigured out that "weapons or tools that aren't very trustworthy are held in very lowesteem people really like to be able to trust their tools and weapons. That was veryclear in that case."

But of course that could be easily fixed. The advantage that a world created by acomputer program had over the real world was that you could fix a dire problemlike faulty torpedoes just by changing a few instructions. That was why so manypeople found it easy to lose themselves in hackerism in the first place! So thetorpedoes were fixed, and people spent hours in outer-space dueling. And evenmore hours trying to make the Spacewar world a better one.Peter Samson, for instance, loved the idea of Spacewar, but could not abide therandomly generated dots that passed themselves off as the sky. Real space hadstars in specific places. "We'll have the real thing," Samson vowed. He obtained athick atlas of the universe, and set about entering data into a routine he wrote thatwould generate the actual constellations visible to someone standing on theequator on a clear night. All stars down to the fifth magnitude were represented;Samson duplicated their relative brightness by controlling how often the computerlit the dot on the screen which represented the star. He also rigged the program sothat, as the game progressed, the sky would majestically scroll at any one time thescreen exposed 45 percent of the sky. Besides adding verisimilitude, this"Expensive Planetarium" program also gave rocket fighters a mappablebackground from which to gauge position. The game could truly be called, asSamson said, Shootout-at-El-Cassiopeia.Another programmer named Dan Edwards was dissatisfied with the unanchoredmovement of the two dueling ships. It made the game merely a test of motor skills.He figured that adding a gravity factor would give the game a strategiccomponent. So he programmed a central star a sun in the middle of the screen; youcould use the sun's gravitational pull to give you speed as you circled it, but if youweren't careful and got too close, you'd be drawn into the sun. Which was certaindeath.Before all the strategic implications of this variation could be employed, ShagGaretz, one of the Higham Institute trio, contributed a wild-card type of feature.He had read in Doc Smith's novels how space hot-rodders could suck themselvesout of one galaxy and into another by virtue of a "hyper-spatial tube," whichwould throw you into "that highly enigmatic Nth space." So he added a"hyperspace" capability to the game, allowing a player to avoid a dire situation bypushing a panic button that would zip him to this hyperspace. You were allowed togo into hyperspace three times in the course of a game; the drawback was that younever knew where you might come out. Sometimes you'd reappear right next tothe sun, just in time to see your ship hopelessly pulled to an untimely demise onthe sun's surface. In tribute to Marvin Minsky's original hack, Garetz programmedthe hyperspace feature so that a ship entering hyperspace would leave a "warpinducedphotonic stress emission signature" a leftover smear of light in a shape

that often formed in the aftermath of a Minskytron display.The variations were endless. By switching a few parameters you could turn thegame into "hydraulic Spacewar," in which torpedoes flow out in ejaculatorystreams instead of one by one. Or, as the night grew later and people becamelocked into interstellar mode, someone might shout, "Let's turn on the Winds ofSpace!" and someone would hack up a warping factor which would force playersto make adjustments every time they moved. Though any improvement a hackerwished to make would be welcome, it was extremely bad form to make someweird change in the game unannounced. The effective social pressures whichenforced the Hacker Ethic which urged hands-on for improvement, not damageprevented any instance of that kind of mischief. Anyway, the hackers were alreadyengaged in a mind-boggling tweak of the system they were using an expensivecomputer to play the world's most glorified game!Spacewar was played a hell of a lot. For some, it was addictive. Though no onecould officially sign up the PDP-1 for a Spacewar session, the machine's everyfree moment that spring seemed to have some version of the game running. Bottlesof Coke in hand (and sometimes with money on the line), the hackers would runmarathon tournaments. Russell eventually wrote a subroutine that would keepscore, displaying in octal (everyone could sight-read that base-eight numbersystem by then) the total of games won. For a while, the main drawback seemed tobe that working the switches on the console of the PDP-1 was uncomfortableeverybody was getting sore elbows from keeping their arms at that particularangle. So one day Kotok and Saunders went over to the TMRC clubroom andfound parts for what would become the first computer joysticks. Constructedtotally with parts lying around the clubroom and thrown together in an hour ofinspired construction, the control boxes were made of wood, with Masonite tops.They had switches for rotation and thrust, as well as a button for hyperspace. Allcontrols were, of course, silent, so that you could surreptitiously circle around youropponent or duck into Nth space, should you care to.While some hackers lost interest in Spacewar once the fury of the programmingphase had died down, others developed a killer instinct for devising strategies tomow down opponents. Most games were won and lost in ..the first few seconds.Wagner became adept at the "lie in wait" strategy, in which you stayed silent whilegravity whipped you around the sun, then straightened out and began blastingtorps at your opponent. Then there was a variation called the "CBS Opening,"where you angled to shoot and then whipped around the star: the strategy got itsname because when both Spacewar gladiators tried it, they would leave a patternon the screen that bore a remarkable resemblance to the CBS eye. Saunders, whotook his Spacewar seriously, used a modified CBS strategy to maintain dominancethrough the tournaments there was a time when he couldn't be beaten. However,

after twenty minutes of protecting your place in the king-of-the-hill-structuredcontest, even a master Spacewarrior would get a bit blurry-eyed and slower on thedraw, and most everybody got a chance to play Spacewar more than was probablysensible. Peter Samson, second only to Saunders in Spacewarring, realized thisone night when he went home to Lowell. As he stepped out of the train, he staredupward into the crisp, clear sky. A meteor flew overhead. Where's the spaceship?Samson thought as he instantly swiveled back and grabbed the air for a controlbox that wasn't there.In May 1962, at the annual MIT Open House, the hackers fed the paper tape withtwenty-seven pages worth of PDP-1 assembly language code into the machine, setup an extra display screen actually a giant oscilloscope and ran Spacewar all dayto a public that drifted in and could not believe what they saw. The sight of it ascience-fiction game written by students and controlled by a computer was somuch on the verge of fantasy that no one dared predict that an entire genre ofentertainment would eventually be spawned from it.It wasn't till years later, when Slug Russell was at Stanford University, that herealized that the game was anything but a hacker aberration. After working lateone night, Russell and some friends went to a local bar which had some pinballmachines. They played until closing time; then, instead of going home, Russelland his co-workers went back to their computer, and the first thing his friends didwas run Spacewar. Suddenly it struck Steve Russell: "These people just stoppedplaying a pinball machine and went to play Spacewar by gosh, it is a pinballmachine." The most advanced, imaginative, expensive pinball machine the worldhad seen.Like the hackers' assemblers and the music program, Spacewar was not sold. Likeany other program, it was placed in the drawer for anyone to access, look at, andrewrite as they saw fit. The group effort that stage by stage had improved theprogram could have stood for an argument for the Hacker Ethic: an urge to getinside the workings of the thing and make it better had led to measurableimprovement. And of course it was all a huge amount of fun. It was no wonderthat other PDP-1 owners began to hear about it, and the paper tapes holdingSpacewar were freely distributed. At one point the thought crossed Slug Russell'smind that maybe someone should be making money from this, but by then therewere already dozens of copies circulating. DEC was delighted to get a copy, andthe engineers there used it as a final diagnostic program on PDP-1s before theyrolled them out the door. Then, without wiping the computer memory clean, they'dshut the machine off. The DEC sales force knew this, and often, when machineswere delivered to new customers, the salesman would turn on the power, check tomake sure no smoke was pouring out the back, and hit the "VY" location whereSpacewar resided. And if the machine had been carefully packed and shipped, the

heavy star would be in the center, and the cigar-shaped rocket and the tube-shapedrocket would be ready for cosmic battle. A maiden flight for a magic machine.Spacewar, as it turned out, was the lasting legacy of the pioneers of MIT hacking.In the next couple of years many of the TX-0 and PDP-1 joyriders departed theInstitute. Saunders would take a job in industry at Santa Monica (where he wouldlater write a Spacewar for the PDP-7 he used at work). Bob Wagner went off tothe Rand Corporation. Peter Deutsch went to Berkeley, to begin his freshman yearof college. Kotok took a part-time job which developed into an importantdesigning position at DEC (though he managed to hang around TMRC and thePDP-1 for years after-ward). In a development which was to have considerableimpact on spreading MIT-style hackerism outside of Cambridge, John McCarthyleft the Institute to begin a new artificial intelligence lab on the West Coast, atStanford University. Slug Russell, ever McCarthy's LISP-writing coolie, taggedalong..But new faces and some heightened activity in the field of computing were toinsure that the hacker culture at MIT would not only continue, but thrive anddevelop more than ever. The new faces belonged to breathtakingly daring hackersdestined for word-of-mouth, living-legend fame. But the developments whichwould allow these people to take their place in living the hacker dream werealready under way initiated by people whose names would become known bymore conventional means: scholarly papers, academic awards, and, in some cases,notoriety in the scientific community.These people were the planners. Among them were scientists who occasionallyengaged in hacking Jack Dennis, McCarthy, Minsky but who were ultimatelymore absorbed by the goals of computing than addicted to the computing process.They saw computers as a means to a better life for the human race, but did notnecessarily think that working on a computer would be the key element in makingthat life better.Some of the planners envisioned a day when artificially intelligent computerswould relieve man's mental burdens, much as industrial machinery had alreadypartially lifted his physical yoke. McCarthy and Minsky were the vanguard of thisschool of thought, and both had participated in a 1956 Dartmouth conference thatestablished a foundation for research in this field. McCarthy's work in the higherlevellanguage LISP was directed toward this end, and was sufficiently intriguingto rouse hackers like Slug Russell, Peter Deutsch, Peter Samson, and others intoworking with LISP. Minsky seemed interested in artificial intelligence with a moretheoretical basis: a gleeful, bald-headed Johnny Apple-seed in the field, he wouldspread his seeds, each one a thought capable of blooming into a veritable appletree of useful AI techniques and projects.

The planners were also extremely concerned about getting the power of computersinto the hands of more researchers, scientists, statisticians, and students. Someplanners worked on making computers easier to use; John Kemeny of Dartmouthshowed how this could be done by writing an easier-to-use computer languagecalled BASIC programs written in BASIC ran much slower than assemblylanguage and took up more memory space, but did not require the almost monasticcommitment that machine language demanded. MIT planners concentrated onextending actual computer access to more people. There were all sorts ofjustifications for this, not the least being the projected scale of economy one thatwas glaringly preferable to the then current system, in which even seconds ofcomputer time were valuable commodities (though you would not know it aroundthe Spacewar-playing PDP-1). If more people used computers, more expertprogrammers and theoreticians would emerge, and the science of computing yes,these aggressive planners were calling it a science could only benefit by that newtalent. But there was something else involved in this. It was something any hackercould understand the belief that computing, in and of itself, was positive. JohnMcCarthy illustrated that belief when he said that the natural state of man was tobe online to a computer all the time. "What the user wants is a computer that hecan have continuously at his beck and call for long periods of time."The man of the future. Hands on a keyboard, eyes on a CRT, in touch with thebody of information and thought that the world had been storing since historybegan. It would all be accessible to Computational Man.None of this would occur with the batch-processed IBM 704. Nor would it occurwith the TX-0 and PDP-1, with their weekly log sheets completely filled in withinhours of being posted on the wall. No, in order to do this, you'd have to haveseveral people use the computer at once. (The thought of each person having his orher own computer was something only a hacker would think worthwhile.) Thismulti-user concept was called time-sharing, and in 1960 the heaviest of the MITplanners began the Long-Range Computer Study Group. Among the memberswere people who had watched the rise of the MIT hacker with amusement andassent, people like Jack Dennis, Marvin Minsky, and Uncle John McCarthy. Theyknew how important it was for people to actually get their hands on those things.To them, it was not a question of whether to time-share or not it was a question ofhow to do it.Computer manufacturers, particularly IBM, were not enthusiastic. It was clear thatMIT would have to go about it pretty much on its own. (The research firm of BoltBeranek and Newman was also working on time-sharing.) Eventually two projectsbegan at MIT: one was Jack Dennis' largely solo effort to write a timesharingsystem for the PDP-1. The other was undertaken by a professor named

F. J. Corbate, who would seek some help from the reluctant goliath, IBM, to writea system for the 7090.The Department of Defense, especially through its Advanced Research ProjectsAgency (ARPA), had been supporting computers since the war, mindful of theireventual applications toward military use. So by the early sixties, MIT hadobtained a long-range grant for its time-sharing project, which would be namedProject MAC (the initials stood for two things: Multiple Access Computing, andMachine Aided Cognition). Uncle Sam would cough up three million dollars ayear. Dennis would be in charge. Marvin Minsky would also be a large presence,particularly in using the one-third share of the money that would go not fortimesharing development, but for the still ephemeral field of artificial intelligence.Minsky was delighted, since the million dollars was ten times his previous budgetfor AI, and he realized that a good part of the remaining two thirds would see itsway into AI activities as well. It was a chance to set up an ideal facility, wherepeople could plan for the realization of the hacker dream with sophisticatedmachines, shielded from the bureaucratic lunacy of the outside world. Meanwhile,the hacker dream would be lived day by day by devoted students of the machine.The planners knew that they'd need special people to staff this lab. Marvin Minskyand Jack Dennis knew that the enthusiasm of brilliant hackers was essential tobring about their Big Ideas. As Minsky later said of his lab: "In this environmentthere were several things going on. There were the most abstract theories ofartificial intelligence that people were working on and some of [the hackers] wereconcerned with those, most weren't. But there was the question of how do youmake the programs that do these things and how do you get them to work."Minsky was quite happy to resolve that question by leaving it to the hackers, thepeople to whom "computers were the most interesting thing in the world." Thekind of people who, for a lark, would hack up something even wilder thanSpacewar and then, instead of playing it all night (as sometimes was happening inthe Kluge Room), would hack some more. Instead of space simulations, thehackers who did the scut work at Project MAC would be tackling larger systemsrobotic arms, vision projects, mathematical conundrums, and labyrinthine timesharingsystems that boggled the imagination. Fortunately, the classes that enteredMIT in the early sixties were to provide some of the most devoted and brillianthackers who ever sat at a console. And none of them so fully fit the title "hacker"as Richard Greenblatt.

4Greenblatt and GosperRICKY Greenblatt was a hacker waiting to happen. Years later, when he wasknown throughout the nation's computer centers as the archetypal hacker, when thetales of his single-minded concentration were almost as prolific as the millions oflines of assembly language code he'd hacked, someone would ask him how it allstarted. He'd twist back in his chair, looking not as rumpled as he did back as anundergraduate, when he was cherub-faced and dark-haired and painfully awkwardof speech; the question, he figured, came down to whether hackers were born ormade, and out came one of the notorious non sequiturs which came to be known asBlattisms: "If hackers are bom, then they're going to get made, and if they're madeinto it, they were bom." But Greenblatt would admit that he was a born hacker. Notthat his first encounter with the PDP-1 had changed his life. He was interested, allright. It had been freshman rush week at MIT, and Ricky Greenblatt had some timeon his hands before tackling his courses, ready for academic glory. He visited theplaces that interested him most: the campus radio station WTBS (MIT's wasperhaps the only college radio station in the country with a surfeit of student audioengineers and a shortage of disc jockeys), the Tech Model Railroad Club, and theKluge Room in Building 26 which held the PDP-1. Some hackers were playingSpacewar.It was the general rule to play the game with all the room lights turned off, so thepeople crowded around the console would have their faces eerily illuminated bythis display of spaceships and heavy stars. Rapt faces lit by the glow of thecomputer. Ricky Greenblatt was impressed. He watched the cosmic clashes for awhile, then went next door to look over the TX-0, with its racks of tubes andtransistors, its fancy power supplies, its lights and switches. His high school mathclub back in Columbia, Missouri, had visited the state university's batch-processedcomputer, and he'd seen a giant card-sorting machine at a local insurance company.But nothing like this. Still, despite being impressed with the radio station, theModel Railroad Club, and especially the computers, he set about making dean's list.This scholastic virtue could not last. Greenblatt, even more than your normal MITstudent, was a willing conscript of the Hands-On Imperative. His life had been

changed irrevocably the day in 1954 that his father, visiting the son he hadn't livedwith since an early divorce, took him to the Memorial Student Union at theUniversity of Missouri, not far from Ricky's house in Columbia. Ricky Greenblatttook to the place immediately. It wasn't merely because of the comfortable lounge,the television set, the soft-drink bar ... It was because of the students, who weremore of an intellectual match for nine-year-old Ricky Greenblatt than were hisclassmates. He would go there to play chess, and he usually had no problembeating the college students. He was a very good chess player.One of his chess victims was a UM engineering student on the GI bill. His namewas Lester, and Lester's gift to this nine-year-old prodigy was a hands-onintroduction to the world of electronics. A world where there were no ambiguities.Logic prevailed. You had a degree of control over things. You could build thingsaccording to your own plan. To a nine-year-old whose intelligence might havemade him uncomfortable with his chronological peers, a child affected by a maritalsplit which was typical of a world of human relations beyond his control,electronics was the perfect escape.Lester and Ricky worked on ham radio projects. They tore apart old television sets.Before finishing college, Lester introduced Ricky to a Mr. Houghton, who ran alocal radio shop, and that became a second home to the youngster through highschool. With a high school friend, Greenblatt built a gamut of hairy projects.Amplifiers, modulators, all sorts of evil-looking vacuum tube contraptions. Anoscilloscope. Ham radios. A television camera. A television camera! It seemed likea good idea, so they built it. And of course when it came time to choose a college,Richard Greenblatt picked MIT. He entered in the fall of 1962.The course work was rigid during his first term, but Greenblatt was handling itwithout much problem. He had developed a relationship with a few campuscomputers. He had gotten lucky, landing the elective course called EE 641Introduction to Computer Programming and he would often go down to the punchcardmachines at EAM to make programs for the Hulking Giant 7090. Also, hisroommate, Mike Beeler, had been taking a course in something calledNomography. The students taking the class had hands-on access to an IBM 1620set in yet another enclave of those misguided priests whose minds had beenclouded with the ignorant fog that came from the IBM sales force. Greenblattwould often accompany Beeler to the 1620, where you would punch up your carddeck, and stand in line. When your turn came, you'd dump your cards in the readerand get an instant printout from a plotter-printer. "It was sort of a fun, eveningthing to do," Beeler would later recall. "We'd do it the way others might watch asports game, or go out and have a beer." It was limited but gratifying. It madeGreenblatt want more.

Around Christmas time, he finally felt comfortable enough to hang out at theModel Railroad Club. There, around such people as Peter Samson, it was natural tofall into hacker mode. (Computers had various states called "modes," and hackersoften used that phrase to describe conditions in real life.) Samson had been workingon a big timetable program for the TMRC operating sessions on the giant layout;because of the number crunching required, Samson had done it in FORTRAN onthe 7090. Greenblatt decided to write the first FORTRAN for the PDP-1. Just whyhe decided to do this is something he could never explain, and chances are no oneasked. It was common, if you wanted to do a task on a machine and the machinedidn't have the software to do it, to write the proper software so you could do it.This was an impulse that Greenblatt would later elevate to an art form.He did it, too. Wrote a program that would enable you to write in FORTRAN,taking what you wrote and compiling the code into machine language, as well astransforming the computer's machine language responses back into FORTRAN.Greenblatt did his FORTRAN compiler largely in his room, since he had troublegetting enough access to the PDP-1 to work on-line. Besides that, he got involvedin working on a new system of relays underneath the layout at TMRC. It seems thatthe plaster in the room (which was always pretty grungy anyway, because custodialpeople were officially barred entry) kept falling, and some of it would get on thecontacts of the system that Jack Dennis had masterminded in the mid-fifties. Also,there was something new called a wire-spring relay which looked better than theold kind. So Greenblatt spent a good deal of time that spring doing that. Along withPDP-1 hacking.It is funny how things happen. You begin working conscientiously as a student,you make the dean's list, and then you discover something which puts classes intotheir proper perspective: they are totally irrelevant to the matter at hand. The matterat hand was hacking, and it seemed obvious at least, so obvious that no one aroundTMRC or the PDP-1 seemed to think it even a useful topic of discourse thathacking was a pursuit so satisfying that you could make a life of it. While acomputer is very complex, it is not nearly as complex as the various comings andgoings and interrelationships of the human zoo; but, unlike formal or informalstudy of the social sciences, hacking gave you not only an understanding of thesystem but an addictive control as well, along with the illusion that total controlwas just a few features away. Naturally, you go about building those aspects of thesystem that seem most necessary to work within the system in the proper way. Justas naturally, working in this improved system lets you know of more things thatneed to be done. Then someone like Marvin Minsky might happen along and say,"Here is a robot arm. I am leaving this robot arm by the machine." Immediately,nothing in the world is as essential as making the proper interface between themachine and the robot arm, and putting the robot arm under your control, andfiguring a way to create a system where the robot arm knows what the hell it is

doing. Then you can see your offspring come to life. How can something ascontrived as an engineering class compare to that? Chances are that yourengineering professor has never done anything half as interesting as the problemsyou are solving every day on the PDP-1. Who's right?By Greenblatt's sophomore year, the computer scene around the PDP-1 waschanging considerably. Though a few more of the original TX-0 hackers haddeparted, there was new talent arriving, and the new, ambitious setup, funded bythe benevolent Department of Defense, nicely accommodated their hacking. Asecond PDP-1 had arrived; its home was the new, nine-story rectangular buildingon Main Street a building of mind-numbing dullness, with no protuberances andsill-less windows that looked painted onto its off-white surface. The building wascalled Tech Square, and among the MIT and corporate clients moving in wasProject MAC. The ninth floor of this building, where the computers were, would behome to a generation of hackers, and none would spend as much time there asGreenblatt.Greenblatt was getting paid (sub-minimum wages) for hacking as a studentemployee, as were several hackers who worked on the system or were starting todevelop some of the large programs that would do artificial intelligence. Theystarted to notice that this awkwardly polite sophomore was a potential PDP-1superstar.He was turning out an incredible amount of code, hacking as much as he could, orsitting with a stack of printouts, marking them up. He'd shuttle between the PDP-1and TMRC, with his head fantastically wired with the structures of the program hewas working on, or the system of relays he'd hacked under the TMRC layout. Tohold that concentration for a long period of time, he lived, as did several of hispeers, the thirty-hour day. It was conducive to intense hacking, since you had anextended block of waking hours to get going on a program, and, once you werereally rolling, little annoyances like sleep need not bother you. The idea was toburn away for thirty hours, reach total exhaustion, then go home and collapse fortwelve hours. An alternative would be to collapse right there in the lab. A minordrawback of this sort of schedule was that it put you at odds with the routineswhich everyone else in the world used to do things like keep appointments, eat, andgo to classes. Hackers could accommodate this one would commonly ask questionslike "What phase is Greenblatt in?" and someone who had seen him recently wouldsay, "I think he's in a night phase now, and should be in around nine or so."Professors did not adjust to those phases so easily, and Greenblatt "zorched" hisclasses.He was placed on academic probation, and his mother came to Massachusetts toconfer with the dean. There was some explaining to do. "His mom was concerned,"

his roommate Beeler would later say. "Her idea was that he was here to get adegree. But the things he was doing on the computer were completely state-of-theartno one was doing them yet. He saw additional things to be done. It was verydifficult to get excited about classes." To Greenblatt, it wasn't really important thathe was in danger of flunking out of college. Hacking was paramount: it was whathe did best and what made him happiest.His worst moment came when he was so "out of phase" that he slept past a finalexam. It only hastened his exit from the student body of MIT. Flunking outprobably wouldn't have made any difference at all in his life had it not been for arule that you couldn't be a student employee when you were an exiled student. SoGreenblatt went looking for work, fully intending to get a daytime programmingjob that would allow him to spend his nights at the place he wanted to spend histime the ninth floor at Tech Square. Hacking. And that is exactly what he did.There was an equally impressive hacker who had mastered the PDP-1 in a differentmanner. More verbal than Greenblatt, he was better able to articulate his vision ofhow the computer had changed his life, and how it might change all our lives. Thisstudent was named Bill Gosper. He had begun MIT a year before Greenblatt, buthad been somewhat slower at becoming a habitue of the PDP-1. Gosper was thin,with birdlike features covered by thick spectacles and an unruly head of kinkybrown hair. But even a brief meeting with Gosper was enough to convince you thathere was someone whose brilliance put things like physical appearance into theirproperly trivial perspective. He was a math genius. It was actually the idea ofhacking the world of mathematics, rather than hacking systems, that attractedGosper to the computer, and he was to serve as a long-time foil to Greenblatt andthe other systems-oriented people in the society of brilliant foot soldiers nowforming around brand-new Project MAC.Gosper was from Pennsauken, New Jersey, across the river from Philadelphia, andhis pre-MIT experience with computers, like Greenblatt's, was limited to watchingHulking Giants operate from behind a pane of glass. He could vividly recall seeingthe Univac at Philadelphia's Franklin Institute churn out pictures of BenjaminFranklin on its line printer. Gosper had no idea what was going on, but it lookedlike great fun.He tasted that fun himself for the first time in his second MIT semester. He'd takena course from Uncle John McCarthy open only to freshmen who'd gottendisgustingly high grade point averages the previous term. The course began withFORTRAN, went on to IBM machine language, and wound up on the PDP-1. Theproblems were non-trivial, things like tracing rays through optical systems with the

709, or working routines with a new floating point interpreter for the PDP-1.The challenge of programming appealed to Gosper. Especially on the PDP-1,which after the torture of IBM batch-processing could work on you likeintoxicating elixir. Or having sex for the first time. Years later, Gosper still spokewith excitement of "the rush of having this live keyboard under you and having thismachine respond in milliseconds to what you were doing..."Still, Gosper was timid about continuing on the PDP-1 after the course was over.He was involved with the math department, where people kept telling him that hewould be wise to stay away from computers they would turn him into a clerk. Theunofficial slogan of the math department, Gosper found, was "There's no such thingas Computer Science it's witchcraft!" Well then, Gosper would be a witch! Hesigned up for Minsky's course in artificial intelligence. The work was again on thePDP-1, and this time Gosper got drawn into hacking itself. Somewhere in thatterm, he wrote a program to plot functions on the screen, his first real project, andone of the subroutines contained a program bum so elegant that he dared show it toAlan Kotok. Kotok by then had attained, thought Gosper, "godlike status," not onlyfrom his exploits on the PDP-1 and TMRC, but from the well-known fact that hiswork at DEC included a prime role in the design of a new computer, a muchenhancedversion of the PDP-1. Gosper was rapturous when Kotok not only lookedover his hack, but thought it clever enough to show to someone else. Kotok actuallythought I'd done something neat! Gosper hunkered down for more hacking.His big project in that course was an attempt to "solve" the game Peg Solitaire (orHI-Q), where you have a board in the shape of a plus sign with thirty-three holes init. Every hole but one is filled by a peg: you jump pegs over each other, removingthe ones you jump over. The idea is to finish with one peg in the center. WhenGosper and two classmates proposed to Minsky that they solve the problem on thePDP-1, Minsky doubted they could do it, but welcomed the try. Gosper and hisfriends not only solved it "We demolished it," he'd later say. They hacked aprogram that would enable the PDP-1 to solve the game in an hour and a half.Gosper admired the way the computer solved HI-Q because its approach was"counterintuitive." He had a profound respect for programs which used techniquesthat on the surface seemed improbable, but in fact took advantage of the situation'sdeep mathematical truth. The counterintuitive solution sprang from understandingthe magical connections between things in the vast mandala of numericalrelationships on which hacking ultimately was based. Discovering thoserelationships making new mathematics on the computer was to be Gosper's quest;and as he began hanging out more around the PDP-1 and TMRC, he made himselfindispensable as the chief "math hacker" not so much interested in systemsprograms, but able to come up with astoundingly clear (non-intuitive!) algorithms

which might help a systems hacker knock a few instructions off a subroutine, orcrack a mental logjam on getting a program running.Gosper and Greenblatt represented two kinds of hacking around TMRC and thePDP-1: Greenblatt focused on pragmatic systems building, and Gosper onmathematical exploration. Each respected the other's forte, and both wouldparticipate in projects, often collaborative ones, that exploited their best abilities.More than that, both were major contributors to the still nascent culture that wasbeginning to flower in its fullest form on the ninth floor of Tech Square. Forvarious reasons, it would be in this technological hothouse that the culture wouldgrow most lushly, taking the Hacker Ethic to its extreme.The action would shift among several scenes. The Kluge Room, with the PDP-1now operating with the time-sharing system which Jack Dennis had worked for ayear to write, was still an option for some late-night hacking, and especiallySpacewarring. But more and more, the true hackers would prefer the Project MACcomputer. It stood among other machines on the harshly lit, sterilely furnishedninth floor of Tech Square, where one could escape from the hum of the airconditioners running the various computers only by ducking into one of severaltiny offices. Finally, there was TMRC, with its never-empty Coke machine andSaunders' change box and the Tool Room next door, where people would sit at allhours of the night and argue what to an outsider would be bafflingly arcane points.These arguments were the lifeblood of the hacker community. Sometimes peoplewould literally scream at each other, insisting on a certain kind of coding schemefor an assembler, or a specific type of interface, or a particular feature in acomputer language. These differences would have hackers banging on theblackboard, or throwing chalk across the room. It wasn't so much a battle of egos asit was an attempt to figure out what The Right Thing was. The term had specialmeaning to the hackers. The Right Thing implied that to any problem, whether aprogramming dilemma, a hardware interface mismatch, or a question of softwarearchitecture, a solution existed that was just ... it. The perfect algorithm. You'd havehacked right into the sweet spot, and anyone with half a brain would see that thestraight line between two points had been drawn, and there was no sense trying totop it. "The Right Thing," Gosper would later explain, "very specifically meant theunique, correct, elegant solution ... the thing that satisfied all the constraints at thesame time, which everyone seemed to believe existed for most problems."Gosper and Greenblatt both had strong opinions, but usually Greenblatt would tireof corrosive human interfacing, and wander away to actually implement something.Elegant or not. In his thinking, things had to be done. And if no one else would be

hacking them, he would. He would sit down with paper and pencil, or maybe at theconsole of the PDP-1, and scream out his code. Greenblatt's programs were robust,meaning that their foundation was firm, with built-in error checks to prevent thewhole thing from bombing as a result of a single mistake. By the time Greenblattwas through with a program, it was thoroughly debugged. Gosper thought thatGreenblatt loved finding and fixing bugs more than anybody he'd ever met, andsuspected he sometimes wrote buggy code just so he could fix it.Gosper had a more public style of hacking. He liked to work with an audience, andoften novice hackers would pull up a chair behind him at the console to watch himwrite his clever hacks, which were often loaded with terse little mathematicalpoints of interest. He was at his best at display hacks, where an unusual algorithmwould evoke a steadily unpredictable series of CRT pyrotechnics. Gosper wouldact as tour guide as he progressed, sometimes emphasizing that even typingmistakes could present an interesting numerical phenomenon. He maintained acontinual fascination with the way a computer could spit back somethingunexpected, and he would treat the utterances of the machine with infinite respect.Sometimes the most seemingly random event could lure him off into a fascinatingtangent on the implications of this quadratic surd or that transcendental function.Certain subroutine wizardry in a Gosper program would occasionally evolve into ascholarly memo, like the one that begins:On the theory that continued fractions are underused, probably because of theirunfamiliarity, I offer the following propaganda session on the relative merits ofcontinued fractions versus other numerical representations.The arguments in the Tool Room were no mere college bull sessions. Kotok wouldoften be there, and it was at those sessions that significant decisions were madeconcerning the computer he was designing for DEC, the PDP-6. Even in its designstage, this PDP-6 was considered the absolute Right Thing around TMRC. Kotokwould sometimes drive Gosper back to South Jersey for holiday breaks, talking ashe drove about how this new computer would have sixteen independent registers.(A register, or accumulator, is a place within a computer where actual computationoccurs. Sixteen of them would give a machine a heretofore unheard-of versatility.)Gosper would gasp. That'll be, he thought, the greatest computer in the history ofthe world!When DEC actually built the PDP-6, and gave the first prototype to Project MAC,everyone could see that, while the computer had all the necessary sops forcommercial users, it was at heart a hacker's machine. Both Kotok and his boss,Gordon Bell, recalling their TX-0 days, used the PDP-6 to demolish the limitationsthat had bothered them on that machine. Also, Kotok had listened closely to thesuggestions of TMRC people, notably Peter Samson, who took credit for the

sixteen registers. The instruction set had everything you needed, and the overallarchitecture was symmetrically sound. The sixteen registers could be accessedthree different ways each, and you could do it in combinations, to get a lot done byusing a single instruction. The PDP-6 also used a "stack," which allowed you tomix and match your subroutines, programs, and activities with ease. To hackers,the introduction of the PDP-6 and its achingly beautiful instruction set meant theyhad a powerful new vocabulary with which to express sentiments that previouslycould be conveyed only in the most awkward terms.Minsky set the hackers to work writing new systems software for the PDP-6, abeautiful sea-blue machine with three large cabinets, a more streamlined controlpanel than the One, rows of shiny cantilevered switches, and a winking matrix oflights. Soon they were into the psychology of this new machine as deeply as theyhad been on the PDP-1. But you could go further on the Six. One day in the ToolRoom at TMRC the hackers were playing around with different ways to do decimalprint routines, little programs to get the computer to print out in Arabic numbers.Someone got the idea of trying some of the flashy new instructions on the PDP-6,the ones that utilized the stack. Hardly anyone had integrated these newinstructions into his code; but as the program got put on the blackboard using oneinstruction called Push-J, to everyone's amazement the entire decimal print routine,which normally would be a page worth of code, came out only six instructionslong. After that, everyone around TMRC agreed that Push-J had certainly been TheRight Thing to put into the PDP-6.The Tool Room discussions and arguments would often be carried over to dinner,and the cuisine of choice was almost always Chinese food. It was cheap, plentiful,and best of all available late at night. (A poor second choice was the nearby greasyspoon on Cambridge's Main Street, a maroon-paneled former railroad car namedthe F&T Diner, but called by hackers "The Red Death.") On most Saturdayevenings, or spontaneously on weeknights after ten o'clock, a group of hackerswould head out, sometimes in Greenblatt's blue 1954 Chevy convertible, toBoston's Chinatown.Chinese food was a system, too, and the hacker curiosity was applied to that systemas assiduously as to a new LISP compiler. Samson had been an aficionado from hisfirst experience on a TMRC outing to Joy Pong's on Central Square, and by theearly sixties he had actually learned enough Chinese characters to read menus andorder obscure dishes. Gosper took to the cuisine with even greater vigor; he wouldprowl Chinatown looking for restaurants open after midnight, and one night hefound a tiny little cellar place own by a small family. It was fairly dull food, but henoticed some Chinese people eating fantastic-looking dishes. So he figured he'dtake Samson back there.

They went back loaded with Chinese dictionaries, and demanded a Chinese menu.The chef, a Mr. Wong, reluctantly complied, and Gosper, Samson, and the otherspored over the menu as if it were an instruction set for a new machine. Samsonsupplied the translations, which were positively revelatory. What was called "Beefwith Tomato" on the English menu had a literal meaning of Barbarian EggplantCowpork. "Wonton" had a Chinese equivalent of Cloud Gulp. There wereunbelievable things to discover in this system! So after deciding the mostinteresting things to order ("Hibiscus Wing? Better order that, find out what that'sabout"), they called over Mr. Wong, and he jabbered frantically in Chinesedisapproval of their selections. It turned out he was reluctant to serve them the foodChinese-style, thinking that Americans couldn't take it. Mr. Wong had mistakenthem for typically timid Americans but these were explorers! They had been insidethe machine, and lived to tell the tale (they would tell it in assembly language). Mr.Wong gave in. Out came the best Chinese meal that any of the hackers had eaten todate.So expert were the TMRC people at hacking Chinese food that they couldeventually go the restauranteursone better. On a hacker excursion one April Fools'Day, Gosper had a craving for a little-known dish called Bitter Melon. It was a wartdottedform of green pepper, with an intense quinine taste that evoked nausea in allbut those who'd painfully acquired the taste. For reasons best known to himself,Gosper decided to have it with sweet-and-sour sauce, and he wrote down the orderin Chinese. The owner's daughter came out giggling. "I'm afraid you made amistake my father says that this says 'Sweet-and-Sour Bitter Melon.' " Gosper tookthis as a challenge. Besides, he was offended that the daughter couldn't even readChinese that went against the logic of an efficient Chinese Restaurant System, alogic Gosper had come to respect. So, even though he knew his order was apreposterous request, he acted indignant, telling the daughter, "Of course it saysSweet-and-Sour Bitter Melon we Americans always order Sweet-and-Sour BitterMelon the first of April." Finally, the owner himself came out. "You can't eat!" heshouted. "No taste' No taste!" The hackers stuck to the request, and the owner slunkback to the kitchen.Sweet-and-Sour Bitter Melon turned out to be every bit as hideous as the ownerpromised. The sauce at that place was wickedly potent, so much so that if youinhaled while you put some in your mouth you'd choke. Combined with theordinarily vile bitter melon, it created a chemical that seemed to squeak on yourteeth, and no amount of tea or Coca-Cola could dilute that taste. To almost anyother group of people, the experience would have been a nightmare. But to thehackers it was all part of the system. It made no human sense, but had its logic. Itwas The Right Thing; therefore every year on April Fools' Day they returned to therestaurant and insisted that their appetizer be Sweet-and-Sour Bitter Melon.

It was during those meals that the hackers were most social. Chinese restaurantsoffered hackers a fascinating culinary system and a physically predictableenvironment. To make it even more comfortable, Gosper, one of several hackerswho despised smoke in the air and disdained those who smoked, brought along atiny, battery-powered fan. The fan was something kluged up by a teenage hackerwho hung around the AI lab it looked like a mean little bomb, and had been builtusing a cooling fan from a junked computer. Gosper would put it on the table togently blow smoke back into offenders' faces. On one occasion at the LuckyGarden in Cambridge, a brutish jock at a nearby table became outraged when thelittle fan redirected the smoke from his date's cigarette back to their table. Helooked at these grungy MIT types with their little fan and demanded the hackersturn the thing off. "OK, if she stops smoking," they said, and at that point the jockcharged the table, knocking dishes around, spilling tea all over, and even stickinghis chopsticks into the blades of the fan. The hackers, who considered physicalcombat one of the more idiotic human interfaces, watched in astonishment. Theincident ended as soon as the jock noticed a policeman sitting across the restaurant.That was an exception to what were usually convivial gatherings. The talk revolvedaround various hacking issues. Often, people would have their printouts with themand during lulls in conversation would bury their noses in the reams of assemblycode. On occasion, the hackers would even discuss some events in the "real world,"but the Hacker Ethic would be identifiable in the terms of the discussion. It wouldcome down to some flaw in a system. Or an interesting event would be consideredin light of a hacker's natural curiosity about the way things work.A common subject was the hideous reign of IBM, the disgustingly naked emperorof the computer kingdom. Greenblatt might go on a "flame" an extended andagitated rift about the zillions of dollars being wasted on IBM computers.Greenblatt would go home on vacation and see that the science department at theUniversity of Missouri, which allegedly didn't have any money, was spending fourmillion dollars a year on the care and feeding of an IBM Hulking Giant that wasn'tnearly as nifty as the PDP-6. And speaking of grossly overrated stuff, what aboutthat IBM timesharing system at MIT, with that IBM 7094 right there on the ninthfloor? Talk about waste!This could go on for a whole meal. It is telling, though, to note the things that thehackers did not talk about. They did not spend much time discussing the social andpolitical implications of computers in society (except maybe to mention howutterly wrong and naive the popular conception of computers was). They did nottalk sports. They generally kept their own emotional and personal lives as far asthey had any to themselves. And for a group of healthy college-age males, therewas remarkably little discussion of a topic which commonly obsesses groups ofthat composition. Females.

Though some hackers led somewhat active social lives, the key figures in TMRC-PDP hacking had locked themselves into what would be called "bachelor mode." Itwas easy to fall into for one thing, many of the hackers were loners to begin with,socially uncomfortable. It was the predictability and controllability of a computersystem as opposed to the hopelessly random problems in a human relationshipwhich made hacking particularly attractive. But an even weightier factor was thehackers' impression that computing was much more important than gettinginvolved in a romantic relationship. It was a question of priorities.Hacking had replaced sex in their lives."The people were just so interested in computers and that kind of stuff that they justreally didn't have time [for women]," Kotok would later reflect. "And as they gotolder, everyone sort of had the view that one day some woman would come alongand sort of plunk you over the head and say, you!" That was more or less whathappened to Kotok, though not until his late thirties. Meanwhile, hackers acted as ifsex didn't exist. They wouldn't notice some gorgeous woman at the table next tothem in the Chinese restaurant, because "the concept of gorgeous woman wasn't inthe vocabulary," hacker David Silver later explained. When a woman did come intothe life of a serious hacker, there might be some discussion "What's happened to soand-so... the guy's just completely falling apart ..." But generally that kind of thingwas not so much disdained as it was shrugged off. You couldn't dwell on those whomight have fallen by the wayside, because you were involved in the most importantthing in the world hacking. Not only an obsession and a lusty pleasure, hackingwas a mission. You would hack, and you would live by the Hacker Ethic, and youknew that horribly inefficient and wasteful things like women burned too manycycles, occupied too much memory space. "Women, even today, are consideredgrossly unpredictable," one PDP-6 hacker noted, almost two decades later. "Howcan a hacker tolerate such an imperfect being?"Maybe it would have been different if there had been more women around TMRCand the ninth floor the few that did hang around paired off with hackers. ("Theyfound us," one hacker would later note.) There were not too many of these women,since outsiders, male or female, were often put off by the group: the hackers talkedstrangely, they had bizarre hours, they ate weird food and they spent all their timethinking about computers.And they formed an exclusively male culture. The sad fact was that there never wasa star-quality female hacker. No one knows why There were women programmersand some of them were good, but none seemed to take hacking as a holy calling theway Greenblatt, Gosper, and the others did. Even the substantial cultural biasagainst women getting into serious computing does not explain the utter lack of

female hackers. "Cultural things are strong, but not that strong," Gosper wouldlater conclude, attributing the phenomenon to genetic, or "hardware," differences.In any case, only rarely were women in attendance at the Chinese restaurantexcursions or the sessions at the Tool Room next door to TMRC. So naturally, onedid not have to look one's best. Greenblatt, perhaps, took this to an extreme. Heworked on several mammoth projects in the mid-sixties, and would often get sowrapped up in them that his personal habits became a matter of some concern to hisfellow hackers.After he dropped out of school, Greenblatt had taken a job at a firm called CharlesAdams Associates, which was in the process of buying and setting up a PDP-1.Greenblatt would work at their offices near Boston's "Technology Highway"outside the city during the day and drive thirty miles back to MIT after work forsome all-night hacking. Originally he moved from the dorms to the CambridgeYMCA, but they booted him out because he wouldn't keep his room clean. Afterhis stint at Adams, he got rehired at the AI Lab, and though he had a stable livingsituation as a boarder in a Belmont house owned by a retired dentist and his wife hewould often sleep on a cot on the ninth floor. Cleanliness was apparently a lowpriority, since tales abounded of his noticeable grunginess. (Later Greenblatt wouldinsist that he was no worse than some of the others.) Some hackers recall that oneof the things Greenblatt's hacking precluded was regular bathing, and the result wasa powerful odor. The joke around the AI lab was that there was a new scientificolfactory measure called a milliblatt. One or two milliblatts was extremelypowerful, and one full blatt was just about inconceivable. To decrease themilliblatts, the story goes, hackers maneuvered Greenblatt to a place in the hallwayof Building 20 where there was an emergency shower for cases of accidentalexposure to chemicals, and let it rip.Gosper would sometimes tweak Greenblatt for his personal habits, and wasparticularly bothered at Greenblatt's habit of rubbing his hands together, whichresulted in little pieces of dirt falling out. Gosper called these blattlies. WhenGreenblatt worked on Gosper's desk and left blattlies behind, Gosper would make apoint of washing the area with ammonia. Gosper would also sometimes kidGreenblatt about his awkward speech patterns, his frequent coughing, his poorspelling, his mumbling even though many of Greenblatt's expressions becameintegrated into the specific vernacular which all the hackers used to some degree.For instance, it was probably Greenblatt who popularized the practice of doublingwords for emphasis like the times he'd get revved up explaining something toGosper, Kotok, and Samson, and the words would get tangled up, and he'd sigh,saying, "Oh, lose-y lose-y" and begin over. Gosper and the others would laugh but,like the way a family will take on a baby's speech patterns and cute malapropisms,the community adopted many Greenblattisms.

Despite these odd personal traits, the hackers held Greenblatt in awe. He was theway he was because of conscious priorities: he was a hacker, not a socialite, andthere was nothing more useful than hacking. It so consumed him that he sometimeswould go six months without finding time to pick up his MIT paycheck. "If herandomly sat around and tried to articulate what he was thinking and doing all thetime, he wouldn't have gotten anything done," Gosper would later say. "If heworried how to spell things, he wouldn't have gotten anything written. He did whathe was good at. He was a complete pragmatist. What people thought, be damned. Ifanyone thought he was stupid or nerdly, that was their problem. Some people did,and they were wrong."Gosper could appreciate Greenblatt's single-mindedness because his own insistenceon graduating (which he did in 1965) had led him to trouble. It was not that hisfinal year at MIT was an academic disaster, because he managed to fulfill thegraduation requirements by a slim margin. The problem was a pact he had madewith the United States Navy. Before he entered MIT, he'd taken a civil serviceexam and placed high enough to be included in an exclusive student engineeringdevelopment program. He worked summers for the Navy, which paid half histuition and required him to work there for three years after graduation. WhenGosper signed up, there had been an escape clause that allowed you to postponeyour commitment if you went to graduate school; and if you could get acorporation to pay off the Navy's three-thousand-dollar investment after that, you'dno longer be obligated. But during Gosper's senior year the graduate schoolloophole closed. Only a buy-out would save him, and he didn't have the money.The prospect of going into the Navy was hideous. During his summer employmentstints he had been exposed to a pathetic system that was antithetical to the HackerEthic. Programmers were kept in a room totally separated from the machine;sometimes, as a reward for years of service, they would let a particularly obedientworker venture into the computer room and actually see his program run. (Onewoman, the story goes, was allowed this privilege, and the sight of the lightsflashing and disks whirring caused her to faint.) In addition, Gosper's Navy bosswas a man who could not understand why the logarithm of the sums in a givenequation was not the sum of the logarithms. There was no way in hell Bill Gosperwas going to work under a man who did not know why the logarithm of the sumwas not the sum of the logarithms.Then there was Gosper's perception that the Navy was in bed with Univac. Heconsidered the Univac machine a grotesque parody of a computer, a Hulking Giant.The Navy had to know it was a basically phony computer, he figured, but used itanyway it was a classic example of the inevitably warped outcome of OutsideWorld bureaucracy. Living with that machine would be immersion in hell. Gosper

used computers to seek things that no one had ever found before, and it wasessential that the computer he used be optimal in every way. The PDP-6 was thebest thing he had found so far, and he was determined not to leave it, especially fora dog like the Univac. "If I see a machine has some incredibly stupid thing wrongwith it, some error in its design or whatever, it just irritates the hell out of me,"Gosper would later explain. "Whereas the PDP-6 always seemed like an infinitelyperfectible machine. If there was something wrong, you would change it. In somesense, we lived inside the damn machine. It was part of our environment. Therewas almost a society in there ... I couldn't imagine being without a PDP-6."Gosper was determined to find the money to pay back the Navy, and to earn itwhile working for a company with a PDP-6. He fulfilled these rigid criteria bylanding a job with the firm that Greenblatt had worked for that past year, CharlesAdams. The fact that the Adams company never quite got their PDP-6 workingright (Greenblatt insists that he did his part of the preparation adequately) did notseem to upset Gosper: what freaked him was the fact that Charles Adams scrappedthe project and bought a carbon copy of the same Hulking Giant Univac that theNavy had.But by that time more funding for Project MAC had come through, and Bill Gosperfound his way onto the payroll. He hardly had to change his habits, since during hiswhole stint at Addams he had been working on the PDP-6 on the ninth floor everynight.Greenblatt by then was in full hacking swing. One of the first projects he workedwith on the PDP-6 was a LISP compiler, to allow the machine to run the latest andmost nifty version of John McCarthy's artificial intelligence language. Young PeterDeutsch had written a LISP for the PDP-1, but it was not too effective, since theOne had less memory; and LISP, which works with symbols and not numberseasily translated to binary, consumes an incredible amount of memory.Some people, notably Gosper, thought that LISP would be a waste of time on thePDP-6 as well. Gosper was always concerned with what he considered theatrocious lack of computer power in those days, and later would marvel at howignorant they all were in the AI lab, trying impossible tasks and blaming theirfailures not on the piddling machines they had, but on themselves. In his senioryear, Gosper had been put to work by Minsky on a display that would test whethera certain visual phenomenon was binocular or monocular. Gosper did manage tocome close with a clever, clover-leaf shape which at least displayed thephenomenon, but generally was banging his head against the wall trying to makethe machine do more than it could do. One of the tasks that Gosper considered

impossible was a useful LISP on a PDP-6 it might be nice as a symbol evaluator,but not to do anything. He considered it one of Minsky's follies that Greenblatt andthe others had been tricked into implementing.But Greenblatt saw more. Though he realized that LISP on the PDP-6 would be tosome extent a hack, not fully pragmatic, he did see the need to move toward it. Itwas a powerful language that would help the field of artificial intelligence moveforward: it was the language by which computers would do extremely difficulttasks, by which they could actually learn. Greenblatt was just starting then to havea certain vision of the future, an inkling of a technical implementation of the hackerdream. So he and some others even Kotok came down from DEC beganimplementing LISP on the PDP-6. They filled the blackboards of TMRC withlayers and layers of code, and finally got it going on the machine.The crucial sections were written by Greenblatt and another hacker Two or threepeople on a project were considered The Right Thing far fewer than IBM's socalled"human wave" style of throwing dozens of programmers at a problem andwinding up with junk. And it was better to rely on two or three people than on asingle crusader so that when one person was at the end of his thirty-hour phase,someone else could come in and keep hacking. Kind of a tag team project.With PDP-6 MacLISP (named for Project MAC), the hackers began integratingthat computer language into their programs, and even into their conversation. TheLISP convention of using the letter "p" as a predicate, for instance, was theinspiration for a common hacker style of asking a question. When someone said"Food-P?" any hacker knew he was being asked if he wanted to get something toeat. The LISP terms "T" and "nil" came to stand, respectively, for "yes" and "no."LISP'S acceptance did not diminish the hacker love for assembly language,particularly the elegant PDP-6 instruction set. But as Greenblatt and even Gosperlater realized, LISP was a powerful system builder that fit neatly into the hands-onHacker Ethic.DEC had shown an interest in MacLISP, and Kotok arranged for Greenblatt and theothers to go to Maynard late at night to work on the program, type in their code,and debug it. It was all part of the easy arrangement between MIT and DEC, and noone questioned it. The Right Thing to do was to make sure that any good programgot the fullest exposure possible, because information was free and the worldwould only be improved by its accelerated flow.After working on MacLISP, Greenblatt was perhaps the most authoritative of thesystems hackers on the PDP-6. The new administrator of the AI lab, a young manfrom the Southwest named Russell Noftsker, had hired Greenblatt mainly tomaintain and improve the organic creation that is a computer operating system. But

Greenblatt's vision did not stop at systems; he was intensely drawn by the conceptsof artificial intelligence. He decided to use the system to actually do something inthat realm, and, since he had been a chess player all his life, it was only logical thathe work on a chess program that would go far beyond Kotok's effort and beyondthe other AI chess projects that had been attempted at various labs around thecountry.Like any good hacker, no sooner did he decide to do something than he began workon it. No one asked him for a proposal. He didn't bother to notify his superiors.Minsky did not have to ponder the relative virtues of the project. There were nochannels to go through because in the mid-sixties, in those early days of the AI lab,the hackers themselves were the channels. It was the Hacker Ethic put to work, andGreenblatt made the most of it.He'd seen a game played by the Kotok program and thought it was crap. Basically,those guys did not know how to play chess: swayed by the romance of a computermaking moves, they had somehow forgotten the idea that the name of the gamewas to take the other guy's pieces. Greenblatt's program used sophisticated artificialintelligence techniques to try and figure out moves in accordance with certaincriteria that he considered good chess. Working with a couple of other hackers,Greenblatt went on a coding blitz. He'd manage to get four hours of PDP-6 time aday, and he'd keep writing off-line when he wasn't on the machine. He got theprogram actually playing chess in one week. The program was debugged, givenfeatures, and generally juiced up over the next few months. (Greenblatt waseventually offered an MIT degree if he would write a thesis about his chessprogram; he never got around to it.)Circulating around MIT around 1965 was a notorious Rand Corporation memocalled "Alchemy and Artificial Intelligence." Its author, an academic namedHerbert Dreyfus, lambasted the field and its practitioners. To hackers, his criticismwas particularly noxious, since the computer was their implicit model of behavior,at least in their theories of information, fairness, and action. Dreyfus focused on thecomputer's ridiculously limited structure (compared to the structure of the humanbrain). His coup de grace was the blunt assertion that no computer program wouldbe able to play a good enough game of chess to beat a ten-year-old.After Greenblatt finished his chess program, called MacHack, MIT invited Dreyfusto play the PDP-6. The hackers gathered round to watch the computer surrogate ofRichard Greenblatt play this cocky, thin, red-headed, bespectacled anti-computeropponent. Artificial intelligence pioneer Herbert Simon, who watched the match,later was quoted as saying that it was ... a real cliffhanger. It's two woodpushers ...fighting each other... Dreyfus was being beaten fairly badly and then he found amove which could've captured the opponent's queen. And the only way the

opponent could get out of this was to keep Dreyfus in check with his own queenuntil he could fork the queen and king and exchange them. And the programproceeded to do exactly that. As soon as it had done that, Dreyfus' game fell topieces, and then it checkmated him right in the middle of the board.Peter Samson later recalled the scene immediately following Dreyfus' loss: thedefeated critic looked around at the assembled MIT professors and hackers,including a victorious Greenblatt, with a look of puzzlement. Why weren't theycheering, applauding, rubbing it in? Because they knew. Dreyfus was part of thatReal World which couldn't possibly comprehend the amazing nature of computers,or what it was like working with computers so closely that a PDP-6 could actuallybecome your environment. This was something which Dreyfus would never know.Even Minsky, who never really immersed himself in the thirty-hour-day, seven-dayweekassembly-language baptistery, had not experienced what the hackers had. Thehackers, the Greenblatts and the Gospers, were secure in having been there,knowing what it was like, and going back there producing, finding things out,making their world different and better. As for convincing skeptics, bringing theoutside world into the secret, proselytizing for the Hacker Ethic all that was notnearly as interesting as living it.

5The Midnight Computer Wiring SocietyGREENBLATT was hacker of systems and visionary of application; Gosper wasmetaphysical explorer and handyman of the esoteric. Together they were two legsof a techno-cultural triangle which would serve as the Hacker Ethic's foundation inits rise to cultural supremacy at MIT in the coming years. The third leg of thetriangle arrived in the fall of 1963, and his name was Stewart Nelson.Not long after his arrival, Stew Nelson displayed his curiosity and ability to getinto uncharted electronic realms, traits which indicated his potential to become amaster magician in service to the Hacker Ethic. As was the custom, Nelson hadcome a week early for Freshman Rush. He was a short kid, generally taciturn, withcurly hair, darting brown eyes, and a large overbite which gave him the restlesslycurious look of a small rodent. Indeed, Stewart Nelson was sniffing outsophisticated electronics equipment that he could play on, and it did not take himlong to find what he wanted at MIT.It began at WTBS, the campus radio station. Bob Clements, a student worker at thestation who would later do some PDP-6 hacking, was showing a group of freshmenthe control rooms when he opened a door that opened to the complex machineryand found Stew Nelson, "a weaselly little kid," he later remembered, "who had hisfingers on the guts of our phone lines and our East Campus radio transmitter."Eventually, he found his way to the PDP-1 in the Kluge Room. The machine gotStewart Nelson very excited. He saw this friendly computer which you could putyour hands on, and with a confidence that came from what Greenblatt might callborn hackerism he got to work. He noticed immediately how the One's outsidespeaker was hooked to the computer, and how Peter Samson's music programcould control that speaker. So one night, very late, when John McKenzie and thepeople tending the TX-0 next door were asleep in their homes, Stewart Nelson setabout learning to program the PDP-1, and it did not take him long to teach the PDP-1 some new tricks. He had programmed some appropriate tones to come out of thespeaker and into the open receiver of the campus phone that sat in the Kluge Room.These tones made the phone system come to attention, so to speak, and dance.

Dance, phone lines, dance!And the signals did dance. They danced from one place on the MIT tie-line systemto the next and then to the Haystack Observatory (connected to MIT's system),where they danced to an open line and, thus liberated, danced out into the world.There was no stopping them, because the particular tones which Stew Nelson hadgenerated on the PDP-1 were the exact tones which the phone company used tosend its internal calls around the world, and Stew Nelson knew that they wouldenable him to go all around the marvelous system which was the phone companywithout paying a penny.This analog alchemist, the new hacker king, was showing a deeply impressedgroup of PDP-1 programmers how a solitary college freshman could wrest controlof the nearly hundred-year-old phone system, using it not for profit but for sheerjoyriding exploration. Word spread of these exploits, and Nelson began to achieveheroic status around TMRC and the Kluge Room; soon some of the moresqueamish PDP-1 people were doing some hand-wringing about whether he hadgone too far. Greenblatt did not think so, nor did any true hacker: people had donethat sort of thing around TMRC for years; and if Nelson took things a step beyond,that was a positive outgrowth of the Hacker Ethic. But when John McKenzie heardof it he ordered Nelson to stop, probably realizing that there was not much he coulddo to slow Stew Nelson's eternal quest for systems knowledge. "How can you stoptalent like that?" he later reflected. As it turned out, things were going to go muchfurther before Stewart Nelson was through. In some ways, they would never stop.Nelson's freshman pyrotechnics were not so startling in light of his life before MIT.Born in the Bronx, Nelson was the son of a physicist-tumed-engineer who haddone some pioneering work on color TV design. Stewart's own interest inelectronics, though, needed no parental urging. It was as natural as walking, and bythe time he was five he was building crystal radios. At eight, he was working ondual-relay burglar alarms. He had little interest, socially or educationally, in school,but gravitated to the electronics shop, where he'd engage in relentlessexperimentation. It wasn't long before the other kids' mothers would ban theirchildren from playing with Stewart they were afraid that their progeny would befried by a dose of electricity. These were inevitable dangers of fooling around withpowerful vacuum tube circuits and state-of-the-art transistors powered by HO-voltelectrical lines. Stew on occasion would get shocks so severe that he'd be painfullyjolted. He would later tell stories of his equipment flying halfway across the roomand exploding into smithereens. After one particularly searing shock, he swore offplaying with electricity. But after about two days he was back at it, a young lonerworking on fantastic projects.Stew loved the telephone. His family had moved to Haddonfield, New Jersey, and

he soon found out that by clicking the switches on which the receiver rests, youcould actually dial a number. Someone on the other end will be saying, "Hello ...yes? Hello?" and you realize that this is not just a random piece of equipment, butsomething hooked to a system that you can endlessly explore. Stewart Nelson wassoon building things that few of his neighbors in the mid-1950s had seen, likeautomatic dialers and gadgets that could connect to several phone lines, receiving acall on one line and automatically calling out on the other. He learned to handletelephone equipment with the deftness with which an artist wields his tools;witnesses would later report how Nelson, when confronted with a phone, wouldimmediately dismantle it, first removing the filter which prevents the caller fromhearing the dialing signals, and then making a few adjustments so that the phonewould dial significantly faster. Essentially, he was reprogramming the telephone,unilaterally debugging Western Electric equipment.Stew's father died when he was fourteen, and his mother moved them up toPoughkeepsie, New York. He struck a deal with his high school teachers whereinhe would fix their radios and televisions in exchange for not having to go to class.Instead, he spent time at a small radio station starting up nearby Nelson "prettymuch put it together," he later explained, connecting the elements, tuning thetransmitter, finding sources of noise and hums in the system. When the radiostation was running, he was the main engineer, and sometimes he would even bethe disc jockey. Every glitch in the system was a new adventure, a new invitationto explore, to try something new, to see what might happen. To Stew-art Nelson,wanting to find out what might happen was the ultimate justification, stronger thanself-defense or temporary insanity.With that attitude, he fit in comfortably at the Tech Model Railroad Club and thePDP-1. There had already been avid interest in "phone hacking" around the club;with Nelson around, that interest could really flower. Besides being a technicalgenius, Nelson would attack problems with bird-dog perseverance. "He approachedproblems by taking action," Donald Eastlake, a hacker in Nelson's class, laterrecalled. "He was very persistent. If you try a few times and give up, you'll neverget there. But if you keep at it ... There's a lot of problems in the world which canreally be solved by applying two or three times the persistence that other peoplewill."Nelson was displaying an extension of the Hacker Ethic if we all acted on our driveto discover, we'd discover more, produce more, be in control of more. Naturally,the phone system was his initial object of exploration at MIT. First the PDP-1 andlater the PDP-6 were ideal tools to use in these excursions. But even as Nelson setoff on these electronic journeys, he adhered to the unofficial hacker morality. Youcould call anywhere, try anything, experiment endlessly, but you should not do itfor financial gain. Nelson disapproved of those MIT students who built "blue

oxes" hardware devices to make illegal calls for the purpose of ripping off thephone company. Nelson and the hackers believed that they were helping the phonecompany. They would get hold of priority phone company lines to variouslocations around the country and test them. If they didn't work, they would report itto the appropriate repair service.To do this, of course, you had to successfully impersonate technical employees ofthe Bell Telephone System, but the hackers became quite accomplished at that,especially after reading such contraband books as the classic Principles ofElectricity and Electronics Applied to Telephone and Telegraph Work, or Notes onDistant Dialing, or recent issues of the Bell System Technical Journal.Armed with this information, you could travel around the world, saying to anoperator, "I'm calling from the test board in Hacken-sack and I'd like you to switchme through to Rome. We're trying to test the circuit." She would "write up thenumber," which would lead you to another number, and soon you would be askinga phone operator in Italy what the weather was like there. Or you'd use the PDP-1in Blue Box Mode, letting it route and reroute your calls until you were connectedto a certain phone number in England where callers would hear a children'sbedtime story, a number inaccessible from this country except by blue box.In the mid-sixties, the phone company was establishing its system of toll-free areacode-800numbers. Naturally, the hackers knew about this. With scientificprecision, they would attempt to chart these undocumented realms: excursions to800-land could send you to bizarre places, from the Virgin Islands to New York.Eventually someone from the phone company gave a call to the line near thecomputer, asking what were these four hundred or so calls to places that, as far asthe phone company was concerned, did not exist. The unlucky Cambridge branchof the phone company had coped with MIT before, and would again at one point,they burst into the ninth floor at Tech Square, and demanded that the hackers showthem the blue box. When the hackers pointed to the PDP-6, the frustrated officialsthreatened to take the whole machine, until the hackers unhooked the phoneinterface and handed it over.Though Nelson's initial interest in the PDP-1 was its phone hacking potential, hebecame more versatile with it, and was eventually programming all sorts of things.The more he programmed, the better he got, and the better he got, the more hewanted to program. He would sit by the console of the machine while somegraduate student would fumble with a program, and he'd sort of peck around thegrad student's back, which would only make the graduate student fumble more, andfinally he would burst out, "If I solve that problem for you, will you let me have thecomputer?" The grad student, who probably had been trying to crack the problemfor weeks, would agree, not really believing this quirky fellow could solve it, but

Nelson would already be pushing him away, sitting down at the console, bringingup the "TECO" editing program, and pounding in code at a blinding rate. In fiveminutes, he'd be done, leaping up to print it on the Model 33 teletype near themachine, and in a rush of motion he'd rip the paper off the line printer, run back tothe machine, pull off the tape with the grad student's program, and send him off.Then he'd do his own hacking.He knew no bounds. He used both the PDP-1 in the Kluge Room and the newermachine at Project MAC. When others used the PDP-1 and its limited instructionset, they might have grumbled at having to use several instructions for a simpleoperation, and then figured out the subroutines to do the programs. Nelson couldbum code with the best of them, but he wanted more instructions actually on themachine. Putting an instruction on the computer itself in hardware is a rather trickyoperation. When the TX-0 was given its new instructions, it had to be shut downfor a while until official priests, trained to the level of Pope, almost, performed thenecessary brain surgery. This seemed only logical who would expect a universityto allow underclassmen to tamper with the delicate parts of a fantasticallyexpensive computer?No one. In fact, Dan Edwards, one of Minsky's graduate students who had donesome hacking on Spacewar, had set himself up as protector of the hardware.According to Gosper, Edwards had declared that "Anyone who does as much aschange a ribbon in the typewriter is going to get permanently barred from thisplace!" But hackers did not care what the university allowed or didn't allow. WhatDan Edwards thought was of even less concern: his position of authority, like thatof most bureaucrats, was deemed an accident.Nelson thought that adding an "add to memory" instruction would improve themachine. It would take months, perhaps, to go through channels to do it, and if hedid it himself he would learn something about the way the world worked. So onenight Stewart Nelson spontaneously convened the Midnight Computer WiringSociety. This was an entirely ad hoc organization which would, when the flow ofhistory required it, circumvent the regulations of the Massachusetts Institute ofTechnology against unauthorized tampering with expensive computers. TheMCWS, which that night consisted of Nelson, a student worker, and severalinterested bystanders, opened up the cabinet and proceeded to rewire the PDP-1.Nelson fused a couple of diodes between the "add" line and the "store" line outputsof the instruction decoder, and had himself a new op-code, which presumablysupported all the previous instructions. He then proceeded to reassemble themachine to an apparent pristine state.The machine was taken through its paces by the hackers that night, and workedfine. But the next day an Officially Sanctioned User named Margaret Hamilton

showed up on the ninth floor to work on something called a Vortex Model for aweather-simulation project she was working on. Margaret Hamilton was justbeginning a programming career which would see her eventually in charge of onboardcomputers on the Apollo moon shot, and the Vortex program at that timewas a very big program for her. She was well aware of the hackers' playfulnessaround the ninth floor, and she was moderately friendly with some of them, eventhough they would eventually blend into one collective personality in her memory:one unkempt, though polite, young male whose love for the computer had madehim lose all reason.The assembler that Margaret Hamilton used with her Vortex program was not thehacker-written MIDAS assembler, but the DEC-supplied DECAL system that thehackers considered absolutely horrid. So of course Nelson and the MCWS, whentesting the machine the previous night, had not used the DECAL assembler. Theyhad never even considered the possibility that the DECAL assembler accessed theinstruction code in a different manner than MIDAS, a manner that was affected to agreater degree by the slight forward voltage drop created by the addition of twodiodes between the add line and the store line. Margaret Hamilton, of course, wasunaware that the PDP-1 had undergone surgery the previous night. So she did notimmediately know the reason why her Vortex program, after she fed it in with theDECAL assembler ... broke. Stopped working. Died. Mysteriously, a perfectlygood program had bombed. Though programs often did that for various reasons,this time Margaret Hamilton complained about it, and someone looked into why,and someone else fingered the Midnight Computer Wiring Society. So there wererepercussions. Reprimands.That was not the end of the Midnight Computer Wiring Society. Edwards and hisilk could not stay up all night to watch the machines. Besides, Minsky and theothers in charge of Project MAC knew that the hackers' nocturnal activities wereturning into a hands-on postgraduate course on logic design and hardware skills.Partially because Nelson and the others got good enough so disasters like the GreatMargaret Hamilton Program Clobber were less likely to occur, the official AI labban against hardware tampering gradually faded away to the status of one of thoseantiquated laws that nobody bothers to take off the books, like a statute forbiddingyou from publicly beating a horse on Sunday. Eventually the Midnight ComputerWiring Society felt free enough to change instructions, make new hardwareconnections, and even rig the computer to the room lights on the ninth floor, so thatwhen you fired up the TECO text-editing program, the lights automaticallydimmed so that you could read the CRT display more easily.This last hack had an unexpected consequence. The TECO editor rang a bell on theteletype to signal when the user made an error. This normally was no problem, buton certain days the machine got flaky, and was extremely sensitive to power line

variations like those generated by the bell on the teletype. Those times, whensomeone made a mistake with TECO, the bell would ring, and the machine wouldbe thrown into randomness. The computer would be out of control; it would typespastically, ringing the bell, and most unsettling, turning the room lights on and off.The computer had run amok! Science-fiction Armageddon! The hackers consideredthis extremely humorous. The people in charge of the lab, particularly MarvinMinsky, were very understanding about these things. Marvin, as the hackers calledhim (they invariably called each other by last name), knew that the Hacker Ethicwas what kept the lab productive, and he was not going to tamper with one of thecrucial components of hackerism. On the other hand, there was Stew Nelson,constantly at odds with the rules, a hot potato who got hotter when he waseventually caught red-handed at phone hacking. Something had to be done. SoMinsky called up his good friend Ed Fredkin, and told him he had this problemwith an incredibly brilliant nineteen-year old who had a penchant for getting intosophisticated mischief. Could Fredkin hire him?Besides being a close friend of Marvin Minsky and the founder of InformationInternational Incorporated (Triple-I), Ed Fredkin considered himself the greatestprogrammer in the world.A dark-haired man with warm brown eyes behind glasses that rested on a nose witha slight intellectual hook, Fredkin had never finished college. He'd learnedcomputers in the Air Force in 1956, as one of the first men working on the SAGEcomputer air defense system, then reputed to be the most complicated systemknown to man. Fredkin and nineteen others began an intensive course in thebudding field of computation memory drums, logic, communications, andprogramming. Fredkin later recalled, in his soothing, story-teller voice, "After aweek, everyone dropped out but me."Ed Fredkin did not fall into computers head-over-heels as had Kotok, Samson,Greenblatt, or Gosper in some ways he was a very measured man, too much anintellectual polyglot to fixate solely on computers. But he was intensely curiousabout them, so after leaving the service he took a job at MIT-affiliated LincolnLab, where he soon earned the reputation of top program bummer around. Hecould consistently come up with original algorithms, some of which became wellknown as standard programming protocols. He also was one of the first to see thesignificance of the PDP-1 he knew about it before the prototype was built, andordered the very first one. He was talked out of the purchase by Bolt Beranek andNewman, who instead hired him to program the machine and write an assembler.Fredkin did so and modestly considered it a masterpiece of programming. Besidessystems work, Fredkin engaged in the kind of math hacking that would later be Bill

Gosper's forte, and he did some early theorizing on automatons. But not being apure hacker he had business instincts and a family to support he left BBN to starthis own company, Information International, which would perform all sorts ofdigital troubleshooting and special computer consultations. The company waseventually based in Los Angeles, but for a long time it had facilities in TechSquare, two floors below the PDP-6.Fredkin was delighted with the hacker community at Tech Square; they had takenhackerism beyond its previous state, found only part-time in the few places in theworld (such as MIT, DEC, the Army, BBN) where computers were accessible topeople for whom computing was an end in itself. Around MIT, hackerism was fulltime.Fredkin came to love the hackers he could speak their language and admiretheir work. Sometimes he would accompany them on their Chinatown excursions,and on those occasions the discussions could get quite freewheeling. Many of thehackers were avid science-fiction fans (note the origins of Spacewar), but Fredkinwas able to link the wonders of Heinlein and Asimov to the work that the hackerswere doing making computers into powerful systems and building a softwaregroundwork for artificial intelligence. Fredkin had a talent for sparking theirimaginations, as he did when he mused that one day people would have tiny robotson their heads which would snip off hair when it reached the precise length for thedesired coiffure. (Fredkin would cause a national ruckus when he repeated thisprediction on a television talk show.)As much as Fredkin admired the hackers, though, he still thought he was the bestprogrammer. While the Hacker Ethic encouraged group effort for generalimprovement, every hacker wanted to be recognized as a wizard, and fast programsand blazing code-crafting efforts would be eagerly displayed and discussed. It wasa heady ego boost to be at the top of the hacking hill, where Fredkin consideredhimself. Hacking, to Fredkin, was above all a pride in craftsmanship."I had never run into anyone who could outcode me, in any sense," Fredkin laterrecalled. "But it was really clear that Nelson could." Nelson was genius-level in hiscomputer knowledge, innovative in approach, fantastically intense in attackingproblems, and capable of superhuman concentration. Fredkin did hire the younghacker on Minsky's recommendation, and it did not take Fredkin long to realizethat even in a place where exceptional programming was commonplace. Nelsonwas something special, a one-man human wave of programmers. Of course, sinceTriple-I was in Tech Square, Nelson was also able to hang out around the AI lab onthe ninth floor and do the work of several programmers up there as well. But thatwas no cause for complaint; when Fredkin needed him, Nelson could almostalways come up with magic.There was a programming project in particular, a task on the DEC PDP-7, that

Fredkin wanted Nelson to work on, but for some reason Nelson couldn't getmotivated. Fredkin's company also needed at the same time a design for aninterface between a certain computer and a disk drive for data storage. Fredkinconsidered the latter a six man-month project, and wanted the other task done first.Nelson promised him that he'd get some results during the weekend. That nextMonday, Nelson came in with a giant piece of paper almost completely coveredwith tiny scrawlings, long lines connecting one block of scribblings to another, andevidence of frantic erasing and write-overs. It was not the PDP-7 program Fredkinhad asked for, but the entire disk-drive interface. Nelson had tried it as aconstructive escape from the assigned task. Fredkin's company built the piece ofequipment straight from that piece of paper, and it worked.Fredkin was delighted, but he still wanted the PDP-7 problem done, too. So hesaid, "Nelson, you and I are going to sit down and program this together. You writethis routine, and I'll write that." Since they did not have a PDP-7 around, they satdown at tables to write their pre-debugged assembly code. They began hackingaway. Maybe it was about then that Ed Fredkin realized, once and for all, that hewas not the best programmer in the world. Nelson was racing along as if it werejust a matter of how fast he could get his scribbles on paper. Fredkin was finallyovercome with curiosity and looked at Nelson's program. He couldn't believe it. Itwas bizarre. Totally non-obvious, a crazy quilt of interlacing subroutines. And itwas clear that it would work. "Stew," Fredkin burst out, "why on earth are youwriting it this way?" Nelson explained that he had once written something similaron the PDP-6, and instead of thinking about it he was merely transliterating theprevious routines, from memory, into PDP-7 code. A perfect example of the wayNelson's mind worked. He had his own behavior down to the point where he couldbum mental instructions, and minimize the work he did.It was clearly an approach that was better suited to working with machines than itwas to human interaction. Nelson was extremely shy, and Fredkin probably actedlike a father figure to the young hacker. He would later recall being startled oneday when Nelson marched into his office and said, "Guess what? I'm gettingmarried!"Fredkin would have judged that Nelson did not know how to go about asking afemale for a date, let alone tender a proposal of marriage. "Fantastic!" he said."Who's the lucky girl?""Oh, I don't know," said Nelson. "I just decided it would be a good thing to do."Fifteen years later, Nelson was still in Bachelor Mode.While women might not have been much of a presence in his life, Nelson did have

the companionship of fellow hackers. He moved into a house with Gosper and twoothers. Although this "Hacker House" was in nearby Belmont, then shifted toBrighton, Nelson resisted buying a car. He couldn't stand driving. "It takes toomuch processing to deal with the road," he would later explain. He would takepublic transportation, or get a ride from another hacker, or even take a cab. Once hegot to Tech Square, he was good for hours: Nelson was among those hackers whohad settled on the twenty-eight-hour-day, six-day-week routine. He didn't worryabout classes he figured that he could get whatever job he wanted whether he had adegree or not, so he never did rematriculate.Nelson was completely a creature of the Hacker Ethic, and the influence of hisbehavior was a contributing factor to the cultural and scientific growth of the AIlab. If Minsky needed someone to point out why a certain subroutine was notworking, he would go to Nelson. Meanwhile, Nelson would be all over the place.Working for Fredkin, doing systems work with Greenblatt, display hacking withGosper, and creating all sorts of strange things. He hacked a weird connectionbetween the Triple-I computer on the seventh floor and the PDP-6 on the ninthwhich sent signals between an oscilloscope on one line and a TV camera onanother. He pulled off all sorts of new phone hacks. And, again more by examplethan by organizing, he was a leader in the hallowed black art of lock hacking."Lock hacking" was the skillful solution of physical locks, whether on doors, filecabinets, or safes. To some extent, the practice was an MIT tradition, especiallyaround TMRC. But once it was combined with the Hacker Ethic, lock hackingbecame more of a crusade than an idle game, though the playful challenge ofovercoming artificial obstacles contributed to lock backing's popularity.To a hacker, a closed door is an insult, and a locked door is an outrage. Just asinformation should be clearly and elegantly transported within a computer, and justas software should be freely disseminated, hackers believed people should beallowed access to files or tools which might promote the hacker quest to find outand improve the way the world works. When a hacker needed something to helphim create, explore, or fix, he did not bother with such ridiculous concepts asproperty rights.Say you are working on the PDP-6 one night, and it goes down. You check itsinnards and discover that it needs a part. Or you may need a tool to install a part.Then you discover that what you need a disk, a tape, a screwdriver, a solderingiron, a spare IC (integrated circuit) is locked up somewhere. A million dollars'worth of hardware wasted and idle, because the hardware wizard who knows how

to fix it can't get at the seventy-five-cent IC, or the oscilloscope kept in a safe. Sothe hackers would manage to get the keys to these lockers and these safes. So theycould get hold of the parts, keep the computers working, carefully replace whatthey'd taken, and go back to work.As a hacker named David Silver later put it, it was "ultra-highly-clever warfare ...there were administrators who would have high-security locks and have vaultswhere they would store the keys, and have sign-out cards to issue keys. And theyfelt secure, like they were locking everything up and controlling things andpreventing information from flowing the wrong way and things from being stolen.Then there was another side of the world where people felt everything should beavailable to everybody, and these hackers had pounds and pounds and pounds ofkeys that would get them into every conceivable place. The people who did thiswere very ethical and honest and they weren't using this power to steal or injure. Itwas kind of a game, partly out of necessity, and partly out of ego and fun ... At theabsolute height of it, if you were in the right inside circle, you could get thecombination to any safe and you'd get access to anything."The basic acquisition of every lock hacker was a master key. The proper masterkey would unlock the doors of a building, or a floor of a building. Even better thana master key was a grand-master key, sort of a master master-key; one of thosebabies could open perhaps two thirds of the doors on campus. Just like phonehacking, lock hacking required persistence and patience. So the hackers would goon late-night excursions, unscrewing and removing locks on doors. Then theywould carefully dismantle the locks. Most locks could be opened by severaldifferent key combinations; so the hackers would take apart several locks in thesame hallway to ascertain which combination they accepted in common. Then theywould go about trying to make a key shaped in that particular combination.It might be that the master key had to be made from special "blanks" unavailable tothe general public. (This is often the case with high-security master keys, such asthose used in defense work). This did not stop the hackers, because several of themhad taken correspondence courses to qualify for locksmith certification; they wereofficially allowed to buy those restricted blank keys. Some keys were so highsecuritythat even licensed locksmiths could not buy blanks for them; to duplicatethose, the hackers would make midnight calls to the machine shop a corner workspace on the ninth floor where a skilled metal craftsman named Bill Bennettworked by day on such material as robot arms. Working from scratch, severalhackers made their own blanks in the machine shop.The master key was more than a means to an end; it was a symbol of the hackerlove of free access. At one point, the TMRC hackers even considered sending anMIT master key to every incoming freshman as a recruitment enticement. The

master key was a magic sword to wave away evil. Evil, of course, was a lockeddoor. Even if no tools were behind locked doors, the locks symbolized the powerof bureaucracy, a power that would eventually be used to prevent fullimplementation of the Hacker Ethic. Bureaucracies were always threatened bypeople who wanted to know how things worked. Bureaucrats knew their survivaldepended on keeping people in ignorance, by using artificial means like locks tokeep people under control. So when an administrator upped the ante in this war byinstalling a new lock, or purchasing a Class Two safe (government-certified forclassified material), the hackers would immediately work to crack the lock, openthe safe. In the latter case, they went to a super-ultra-techno surplus yard in Taunton,found a similar Class Two safe, took it back to the ninth floor, and opened it upwith acetylene torches to find out how the locks and tumblers worked.With all this lock hacking, the AI lab was an administrator's nightmare. RussNoftsker knew; he was the administrator. He had arrived at Tech Square in 1965with an engineering degree from the University of Mexico, an interest in artificialintelligence, and a friend who worked at Project MAC. He met Minsky, whoseprime grad student-administrator, Dan Edwards, had just left the lab. Minsky,notoriously uninterested in administration, needed someone to handle thepaperwork of the AI lab, which was eventually to split from Project MAC into aseparate entity with its own government funding. So Marvin hired Noftsker, who inturn officially hired Greenblatt, Nelson, and Gosper as full-time hackers.Somehow, Noftsker had to keep this electronic circus in line with the values andpolicy of the Institute.Noftsker, a compactly built blond with pursed features and blue eyes which couldalternatively look dreamy or troubled, was no stranger to weird technologicalexploits: when he was in school, he had hacked explosives with a friend. Theyworked for a high-tech company and took their salaries in primacord (a highlycombustible material) or dynamite, and set off explosions in caves to see howmany spiders they could blow out, or see how much primacord it took to split asixty-five-gallon drum in half. Noftsker's friend once was melting thirty pounds ofTNT late one night in his mother's oven when it caught fire the oven andrefrigerator actually melted, and the boy was in the awkward position of having togo to the next-door neighbors' and say, "Excuse me, uh, I think it would be a goodidea if you kind of, uh, moved down the street a little ways..." Noftsker knew he'dbeen lucky to survive those days; yet, according to Gosper, Noftsker later wouldcook up a plan for clearing snow from his sidewalk with primacord, until his wifeput a stop to the idea. Noftsker also shared the hacker aversion to cigarette smoke,and would sometimes express his displeasure by shooting a jet of pure oxygenfrom a canister he kept for that purpose; the astonished smoker would find his orher cigarette bursting into a fierce orange blur. Obviously, Noftsker understood theconcept of technological extremism to maintain a convivial environment.

On the other hand, Noftsker was in charge, dammit, and part of his job waskeeping people out of locked areas and keeping confidential information private.He would bluster, he would threaten, he would upgrade locks and order safes, buthe knew that ultimately he could not prevail by force. Naive as the thought was inthe Real World, hackers believed that property rights were nonexistent. As far asthe ninth floor was concerned, that was indeed the case. The hackers could get intoanything, as Noftsker graphically saw one day when a new safe with a twenty-fourhourpick-proof lock arrived and someone inadvertently closed the safe and spunthe dial before Noftsker got the combination from the manufacturer. One of thehackers who was a registered locksmith volunteered to help out, and had the safeopen in twenty minutes.So what was Noftsker to do?"Erecting barriers [would raise] the level of the challenge," Noftsker would laterexplain. "So the trick was to sort of have an unspoken agreement that. This line,imaginary as it may be, is off limits' to give the people who felt they had to havesome privacy and security the sense that they really had some privacy and security.And if someone violated those limits, the violation would be tolerated as long asno one knew about it. Therefore if you gained something by crawling over the wallto get into my office, you had to never say anything about it."Unilateral disarmament. Give the hackers free rein to go where they wanted in theirexplorations, take what they wanted to aid them in their electronic meanderingsand computer-science jam sessions ... as long as they didn't go around boastinghow the bureaucratic emperor had no clothes. That way, Noftsker and theadministration he represented could maintain some dignity while the hackers couldpretend the administration did not exist. They went wherever they wanted, enteringoffices by traveling in the crawl space created by the low-hanging artificial ceiling,removing a ceiling tile, and dropping into their destinations commandos withpencil-pals in their shirt pockets. One hacker hurt his back one night when theceiling collapsed and he fell into Minsky's office. But more often, the onlyevidence Noftsker would find was the occasional footprint on his wall. And, ofcourse, sometimes he would enter his locked office and discover a hacker dozingon the sofa.Some people, though, never could tolerate the Hacker Ethic. Apparently, one ofthese was the machine shop craftsman Bill Bennett. Though he was a TMRCmember, he was by no means a hacker: his allegiance was not to the Signals &Power faction, but to what Gosper called the "Let's-Build-Precise-Little-Miniature-Physical-Devices Subculture." He was a good old boy from Marietta, Georgia, andhad a near-religious respect for his tools. His homeland tradition thought of tools as

sanctified objects, things you nurture and preserve and ultimately hand over to yourgrandchildren. "I'm a fanatic," he would later explain. "A tool should be in its rightplace, cleaned and ready to use." So he not only locked up all his tools but wouldforbid the hackers to even enter his work space, which he cordoned off by settingup a rope fence and painting stripes on the floor.Bennett could not prevent the inevitable result of drawing a line and telling hackersthey could not cross. He would come in and see his tools had been used, and wouldcomplain to Minsky. He would threaten to quit; Noftsker recalls him threatening tobooby-trap his area. He would especially demand that Minsky take vengeance onNelson, whom he apparently saw as the worst offender. Minsky or Noftsker mightgo through the motions of reprimanding Nelson, but privately they considered thedrama rather amusing. Eventually Noftsker would come up with the idea of givingeach hacker his own toolbox, with responsibility for his own tools, but that didn'twork out particularly well. When a hacker wants something on a machine adjusted,or wants to create a quick hardware hack, he'll use anything available, whether itbelongs to a friend or whether it is one of Bill Bennett's pampered possessions. Onetime Nelson used the latter, a screwdriver, and in the course of his work marked itup somewhat. When Bennett came in the next day and found a damagedscrewdriver, he went straight for Nelson.Nelson was normally very quiet, but at times he would explode. Gosper laterdescribed it: "Nelson was an incredible arguer. If you cornered Nelson, he wouldturn from this mousy little guy to a complete savage." So, Gosper later recalled,Nelson and Bennett got into a shouting match, and during the course of it Nelsonsaid that the screwdriver was just about "used up," anyway.Used up? It was an incredibly offensive philosophy to Bennett. "This causedsmoke to come out of Bennett's ears," Gosper later recounted. "He just blew up."To people like Bennett, things are not passed along from person to person untilthey are no longer useful. They are not like a computer program which you writeand polish, then leave around so others without asking your permission can workon it, add new features, recast it in their own image, and then leave it for the nextperson to improve, the cycle repeating itself all over when someone builds fromscratch a gorgeous new program to do the same thing. That might be what hackersbelieved, but Bill Bennett thought that tools were something you owned, somethingprivate. These hackers actually thought that a person was entitled to use a tool justbecause he thought he could do something useful with it. And when they werefinished, they would just toss it away, saying it was ... used up!Considering these diametrically opposed philosophies, it was no surprise thatBennett blew up at Nelson. Bennett would later say that his outbursts were alwaysquick, and followed by the usual good will that existed between himself and the

hackers. But Nelson would later say that at the time he had been afraid themachinist might do him physical harm.A few nights later Nelson wanted to perform some completely unauthorizedadjustments to the power supply on a computer on the seventh floor of TechSquare, and needed a large screwdriver to do it. Naturally, he went into Bennett'slocked cabinet for the tool. Somehow the breakers on the power supply were in aprecarious state, and Nelson got a huge electrical jolt. Nelson survived nicely, butthe shock melted the end off the screwdriver.The next day Bill Bennett came back to his office and found his mangledscrewdriver with a sign on it. The sign read "USED UP".

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

working in machine language he wrote a program that made the two-wheeled bugactually crawl. David decided that robotics was the best of all pursuits what couldbe more interesting than making machines that could move on their own, see ontheir own ... think on their own?So his visit to the AI lab, arranged by Minsky, was a revelation. Not only werethese people as excited about computers as David Silver was, but one of the majoractivities at the lab was robotics. Minsky was extremely interested in that field.Robotics was crucial to the progress of artificial intelligence; it let us see how farman could go in making smart machines do his work. Many of Minsky's graduatestudents concerned themselves with the theory of robotics, Grafting theses aboutthe relative difficulty of getting a robot to do this or that. The hackers were alsoheavily involved in the field not so much in theorizing as in building andexperimenting. Hackers loved robots for much the same reasons that David Silverdid. Controlling a robot was a step beyond computer programming in controllingthe system that was the real world. As Gosper used to say, "Why should we limitcomputers to the lies people tell them through keyboards?" Robots could go off andfind out for themselves what the world was like.When you program a robot to do something, Gosper would later explain, you get "akind of gratification, an emotional impact, that is completely indescribable. And itfar surpasses the kind of gratification you get from a working program. You'regetting a physical confirmation of the correctness of your construction. Maybe it'ssort of like having a kid."One big project that the hackers completed was a robot that could catch a ball.Using a mechanical arm controlled by the PDP-6, as well as a television camera,Nelson, Greenblatt, and Gosper worked for months until the arm could finally catcha Ping-Pong ball lobbed toward it. The arm was able to determine the location ofthe ball in time to move itself in position to catch it. It was something the hackerswere tremendously proud of, and Gosper especially wanted to go further and beginwork on a more mobile robot which could actually play Ping-Pong."Ping-Pong by Christmas?" Minsky asked Gosper as they watched the robot catchballs.Ping-Pong, like Chinese restaurants, was a system Gosper respected. He'd playedthe game in his basement as a kid, and his Ping-Pong style had much in commonwith his hacking style: both were based on his love of the physically improbable.When Gosper hit a Ping-Pong ball, the result was something as looney as a PDP-6display hack he put so much English on the ball that complex and counterintuitiveforces were summoned, and there was no telling where the ball might go. Gosperloved the spin, the denial of gravity that allowed you to violently slam a ball so that

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

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,

like a pair of antlers. It looked, frankly, like a piece of junk. Silver used a techniquecalled "image subtraction" to let the computer know where the bug was at any timethe camera would always be scanning the scene to see what had moved, and wouldnotice any change in its picture. Meanwhile the bug would be moving randomlyuntil the camera picked it up, and the computer directed it to the target, whichwould be a wallet which someone tossed nearby.Meanwhile, something was happening which was indicative of a continuingstruggle in this hacker haven. David Silver was getting a lot of criticism. Thecriticism came from nemeses of the Hacker Ethic: the AI theorists and gradstudents on the eighth floor. These were people who did not necessarily see theprocess of computing as a joyful end in itself: they were more concerned withgetting degrees, winning professional recognition, and the, ahem, advancement ofcomputer science. They considered hackerism unscientific. They were alwaysdemanding that hackers get off the machine so they could work on their OfficiallySanctioned Programs, and they were appalled at the seemingly frivolous uses towhich the hackers put the computer. The grad students were all in the midst ofscholarly and scientific theses and dissertations which pontificated on the difficultyof doing the kind of thing that David Silver was attempting. They would notconsider any sort of computer-vision experiment without much more planning,complete review of previous experiments, careful architecture, and a setup whichincluded pure white cubes on black velvet in a pristine, dustless room. They werefurious that the valuable time of the PDP-6 was being taken up for this ... toy! By acallow teen-ager, playing with the PDP-6 as if it were his personal go-cart.While the grad students were complaining about how David Silver was never goingto amount to anything, how David Silver wasn't doing proper AI, and how DavidSilver was never going to understand things like recursive function theory, DavidSilver was going ahead with his bug and PDP-6. Someone tossed a wallet on thegrimy, crufty floor, and the bug scooted forward, six inches a second, moved right,stopped, moved forward. And the stupid little bug kept darting forward, right, orleft until it reached the wallet, then rammed forward until the wallet was solidlybetween its "antlers" (which looked for all the world like bent shirt-hangers). Andthen the bug pushed the wallet to its designated "pen." Mission accomplished.The graduate students went absolutely nuts. They tried to get Silver booted. Theyclaimed there were insurance considerations springing from the presence of afourteen-year-old in the lab late at night. Minsky had to stand up for the kid. "It sortof drove them crazy," Silver later reflected, "because this kid would just sort ofscrew around for a few weeks and the computer would start doing the thing theywere working on that was really hard, and they were having difficulties and theyknew they would never really fully solve [the problem] and couldn't implement itin the real world. And it was all of a sudden happening and I pissed them off.

They're theorizing all these things and I'm rolling up my sleeves and doing it ... youfind a lot of that in hacking in general. I wasn't approaching it from either atheoretical point of view or an engineering point of view, but from sort of a funnesspoint of view. Let's make this robot wiggle around in a fun, interesting way. And sothe things I built and the programs I wrote actually did something. And in manycases they actually did the very things that these graduate students were trying todo."Eventually the grad students calmed down about Silver. But the schism wasconstant. The grad students viewed the hackers as necessary but juveniletechnicians. The hackers thought that grad students were ignoramuses with theirthumbs up their asses who sat around the eighth floor blindly theorizing about whatthe machine was like. They wouldn't know what The Right Thing was if it fell onthem. It was an offensive sight, these incompetents working on OfficiallySanctioned Programs which would be the subjects of theses and then tossed out (asopposed to hacker programs, which were used and improved upon). Some of themhad won their sanctions by snow-jobbing professors who themselves knew next tonothing about the machines. The hackers would watch these people "spaz out" onthe PDP-6, and rue the waste of perfectly good machine time.One of these grad students, in particular, drove the hackers wild he would makecertain mistakes in his programs that would invariably cause the machine to try toexecute faulty instructions, so-called "unused op-codes." He would do this forhours and days on end. The machine had a way of dealing with an unused op-codeit would store it in a certain place and, assuming you meant to define a new opcode,get ready to go back to it later. If you didn't mean to redefine this illegalinstruction, and proceeded without knowing what you'd done, the program wouldgo into a loop, at which point you'd stop it, look over your code, and realize whatyou'd done wrong. But this student, whom we will call Fubar in lieu of his longforgottenname, could never understand this, and kept putting in the illegalinstructions. Which caused the machine to loop wildly, constantly executinginstructions that didn't exist, waiting for Fubar to stop it. Fubar would sit there andstare. When he got a printout of his program, he would stare at that. Later on,perhaps, after he got the printout home, he would realize his mistake, and comeback to run the program again. Then he'd make the same error. And the hackerswere infuriated because by taking his printout home and fixing it there all the time,he was wasting the PDP-6 doing thumb-sucker, IBM-style batch-processing insteadof interactive programming. It was the equivalent of cardinal sin.So one day Nelson got into the computer and made a hack that would respond tothat particular mistake in a different way. People made sure to hang around the nexttime Fubar was signed up for the machine. He sat down at the console, taking hisusual, interminably long time to get going, and sure enough, within a half hour, he

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

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,

"Well, it has them, it's just that you don't know what they are." It was the mostprofound thing Gerry Sussman had ever heard. And Minsky continued, telling himthat the world is built a certain way, and the most important thing we can do withthe world is avoid randomness, and figure out ways by which things can beplanned. Wisdom like this has its effect on seventeen-year-old freshmen, and fromthen on Sussman was hooked.But he got off on the wrong foot with the hackers. He tried to compensate for hisinsecurity by excessive bravado, and everyone saw right through it. He was also, bymany accounts, terrifically clumsy, almost getting himself flattened in a bout withthe robot arm which he had infinite trouble controlling and once he accidentallycrushed a special brand of imported Ping-Pong ball that Gosper had brought intothe lab. Another time, while on a venture of the Midnight Computer WiringSociety, Sussman got a glob of solder in his eye. He was losing left and right.Perhaps to cultivate a suave image, Sussman smoked a pipe, the utterly wrongthing to do on the smokeaphobic ninth floor, and one day the hackers managed toreplace some of his tobacco with cut-up rubber bands of the same approximatecolor.He unilaterally apprenticed himself to Gosper, the most verbally profound of thehackers. Gosper might not have thought that Sussman was much of a winner at thatpoint, but he loved an audience, and tolerated Sussman's misguided cockiness.Sometimes the wry guru's remarks would set Sussman's head spinning, like thetime Gosper offhandedly remarked that "Well, data is just a dumb kind ofprogramming." To Sussman, that answered the eternal existence question, "Whatare you?" We are data, pieces of a cosmic computer program that is the universe.Looking at Gosper's programs,Sussman divined that this philosophy was embedded in the code. Sussman laterexplained that "Gosper sort of imagined the world as being made out of all theselittle pieces, each of which is a little machine which is a little independent localstate. And [each state] would talk to its neighbors."Looking at Gosper's programs, Sussman realized an important assumption ofhackerism: all serious computer programs are expressions of an individual. "It'sonly incidental that computers execute programs," Sussman would later explain."The important thing about a program is that it's something you can show topeople, and they can read it and they can learn something from it. It carriesinformation. It's a piece of your mind that you can write down and give to someoneelse just like a book." Sussman learned to read programs with the same sensitivitythat a literature buff would read a poem. There are fun programs with jokes inthem, there are exciting programs which do The Right Thing, and there are sad

programs which make valiant tries but don't quite fly.These are important things to know, but they did not necessarily make you awinner. It was hacking that did it for Sussman. He stuck at it, hung around Gospera lot, toned down his know-it-all attitude, and, above all, became an impressiveprogrammer. He was the rare loser who eventually turned things around andbecame a winner. He later wrote a very complicated and much-heralded program inwhich the computer would move blocks with a robot arm; and by a process muchlike debugging, the program would figure out for itself which blocks it would haveto move to get to the one requested. It was a significant step forward for artificialintelligence, and Sussman became known thereafter as more of a scientist, aplanner. He named his famous program HACKER.One thing that helped Sussman in his turnaround from loser to winner was a senseof what The Right Thing was. The biggest losers of all, in the eyes of the hackers,were those who so lacked that ability that they were incapable of realizing what thetrue best machine was, or the true best computer language, or the true best way touse a computer. And no system of using a computer earned the hackers' contemptas much as the time-sharing systems which, since they were a major part of ProjectMAC, were also based on the ninth floor of Tech Square. The first one, which wasoperating since the mid-sixties, was the Compatible Time-sharing System (CTSS).The other, long in preparation and high in expense, was called Multics, and was sooffensive that its mere existence was an outrage.Unlike the quiltwork of constantly improving systems programs operating on thePDP-6, CTSS had been written by one man, MIT Professor F. J. Corbate. It hadbeen a virtuoso job in many respects, all carefully coded and ready to run on theIBM 7094, which would support a series of terminals to be used simultaneously.But to the hackers, CTSS represented bureaucracy and IBM-ism. "One of the reallyfun things about computers is that you have control over them," CTSS foe TomKnight would later explain. "When you have a bureaucracy around a computer youno longer have control over it. The CTSS was a 'serious' system. People had to goget accounts and had to pay attention to security. It was a benign bureaucracy, butnevertheless a bureaucracy, full of people who were here from nine to five. If therewas some reason you wanted to change the behavior of the system, the way itworked, or develop a program that might have only sometimes worked, or mighthave some danger of crashing the system, that was not encouraged [on CTSS]. Youwant an environment where making those mistakes is not something for whichyou're castigated, but an environment where people say, 'Oops, you made amistake.'"In other words, CTSS discouraged hacking. Add to this the fact that it was run on atwo-million-dollar IBM machine that the hackers thought was much inferior to

their PDP-6, and you had one loser system. No one was asking the hackers to useCTSS, but it was there, and sometimes you just have to do some hacking on what'savailable. When a hacker would try to use it, and a message would come on-screensaying that you couldn't log on without the proper password, he would becompelled to retaliate. Because to hackers, passwords were even more odious thanlocked doors. What could be worse than someone telling you that you weren'tauthorized to use his computer?As it turned out, the hackers learned the CTSS system so well that they couldcircumvent the password requirements. Once they were on the system, they wouldrub it in a bit by leaving messages to the administrators high-tech equivalents of"Kilroy Was Here." Sometimes they would even get the computer to print out a listof all current passwords, and leave the printout under an administrator's door.Greenblatt recalls that the Project MAC-CTSS people took a dim view of that, andinserted an official MAC memo which would flash when you logged in, basicallysaying, a password is your sanctity, and only the lowest form of human wouldviolate a password. Tom Knight got inside the system and changed the heading ofthat memo from MAC to HAC.But as bad as CTSS was, the hackers thought Multics was worse. Multics was thename of the hugely expensive time-sharing system for the masses being built anddebugged on the ninth floor. Though it was designed for general users, the hackersevaluated the structure of any system in a very personal light, especially a systemcreated on the very floor of the building in which they hacked. So MULTICS was abig topic of hacker conversation.Originally, Multics was done in conjunction with General Electric; then Honeywellstepped in. There were all sorts of problems with it. As soon as the hackers heardthat the system would run on teletype Model 33 terminals instead of fast,interactive CRT displays, they knew the system was a total loser. The fact that thesystem was written in an IBM-created computer language called PL/I instead ofsleek machine language was appalling. When the system first ran, it was incrediblysluggish. It was so slow that the hackers concluded the whole system must be braindamaged,a term used so often to describe Multics that "brain-damaged" became astandard hackerese pejorative.But the worst thing about Multics was the heavy security and the system ofcharging the user for the time. Multics took the attitude that the user paid down tothe last nickel; it charged some for the memory you used, some more for the diskspace, more for the time. Meanwhile the Multics planners, in the hacker view, weremaking proclamations about how this was the only way that utilities could work.The system totally turned the Hacker Ethic around instead of encouraging moretime on the computer (the only good thing about time-sharing as far as most

hackers were concerned), it urged you to spend less time and to use less of thecomputer's facilities once you were on! The Multics philosophy was a disaster.The hackers plagued the Multics system with tricks and crashes. It was almost aduty to do it. As Minsky would later say, "There were people doing projects thatsome other people didn't like and they would play all sorts of jokes on them so thatit was impossible to work with them... I think [the hackers] helped progress byundermining professors with stupid plans."In light of the guerrilla tendencies of hackers, the planners in charge of the AI labhad to tread very lightly with suggestions that would impact the hackerenvironment. And around 1967, the planners wanted a whopper of a change. Theywanted to convert the hackers' beloved PDP-6 into a time-sharing machine.By that time, Minsky had turned many of his AI lab leadership duties over to hisfriend Ed Fredkin, Nelson's boss at Triple-I who himself was easing out of fulltimebusiness and into a professorship at MIT. (Fredkin would be one of theyoungest full professors on the faculty, and the only full professor without adegree.) A master programmer himself, Fredkin was already close to the hackers.He appreciated the way the laissez-faire attitude allowed hackers to be dazzlinglyproductive. But he thought that sometimes the hackers could benefit from top-downdirection. One of his early attempts to organize a "human wave" approach toward arobotics problem, assigning the hackers specific parts of the problem himself, hadfailed ignominiously. "Everyone thought I was crazy," Fredkin later recalled. Heultimately accepted the fact that the best way to get hackers to do things was tosuggest them, and hope that the hackers would be interested enough. Then youwould get production unheard of in industry or academia.Time-sharing was something that Minsky and Fredkin considered essential.Between hackers and Officially Sanctioned Users, the PDP-6 was in constantdemand; people were frustrated by long waits for access. But the hackers did notconsider time-sharing acceptable. They pointed at CTSS, Multics, even at JackDennis' more amiable system on the PDP-1, as examples of the slower, lesspowerful access one would be stuck with when one shared the computer withothers using it at the same time.They noted that certain large programs could not be run at all with time-sharing.One of these was a monster program that Peter Samson had been working on. Itwas sort of an outgrowth of one of his first hacks on the TX-0, a program which, ifyou typed in the names of two subway stations on the MTA, would tell you theproper subway lines to take, and where to make the changes from one to another.Now, Samson was tackling the entire New York subway system ... he intended toput the entire system in the computer's memory, and the full timetable of its trains

on a data disk accessible by the computer. One day he ran the program to figure outa route by which a person could ride the entire subway system with one token. Itgot some media attention, and then someone suggested that they see if they coulduse the computer to actually do it, break a record previously set by a Harvardstudent for actually traveling to every stop on the New York subway system.After months of hacking, Samson came up with a scheme, and one day two hackersmade the run. A teletype was installed at the MIT Alumni Club in Manhattan,connected to the PDP-6. Two dozen or so messengers were stationed along theroute, and they periodically ducked into pay phones, constantly updating scheduleinformation, calling in late trains, reporting delays, and noting missed connections.The hackers at the teletype pounded in the information, and back in Cambridge thePDP-6 calculated changes in the route. As the travelers passed each station,Samson marked it off on a war-room map. The idea of these crew-cut madmenstark contrast to the long-haired protesters making news in other sorts of activitiescaptured the imagination of the media for a day, and The Great Subway Hack wasnoted as one of the memorable uses of the PDP-6.It underlined something that Greenblatt, Gosper, and the rest considered essentialthe magic that could come only from programs using all of the computer. Thehackers worked on the PDP-6, one by one, as if it were their own personalcomputer. They would often run display programs which ran in "real time" andrequired the computer to constantly refresh the screen; timesharing would make thedisplay hacks run slower. And the hackers had gotten used to little frills that camefrom complete control of the PDP-6, like being able to track a program by theflashing lights (indicating which registers in the machine were firing). Those perkswould be gone with time-sharing.At heart, though, the time-sharing issue was an esthetic question. The very idea thatyou could not control the entire machine was disturbing. Even if the time-sharingsystem allowed the machine to respond to you in exactly the same way as it did insingle-user mode, you would just know that it wasn't all yours. It would be liketrying to make love to your wife, knowing she was simultaneously making love tosix other people!The hackers' stubbornness on this issue illustrated their commitment to the qualityof computing; they were not prepared to compromise by using an inferior systemthat would serve more people and perhaps spread the gospel of hacking. In theirview, hacking would be better served by using the best system possible. Not a timesharedsystem.Fredkin was faced with an uphill political struggle. His strategy was to turn aroundthe most vehement of the anti-time-sharing camp Greenblatt. There was a certain

affection between them. Fredkin was the only person on the-ninth floor who calledGreenblatt "Ricky." So he courted. He cajoled. He told Greenblatt how the powerof the PDP-6 would be improved by a new piece of hardware which would expandits memory to a size bigger than any computer in the world. He promised that thetime-sharing system would be better than any to date and the hackers would controlit. He worked on Greenblatt for weeks, and finally Ricky Greenblatt agreed thattime-sharing should be implemented on the PDP-6.Soon after that, Fredkin was in his office when Bill Gosper marched in, leadingseveral hackers. They lined up before Fredkin's desk and gave him a collective icystare."What's up?" Fredkin asked.They kept staring him for a while longer. Finally they spoke."We'd like to know what you've done to Greenblatt," they said. "We have reason tobelieve you've hypnotized him."Gosper in particular had difficulty accepting joint control of the PDP-6. Hisbehavior reminded Fredkin of Rourke, the architect in Ayn Rand's TheFountainhead who designed a beautiful building; when Rourke's superiors tookcontrol of the design and compromised its beauty, Rourke blew up the building.Fredkin later recalled Gosper telling him that if time-sharing were implemented onthe PDP-6, Gosper would be compelled to physically demolish the machine. "Justlike Rourke," Fredkin later recalled. "He felt if this terrible thing was to be done,you would have to destroy it. And I understood this feeling. So I worked out acompromise." The compromise allowed the machine to be run late at night insingle-user mode, so the hackers could run giant display programs and have thePDP-6 at their total command.The entire experiment in time-sharing did not work out badly at all. The reason wasthat a special, new time-sharing system was created, a system that had the HackerEthic in its very soul.The core of the system was written by Greenblatt and Nelson, in weeks of hardcorehacking. After some of the software was done, Tom Knight and others beganthe necessary adjustments to the PDP-6 and the brand-new memory addition a largecabinet with the girth of two Laundromat-size washing machines, nicknamed MobyMemory. Although the administration approved of the hackers' working on the

system, Greenblatt and the rest exercised full authority on how the system wouldturn out. An indication of how this system differed from the others (like theCompatible Time-sharing System) was the name that Tom Knight gave the hackerprogram: the Incompatible Time-sharing System (ITS).The title was particularly ironic because, in terms of friendliness to other systemsand programs, ITS was much more compatible than CTSS. True to the HackerEthic, ITS could easily be linked to other things that way it could be infinitelyextended so users could probe the world more effectively. As in any time-sharingsystem, several users would be able to run programs on ITS at the same time. Buton ITS, one user could also run several programs at once. ITS also allowedconsiderable use of the displays, and had what was for the time a very advancedsystem of editing that used the full screen ("years before the rest of the world,"Greenblatt later boasted). Because the hackers wanted the machine to run as swiftlyas it would have done had it not been time-shared, Greenblatt and Nelson wrotemachine language code which allowed for unprecedented control in a time-sharingsystem.There was an even more striking embodiment of the Hacker Ethic within ITS.Unlike almost any other time-sharing system, ITS did not use passwords. It wasdesigned, in fact, to allow hackers maximum access to any user's file. The oldpractice of having paper tapes in a drawer, a collective program library where you'dhave people use and improve your programs, was embedded in ITS; each usercould open a set of personal files, stored on a disk. The open architecture of ITSencouraged users to look through these files, see what neat hacks other people wereworking on, look for bugs in the programs, and fix them. If you wanted a routine tocalculate sine functions, for instance, you might look in Gosper's files and find histen-instruction sine hack. You could go through the programs of the masterhackers, looking for ideas, admiring the code. The idea was that computerprograms belonged not to individuals, but to the world of users.ITS also preserved the feeling of community that the hackers had when there wasonly one user on the machine, and people could crowd around him to watch himcode. Through clever cross-bar switching, not only could any user on ITS type acommand to find out who else was on the system, but he could actually switchhimself to the terminal of any user he wanted to monitor. You could even hack inconjunction with another user for instance, Knight could log in, find out thatGosper was on one of the other ports, and call up his program then he could writelines of code in the program Gosper was hacking.This feature could be used in all sorts of ways. Later on, after Knight had builtsome sophisticated graphics terminals, a user might be wailing away on a programand suddenly on screen there would appear this six-legged ... bug. It would crawl

up your screen and maybe start munching on your code, spreading littlephosphorous crumbs all over. On another terminal, hysterical with high-pitchedlaughter, would be the hacker who was telling you, in this inscrutable way, thatyour program was buggy. But though any user had the power not only to do thatsort of thing, but to go in your files and delete ("reap," as they called it) your hardhackedprograms and valuable notes, that sort of thing wasn't done. There washonor among hackers on ITS.The faith that the ITS had in users was best shown in its handling of the problem ofintentional system crashes. Formerly, a hacker rite of passage would be breakinginto a time-sharing system and causing such digital mayhem maybe byoverwhelming the registers with looping calculations that the system would"crash." Go completely dead. After a while a hacker would grow out of thatdestructive mode, but it happened often enough to be a considerable problem forpeople who had to work on the system. The more safeguards the system hadagainst this, the bigger the challenge would be for some random hacker to bring thething to its knees. Multics, for instance, required a truly non-trivial hack before itbombed. So there'd always be macho programmers proving themselves by crashingMultics.ITS, in contrast, had a command whose specific function was crashing the system.All you had to do was type KILL SYSTEM, and the PDP-6 would grind to a halt.The idea was to take all the fun away from crashing the system by making it trivialto do that. On rare occasions, some loser would look at the available commandsand say, "Wonder what KILL does?" and bring the system down, but by and largeITS proved that the best security was no security at all.Of course, as soon as ITS was put up on the PDP-6 there was a flurry of debugging,which, in a sense, was to go on for well over a decade. Greenblatt was the mostprominent of those who spent full days "hacking ITS" seeking bugs, adding newfeatures, making sections of it run faster ... working on it so much that the ITSenvironment became, in effect, a home for systems hackers.In the world that was the AI lab, the role of the systems hacker was central. TheHacker Ethic allowed anyone to work on ITS, but the public consequences ofsystems hacking threw a harsh spotlight on the quality of your work if you weretrying to improve the MIDAS assembler or the ITS-DDT debugger, and you madea hideous error, everyone's programs were going to crash, and people were going tofind out what loser was responsible. On the other hand, there was no higher callingin hackerism than quality systems hacking.The planners did not regard systems hacking with similar esteem. The plannerswere concerned with applications using computers to go beyond computing, to

create useful concepts and tools to benefit humanity. To the hackers, the systemwas an end in itself. Most hackers, after all, had been fascinated by systems sinceearly childhood. They had set aside almost everything else in life once theyrecognized that the ultimate tool in creating systems was the computer: not onlycould you use it to set up a fantastically complicated system, at once byzantine andelegantly efficient, but then, with a "Moby" operating system like ITS, that samecomputer could actually be the system. And the beauty of ITS was that it openeditself up, made it easy for you to write programs to fit within it, begged for newfeatures and bells and whistles. ITS was the hacker living room, and everyone waswelcome to do what he could to make himself comfortable, to find and decorate hisown little niche. ITS was the perfect system for building ... systems!It was an endlessly spiraling logical loop. As people used ITS, they might admirethis feature or that, but most likely they would think of ways to improve it. Thiswas only natural, because an important corollary of hackerism states that no systemor program is ever completed. You can always make it better. Systems are organic,living creations: if people stop working on them and improving them, they die.When you completed a systems program, be it a major effort like an assembler ordebugger or something quick and (you hoped) elegant, like an interface outputmultiplexor, you were simultaneously creating a tool, unveiling a creation, andfashioning something to advance the level of your own future hacking. It was aparticularly circular process, almost a spiritual one, in which the systemsprogrammer was a habitual user of the system he was improving. Many virtuososystems programs came out of remedies to annoying obstacles which hackers feltprevented them from optimum programming. (Real optimum programming, ofcourse, could only be accomplished when every obstacle between you and the purecomputer was eliminated an ideal that probably won't be fulfilled until hackers aresomehow biologically merged with computers.) The programs ITS hackers wrotehelped them to pro gram more easily, made programs run faster, and allowedprograms to gain from the power that comes from using more of the machine. Sonot only would a hacker get huge satisfaction from writing a brilliant systemsprogram a tool which everyone would use and admire but from then on he wouldbe that much further along in making the next systems program.To quote a progress report written by hacker Don Eastlake five years after ITS wasfirst running:The ITS system is not the result of a human wave or crash effort. Thesystem has been incrementally developed almost continuously sinceits inception. It is indeed true that large systems are never"finished"... In general, the ITS system can be said to have beendesigner implemented and user designed. The problem of unrealistic

software design is greatly diminished when the designer is theimplementor. The implementor's ease in programming and pride inthe result is increased when he, in an essential sense, is the designer.Features are less likely to turn out to be of low utility if users aretheir designers and they are less likely to be difficult to use if theirdesigners are their users.The prose was dense, but the point was clear ITS was the strongest expression yetof the Hacker Ethic. Many thought that it should be a national standard for timesharingsystems everywhere. Let every computer system in the land spread thegospel, eliminating the odious concept of passwords, urging the unrestricted handsonpractice of system debugging, and demonstrating the synergistic power thatcomes from shared software, where programs belong not to the author but to allusers of the machine.In 1968, major computer institutions held a meeting at the University of Utah tocome up with a standard time-sharing system to be used on DEC'S latest machine,the PDP-10. The Ten would be very similar to the PDP-6, and one of the twooperating systems under consideration was the hackers' Incompatible Time-sharingSystem. The other was TENEX, a system written by Bolt Beranek and Newmanthat had not yet been implemented. Greenblatt and Knight represented MIT at theconference, and they presented an odd picture two hackers trying to persuade theassembled bureaucracies of a dozen large institutions to commit millions of dollarsof their equipment to a system that, for starters, had no built-in security.They failed.Knight would later say that it was political naivete which lost it for the MIThackers. He guessed that the fix was in even before the conference was called toorder a system based on the Hacker Ethic was too drastic a step for thoseinstitutions to take. But Greenblatt later insisted that "we could have carried the dayif [we'd] really wanted to." But "charging forward," as he put it, was moreimportant. It was simply not a priority for Greenblatt to spread the Hacker Ethicmuch beyond the boundaries of Cambridge. He considered it much more importantto focus on the society at Tech Square, the hacker Utopia which would stun theworld by applying the Hacker Ethic to create ever more perfect systems.

7LIFETHEY would later call it a Golden Age of hacking, this marvelous existence on the ninth floor ofTech Square. Spending their time in the drab machine room and the cluttered offices nearby,gathered closely around terminals where rows and rows of green characters of code would scrollpast them, marking up printouts with pencils retrieved from shirt pockets, and chatting in theirpeculiar jargon over this infinite loop or that losing subroutine, the cluster of technological monkswho populated the lab was as close to paradise as they would ever be. A benevolently anarchisticlife-style dedicated to productivity and PDP-6 passion. Art, science, an1d play had merged into themagical activity of programming, with every hacker an omnipotent master of the flow ofinformation within the machine. The debugged life in all its glory.But as much as the hackers attempted to live the hacker dream without interference from thepathetically warped systems of the "Real World," it could not be done. Greenblatt and Knight'sfailure to convince outsiders of the natural superiority of the Incompatible Time-sharing Systemwas only one indication that the total immersion of a small group of people into hackerism mightnot bring about change on the massive scale that all the hackers assumed was inevitable. It was truethat, in the decade since the TX-0 was first delivered to MIT, the general public and certainly theother students on campus had become more aware of computers in general. But they did not regardcomputers with the same respect and fascination as did the hackers. And they did not necessarilyregard the hackers' intentions as benign and idealistic.On the contrary, many young people in the late 1960s saw computers as something evil, part of atechnological conspiracy where the rich and powerful used the computer's might against the poorand powerless. This attitude was not limited to students protesting, among other things, the nowexploding Vietnam war (a conflict fought in part by American computers). The machines whichstood at the soul of hackerism were also loathed by millions of common, patriotic citizens who sawcomputers as a dehumanizing factor in society. Every time an inaccurate bill arrived at a home, andthe recipient's attempts to set it right wound up in a frustrating round of calls usually leading to anexplanation that "the computer did it," and only herculean human effort could erase the digital blotthe popular contempt toward computers grew. Hackers, of course, attributed those slipups to thebrain-damaged, bureaucratic, batch-processed mentality of IBM. Didn't people understand that theHacker Ethic would eliminate those abuses by encouraging people to fix bugs like thousand-dollarelectric bills? But in the public mind there was no distinction between the programmers of HulkingGiants and the AI lab denizens of the sleek, interactive PDP-6. And in that public mind all computerprogrammers, hackers or not, were seen either as wild-haired mad scientists plotting the destructionof the world or as pasty-skinned, glassy-eyed automatons, repeating wooden phrases in dullmonotones while planning the next foray into technological big-brotherism.Most hackers chose not to dwell on those impressions. But in 1968 and 1969 the hackers had to facetheir sad public images, like it or not.

A protest march that climaxed at Tech Square dramatically indicated how distant the hackers werefrom their peers. Many of the hackers were sympathetic to the anti-war cause. Greenblatt, forinstance, had gone to a march in New Haven, and had done some phone line hookups for anti-warradicals at the National Strike Information Center at Brandeis. And hacker Brian Harvey was veryactive in organizing demonstrations; he would come back and tell in what low esteem the AI labwas held by the protesters. There was even some talk at anti-war meetings that some of thecomputers at Tech Square were used to help run the war. Harvey would try to tell them it wasn't so,but the radicals would not only disbelieve him but get angry that he'd try to feed them bullshit.The hackers shook their heads when they heard of that unfortunate misunderstanding. One moreexample of how people didn't understand! But one charge leveled at the AI lab by the anti-warmovement was entirely accurate: all the lab's activities, even the most zany or anarchisticmanifestations of the Hacker Ethic, had been funded by the Department of Defense. Everything,from the Incompatible Time-sharing System to Peter Samson's subway hack, was paid for by thesame Department of Defense that was killing Vietnamese and drafting American boys to dieoverseas.The general AI lab response to that charge was that the Defense Department's Advanced ResearchProjects Agency (ARPA), which funded the lab, never asked anyone to come up with specificmilitary applications for the computer research engaged in by hackers and planners. ARPA hadbeen run by computer scientists; its goal had been the advancement of pure research. During the late1960s a planner named Robert Taylor was in charge of ARPA funding, and he later admitted todiverting funds from military, "mission-oriented" projects to projects that would advance purecomputer science. It was only the rarest hacker who called the ARPA funding "dirty money."Almost everyone else, even people who opposed the war, recognized that ARPA money was thelifeblood of the hacking way of life. When someone pointed out the obvious that the DefenseDepartment might not have asked for specific military applications for the Artificial Intelligence andsystems work being done, but still expected a bonanza of military applications to come from thework (who was to say that all that "interesting" work in vision and robotics would not result in moreefficient bombing raids?) the hackers would either deny the obvious (Greenblatt: "Though ourmoney was coming from the Department of Defense, it was not military") or talk like MarvinMinsky: "There's nothing illegal about a Defense Department funding research. It's certainly betterthan a Commerce Department or Education Department funding research ... because that would leadto thought control. I would much rather have the military in charge of that ... the military peoplemake no bones about what they want, so we're not under any subtle pressures. It's clear what's goingon. The case of ARPA was unique, because they felt that what this country needed was people goodin defense technology. In case we ever needed it, we'd have it."Planners thought they were advancing true science. Hackers were blithely formulating their tidy,new-age philosophy based on free flow of information, decentralization, and computer democracy.But the anti-military protesters thought it was a sham, since all that so-called idealism wouldultimately benefit the War Machine that was the Defense Department. The anti-war people wantedto show their displeasure, and the word filtered up to the Artificial Intelligence lab one day that theprotesters were planning a march ending with a rally right there on the ninth floor. There, protesterswould gather to vividly demonstrate that all of them hackers, planners, and users were puppets ofthe Defense Department.Russ Noftsker, the nuts-and-bolts administrator of the AI lab, took the threat of protesters very

seriously. These were the days of the Weather Underground, and he feared that wild-eyed radicalswere planning to actually blow up the computer. He felt compelled to take certain measures toprotect the lab.Some of the measures were so secretive perhaps involving government agencies like the CIA,which had an office in Tech Square that Noftsker would not reveal them, even a decade after thewar had ended. But other measures were uncomfortably obvious. He removed the glass on the doorsleading from the elevator foyer on the ninth floor to the area where the hackers played withcomputers. In place of the glass, Noftsker installed steel plates, covering the plates with wood so itwould not look as if the area were as barricaded as it actually was. The glass panels beside the doorwere replaced with half-inch-thick bulletproof Plexiglas, so you could see who was petitioning forentry before you unlocked the locks and removed the bolts. Noftsker also made sure the doors hadheavy-duty hinges bolted to the walls, so that the protesters would not try to remove the entire door,rush in, and storm the computers.During the days preceding the demonstration, only people whose names were on an approved listwere officially allowed entry to this locked fortress. On the day of the demonstration, he even wentso far as to distribute around forty Instamatic cameras to various people, asking them, when theyventured outside the protected area, to take pictures of the demonstrators. If the demonstrators choseto become violent, at least there would be documentation of the wrongdoers.The barricades worked insofar as the protesters around twenty or thirty of them, in Noftsker'sestimate walked to Tech Square, stayed outside the lab a bit, and left without leveling the PDP-6with sledgehammers. But the collective sigh of relief on the part of the hackers must have beenmixed with much regret. While they had created a lock-less, democratic system within the lab, thehackers were so alienated from the outside world that they had to use those same hated locks,barricades, and bureaucrat-compiled lists to control access to this idealistic environment. Whilesome might have groused at the presence of the locks, the usual free-access guerrilla fervor did notseem to be applied in this case. Some of the hackers, shaken at the possibility of a rout, even riggedthe elevator system so that the elevators could not go directly to the ninth floor. Though previouslysome of the hackers had declared, "I will not work in a place that has locks," after thedemonstrations were over, and after the restricted lists were long gone, the locks remained.Generally, the hackers chose not to view the locks as symbols of how far removed they were fromthe mainstream.A very determined solipsism reigned on the ninth floor, a solipsism that stood its ground even whenhackerism suffered some direct, though certainly less physically threatening, attacks in publicationsand journals. It was tough to ignore, however, the most vicious of these, since it came from withinMIT, from a professor of Computer Science (yes, MIT had come around and started a department)named Joseph Weizenbaum. A former programmer himself, a thin, moustachioed man who spokewith a rolling eastern European accent, Weizenbaum had been at MIT since 1963, but had rarelyinteracted with the hackers. His biggest programming contribution to AI had been a program calledELIZA, which carried on a conversation with the user; the computer would take the role of atherapist. Weizenbaum recognized the computer's power, and was disturbed to note how seriouslyusers would interact with ELIZA. Even though people knew it was "only" a computer program, theywould tell it their most personal secrets. To Weizenbaum, it was a demonstration of how thecomputer's power could lead to irrational, almost addictive behavior, with dehumanizingconsequences. And Weizenbaum thought that hackers or "compulsive programmers" were theultimate in computer dehumanization. In what was to become a notorious passage, he wrote, inComputer Power and Human Reason:

...bright young men of disheveled appearance, often with sunken glowing eyes, canbe seen sitting at computer consoles, their arms tensed and waiting to fire theirfingers, already poised to strike, at the buttons and keys on which their attentionseems to be riveted as a gambler's on the rolling dice. When not so transfixed, theyoften sit at tables strewn with computer printouts over which they pore like possessedstudents of a cabbalistic text. They work until they nearly drop, twenty, thirty hours ata time. Their food, if they arrange it, is brought to them: coffee, Cokes, sandwiches. Ifpossible, they sleep on cots near the printouts. Their rumpled clothes, their unwashedand unshaven faces, and their uncombed hair all testify that they are oblivious to theirbodies and to the world in which they move. These are computer bums, compulsiveprogrammers...Weizenbaum would later say that the vividness of this description came from his own experience asa hacker of sorts, and was not directly based on observations of the ninth-floor culture. But manyhackers felt otherwise. Several thought that Weizenbaum had identified them personally, eveninvaded their privacy in his description. Some others guessed that Greenblatt had been unfairlysingled out; indeed, Greenblatt did send Weizenbaum some messages objecting to the screed.Still, there was no general introspection resulting from this or any other attack on the hacker lifestyle.That was not the way of the lab. Hackers would not generally delve into each other'spsychological makeups. "There was a set of shared goals" Tom Knight would later explain "a set ofshared intellectual excitement, even to a large degree a set of shared social life, but there was also aboundary which people were nervous to go beyond."It was this unspoken boundary which came to bother hacker David Silver. He joined the lab as anadolescent and literally came to maturity there, and besides his productive hacking he spent timethinking about the relationship between hackers and computers. He came to be fascinated at how allof them got so attached to, so intimately connected with something as simple as the PDP-6. It wasalmost terrifying: thinking about this made David Silver wonder what it was that connected peopletogether, how people found each other, why people got along ... when something relatively simplelike the PDP-6 drew the hackers so close. The whole subject made him wonder on the one handwhether people were just fancy kinds of computers, or on the other hand whether they were imagesof God as a spirit.These introspections were not things he necessarily shared with his mentors, like Greenblatt orGosper. "I don't think people had sort of warm conversations with each other," he would later say."That wasn't the focus. The focus was on sheer brainpower." This was the case even with Gosper:Silver's apprenticeship with him was not so much a warm human relationship, he'd later reflect, as"a hacker relationship," very close in terms of what they shared in terms of the computer, but notimbued with the richness of a Real World friendship."There were many many many years that went by when all I did was hack computers, and I didn'tfeel lonely, like I was missing anything," Silver would say. "But I guess as I started to grow upmore, round out more, change more, become less eccentric in certain ways, I started needing moreinput from people. [By not going to high school] I bypassed all that social stuff and went right intothis blue-sky think tank ... I spent my lifetime walking around talking like a robot, talking to abunch of other robots."

Sometimes the hacker failure to be deeply personal had grim consequences. The lab might havebeen the ideal location for guru-level hackers, but for some the pressure was too much. Even thephysical layout of the place promoted a certain high-tension feeling, with the open terminals, theconstant intimidating presence of the greatest computer programmers in the world, the cold air andthe endless hum of the air conditioners. At one point a research firm was called in to do a study ofthe excessive, inescapable noise, and they concluded that the hum of the air conditioner was sobothersome because there weren't enough competing noises so they fixed the machines to makethem give off a loud, continual hiss. In Greenblatt's words, this change "was not a win," and theconstant hiss made the long hours on the ninth floor rather nerve-racking for some. Add that toother factors lack of sleep, missed meals to the point of malnutrition, and a driving passion to finishthat hack and it was clear why some hackers went straight over the edge.Greenblatt was best at spotting "the classical syndrome of various kinds of losses," as he called it."In a certain way, I was concerned about the fact that we couldn't have people dropping dead allover the place." Greenblatt would sometimes tell people to go home for a while, take it easy. Otherthings were beyond him. For instance, drugs. One night, while driving back from a Chinese meal, ayoung hacker turned to him and asked, not kidding, if he wanted to "shoot up." Greenblatt wasflabbergasted. The Real World was penetrating again, and there was little Greenblatt could do. Onenight not long afterward, that particular hacker leapt off the Harvard Bridge into the ice-coveredCharles River and was severely injured. It was not the only suicide attempt by an AI lab hacker.From that evidence alone, it would seem that Weizenbaum's point was well taken. But there wasmuch more to it than that. Weizenbaum did not acknowledge the beauty of the hacker devotionitself ... or the very idealism of the Hacker Ethic. He had not seen, as Ed Fredkin had. Stew Nelsoncomposing code on the TECO editor while Greenblatt and Gosper watched: without any of the threesaying a word. Nelson was entertaining the others, encoding assembly language tricks which tothem, with their absolute mastery of that PDP-6 "language," had the same effect as hilariouslyincisive jokes. And after every few instructions there would be another punch line in this sublimeform of communication... The scene was a demonstration of sharing which Fredkin never forgot.While conceding that hacker relationships were unusual, especially in that most hackers livedasexual lives, Fredkin would later say that "they were living the future of computers ... They justhad fun. They knew they were an elite, something special. And I think they appreciated each other.They were all different, but each knew something great about the other. They all respected eachother. I don't know if anything like [that hacker culture] has happened in the world. I would say theykind of loved each other."The hackers focused on the magic of computers instead of human emotions, but they also could betouched by other people. A prime example would be the case of Louis Merton. * Merton was anMIT student, somewhat reserved, and an exceptional chess player. Save for the last trait, Greenblattat first thought him well within the spectrum of random people who might wander into the lab.The fact that Merton was such a good chess player pleased Greenblatt, who was then working tobuild an actual computer which would run a souped-up version of his chess program. Mertonlearned some programming, and joined Greenblatt on the project. He later did his own chessprogram on a little-used PDP-7 on the ninth floor. Merton was enthusiastic about chess andcomputers, and there was little to foreshadow what happened during the Thanksgiving break in late1966, when, in the little theater-like AI "playroom" on Tech Square's eighth floor (where ProfessorSeymour Papert and a group were working on the educational LOGO computer language), Merton

temporarily turned into a vegetable. He assumed a classic position of catatonia, rigidly sittingupright, hands clenched into fists at his side. He would not respond to questions, would not evenacknowledge the existence of anything outside himself. People didn't know what to do. They calledup the MIT infirmary and were told to call the Cambridge police, who carted poor Merton away.The incident severely shook the hackers, including Greenblatt, who found out about the incidentwhen he returned from a holiday visit home.Merton was not one of the premier hackers. Greenblatt was not an intimate friend. Nonetheless,Greenblatt immediately drove out to Westboro State Hospital to recover Merton. It was a longdrive, and the destination reminded Greenblatt of something out of the Middle Ages. Less a hospitalthan a prison. Greenblatt became determined not to leave until he got Merton out. The last step inthis tortuous process was getting the signature of an elderly, apparently senile doctor. "Exactly [likesomething] out of a horror film," Greenblatt later recalled. "He was unable to read. This randomattendant type would say, 'Sign here. Sign here.'"It turned out that Merton had a history of these problems. Unlike most catatonics, Merton wouldimprove after a few days, especially when he was given medicine. Often, when he went catatonicsomewhere, whoever found him would call someone to take him away, and the doctors would givea diagnosis of permanent catatonia even as Merton was coming to life again. He would call up theAI lab and say, "Help," and someone, often Greenblatt, would come and get him.Later, someone discovered in MIT records a letter from Merton's late mother. The letter explainedthat Louis was a strange boy, and he sometimes would go stiff. In that case, all you needed to dowas to ask, "Louis, would you like to play a game of chess?" Fredkin, who had also taken aninterest in Merton, tried this. Merton one day stiffened on the edge of his chair, totally in sculpturemode. Fredkin asked him if he'd like to play chess, and Merton stiffly marched over to the chessboard. The game got under way, with Fredkin chatting away in a rather one-sided conversation, butsuddenly Merton just stopped. Fredkin asked, "Louis, why don't you move?" After a very longpause, Merton responded in a guttural, slow voice, "Your ... king's ... in ... check." Fredkin hadinadvertently uncovered the check from his last move.Merton's condition could be mitigated by a certain medicine, but for reasons of his own he almostnever took it. Greenblatt would plead with him, but he'd refuse. Once Greenblatt went to Fredkin toask him to help out; Fredkin went back with Greenblatt to find Merton stiff and unresponsive."Louis, how come you're not taking your medicine?" he asked. Merton just sat there, a weak smilefrozen on his face. "Why won't you take it?" Fredkin repeated.Suddenly, Merton reared back and walloped Fredkin on the chin. That kind of behavior was one ofMerton's unfortunate features. But the hackers showed remarkable tolerance. They did not dismisshim as a loser. Fredkin considered Merton's case a good example of the essential humanity of thegroup which Weizenbaum had, in effect, dismissed as emotionless androids. "He's just crazy,"Minsky would later say of Weizenbaum. "These [hackers] are the most sensitive, honorable peoplethat have ever lived." Hyperbole, perhaps, but it was true that behind their single-mindedness therewas warmth, in the collective realization of the Hacker Ethic. As much as any devout religiousorder, the hackers had sacrificed what outsiders would consider basic emotional behavior for thelove of hacking.David Silver, who would eventually leave the order, was still in awe of that beautiful sacrifice years

later: "It was sort of necessary for these people to be extremely brilliant and, in some sense,handicapped socially so that they would just kind of concentrate on this one thing." Hacking. Themost important thing in the world to them.The computer world outside Cambridge did not stand still while the Hacker Ethic nourished on theninth floor of Tech Square. By the late 1960s, hackerism was spreading, partly because of theproliferation of interactive machines like the PDP-10 or the XDS-940, partly because of friendlyprogramming environments (such as the one hackers had created at MIT), and partly because MITveterans would leave the lab and carry their culture to new places. But the heart of the movementwas this: people who wanted to hack were finding computers to hack on.These computers were not necessarily at MIT. Centers of hacker culture were growing at variousinstitutions around the country, from Stanford to Carnegie-Mellon. And as these other centersreached critical mass enough dedicated people to hack a large system and go on nightly pilgrimagesto local Chinese restaurants they became tempting enough to lure some of the AI lab hackers awayfrom Tech Square. The intense MIT style of hackerism would be exported through these emissaries.Sometimes it would not be an institution that hackers moved to, but a business. A programmernamed Mike Levitt began a leading-edge technology firm called Systems Concepts in SanFrancisco. He was smart enough to recruit phone-and-PDP-1 hacker Stew Nelson as a partner; TX-0music master Peter Samson also joined this high-tech hardware design-and-manufacture business.All in all, the small company managed to get a lot of the concentrated talent around Tech Square outto San Francisco. This was no small feat, since hackers were generally opposed to the requirementsof California life, particularly driving and recreational exposure to the sun. But Nelson had learnedhis lesson earlier despite Fredkin's repeated urgings in the mid-sixties, he'd refused to go to Triple-I's new Los Angeles headquarters until, one day, after emphatically reiterating his vow, he stormedout of Tech Square without a coat. It happened to be the coldest day of the Cambridge winter thatyear, and as soon as he walked outside his glasses cracked from the sudden change of temperature.He walked straight back to Fredkin's office, his eyebrows covered with icicles, and said, "I'm going10 Los Angeles."In some cases, a hacker's departure would be hastened by what Minsky and Ed Fredkin called"social engineering." Sometimes the planners would find a hacker getting into a rut, perhaps stuckon some systems problem, or maybe becoming so fixated on extracurricular activities, like lockhacking or phone hacking, that planners deemed his work no longer "interesting." Fredkin wouldlater recall that hackers could get into a certain state where they were "like anchors dragging thething down. Time had gone by them, in some sense. They needed to get out of the lab and the labneeded them out. So some surprising offer would come to those persons, or some visit arranged,usually someplace far, far away. These people started filtering out in the world to companies orother labs. It wasn't fate 1 would arrange it."Minsky would say, "Brave Fredkin," acknowledging the clandestine nature of Fredkin's activity,which would have to be done without the knowledge of the hacker community; they would nottolerate an organizational structure which actually dictated where people should go.While the destination could be industry besides Systems Concepts, Fredkin's InformationInternational company hired many of the MIT hackers it was often another computer center. The

most desirable of these was the Stanford AI Lab (SAIL), which Uncle John McCarthy had foundedwhen he left MIT in 1962.In many respects SAIL was a mirror image of MIT's operation, distorted only by the California hazethat would sometimes drift from the Pacific Ocean to the peninsula. But the California distortionwas a significant one demonstrating how even the closest thing to the MIT hacker community wasonly an approximation of the ideal; the hothouse MIT style of hackerism was destined to travel, butwhen exposed to things like California sunlight it faded a bit in intensity.The difference began with the setting, a semicircular concrete-glass-and-redwood formerconference center in the hills overlooking the Stanford campus. Inside the building, hackers wouldwork at any of sixty-four terminals scattered around the various offices. None of the claustrophobiaof Tech Square. No elevators, no deafening air-conditioning hiss. The laid-back style meant thatmuch of MIT's sometimes constructive acrimony the shouting sessions at the TMRC classroom, thereligious wars between grad students and hackers did not carry over. Instead of the battle-strewnimagery of shoot-'em-up space science fiction that pervaded Tech Square, the Stanford imagery wasthe gentle lore of elves, hobbits, and wizards described in J. R. R. Tolkien's Middle Earth trilogy.Rooms in the AI lab were named after Middle Earth locations, and the SAIL printer was rigged so itcould handle three different Elven type fonts.The California difference was reflected in the famous genre of computer games that the Stanford labeventually developed after the heyday of MIT Spacewar. A Stanford hacker named Donald Woodsdiscovered a kind of game on a Xerox research computer one day that involved a spelunkerexplorerseeking treasure in a dungeon. Woods contacted the programmer, Will Crowther, talked tohim about it, and decided to expand Crowther's game into a full-scale "Adventure," where a personcould use the computer to assume the role of a traveler in a Tolkienesque setting, fight off enemies,overcome obstacles through clever tricks, and eventually recover treasure. The player would givetwo-word, verb-noun commands to the program, which would respond depending on how thecommand changed the universe that had been created inside the computer by Don Woods'imagination. For instance, the game began with the computer describing your opening location:YOU ARE STANDING AT THE END OF A ROAD BEFORE A SMALL BRICKBUILDING.AROUND YOU IS A FOREST. A SMALL STREAM PLOWS OUT OF THE BUILDINGAND DOWN A GULLY.If you wrote GO SOUTH, the computer would say:AYOU ARE IN A VALLEY IN THE FOREST BESIDE A STREAM TUMBLING ALONGROCKY BED.Later on, you would have to figure all sorts of tricks to survive. The snake you encountered, forinstance, could only be dealt with by releasing a bird you'd picked up along the way. The birdwould attack the snake, and you'd be free to pass. Each "room" of the adventure was like acomputer subroutine, presenting a logical problem you'd have to solve.In a sense, Adventure was a metaphor for computer programming itself the deep recesses you

explored in the Adventure world were akin to the basic, most obscure levels of the machine thatyou'd be traveling in when you hacked in assembly code. You could get dizzy trying to rememberwhere you were in both activities. Indeed, Adventure proved as addicting as programming Woodsput the program on the SAIL PDP-10 on a Friday, and some hackers (and Real World "tourists")spent the entire weekend trying to solve it. Like any good system or program, of course, Adventurewas never finished Woods and his friends were always improving it, debugging it, adding morepuzzles and features. And like every significant program. Adventure was expressive of thepersonality and environment of the authors. For instance, Woods' vision of a mist-covered TollBridge protected by a stubborn troll came during a break in hacking one night, when Woods andsome other hackers decided to watch the sun rise at a mist-shrouded Mount Diablo, a substantialdrive away. They didn't make it in time, and Woods remembered what that misty dawn looked like,and wrote it into the description of that scene in the game, which he conceived of over breakfast thatmorning.It was at Stanford that gurus were as likely to be faculty people as systems hackers (among Stanfordprofessors was the noted computer scientist Donald Knuth, author of the multivolume classic TheArt of Computer Programming). It was at Stanford that, before the Adventure craze, the casualpleasures of Spacewar were honed to a high art (Slug Russell had come out with McCarthy, but itwas younger hackers who developed five-player versions and options for reincarnation, and ranextensive all-night tournaments). It was at Stanford that hackers would actually leave theirterminals for a daily game of volleyball. It was at Stanford that a fund-raising drive wassuccessfully undertaken for an addition to the lab which would have been inconceivable at MIT: asauna. It was at Stanford that the computer could support video images, allowing users to switchfrom a computer program to a television program. The most famous use of this, according to someSAIL regulars, came when SAIL hackers placed an ad in the campus newspaper for a couple ofwilling young coeds, and the women answering the ad became stars of a sex orgy at the AI lab,captured by a video camera and watched over the terminals by appreciative hackers. Something elsethat never would have occurred at MIT.It was not as if the SAIL hackers were any less devoted to their hacking than the MIT people. In apaper summarizing the history of the Stanford lab, Professor Bruce Buchanan refers to the "strangesocial environment created by intense young people whose first love was hacking," and it was truethat the lengths that hackers went to in California were no less extreme than those at Tech Square.For instance, it did not take long for SAIL hackers to notice that the crawl space between the lowhangingartificial ceiling and the roof could be a comfortable sleeping hutch, and several of themactually lived there for years. One systems hacker spent the early 1970s living in his dysfunctionalcar parked in the lot outside the building once a week he'd bicycle down to Palo Alto for provisions.The other alternative for food was the Prancing Pony; named after a tavern in Middle Earth, thiswas the SAIL food-vending machine, loaded with health-food goodies and pot-stickers from a localChinese restaurant. Each hacker kept an account on the Prancing Pony, maintained by the computer.After you made your food purchase, you were given the option to double-or-nothing the cost ofyour food, the outcome depending on whether it was an odd- or even-numbered millisecond whenyou made the gamble. With those kinds of provisions, SAIL was even more amenable than MIT forround-the-clock hacking. It had its applications people and its systems people. It was open tooutsiders, who would sit down and begin hacking; and if they showed promise, Uncle JohnMcCarthy might hire them.SAIL hackers also lived by the Hacker Ethic. The time-sharing system on the SAIL machine, likeITS, did not require passwords, but, at John McCarthy's insistence, a user had the option to keep hisfiles private. The SAIL hackers wrote a program to identify these people, and proceeded to unlock

the files, which they would read with special interest. "Anybody that's asking for privacy must bedoing something interesting," SAIL hacker Don Woods would later explain.Likewise, SAIL was in no way inferior to MIT in doing important computer work. Just like theircounterparts at MIT's AI lab, SAIL hackers were robotics fans, as implied by the sign outside SAIL:CAUTION, ROBOT VEHICLE. It was John McCarthy's dream to have a robot leave the funky AIlab and travel the three miles to campus under its own physical and mental power. At one point,presumably by mistake, a robot got loose and was careening down the hill when, fortunately, aworker driving to the lab spotted it, and rescued it. Various hackers and academics worked at SAILin important planner fields like speech understanding and natural language studies. Some of thehackers got heavily involved in a computer music project that would break ground in that field.Stanford and other labs, whether in universities like Carnegie-Mellon or research centers likeStanford Research Institute, became closer to each other when ARPA linked their computer systemsthrough a communications network. This "ARPAnet" was very much influenced by the HackerEthic, in that among its values was the belief that systems should be decentralized, encourageexploration, and urge a free flow of information. From a computer at any "node" on the ARPAnet,you could work as if you were sitting at a terminal of a distant computer system. Hackers from allover the country could work on the ITS system at Tech Square, and the hacker values implicit inthat were spreading. People sent a tremendous volume of electronic mail to each other, swappedtechnical esoterica, collaborated on projects, played Adventure, formed close hacker friendshipswith people they hadn't met in person, and kept in contact with friends at places they'd previouslyhacked. The contact helped to normalize hackerism, so you could find hackers in Utah speaking inthe peculiar jargon developed in the Tool Room next to the Tech Model Railroad Club.Yet even as the Hacker Ethic grew in the actual number of its adherents, the MIT hackers noted thatoutside of Cambridge things were not the same. The hackerism of Greenblatt, Gosper, and Nelsonhad been directed too much toward creating one Utopia, and even the very similar offshoots were,by comparison, losing in various ways."How could you go to California, away from the action?" people would ask those who went toStanford Some left because they tired of the winner-loser dichotomy on the ninth floor, though theywould admit that the MIT intensity was not in California. Tom Knight, who hacked at Stanford for awhile, used to say that you couldn't really do good work at Stanford.David Silver went out there, too, and concluded that "the people at Stanford were kind of losers intheir thinking. They weren't as rigorous in certain ways and they sort of were more fun-loving. Oneguy was building a race car and another was building an airplane in the basement..." Silver himselfgot into hardware at Stanford when he built an audio switch to allow people working at theirterminals to listen to any of sixteen channels, from radio stations to a SAIL public-address system.All the choices, of course, were stored within the SAIL PDP-6. And Silver thinks that exposure tothe California style of hacking helped loosen him up, preparing him to make the break from theclosed society of the ninth floor.The defection of Silver and the other MIT hackers did not cripple the lab. New hackers came toreplace them. Greenblatt and Gosper remained, as did Knight and some other canonical hackers.But the terrifically optimistic energy that came with the opening explosion of AI research, of settingup new software systems, seemed to have dissipated. Some scientists were complaining that theboasts of early AI planners were not fulfilled. Within the hacker community itself, the fervid habits

and weird patterns established in the past decade seemed to have solidified. Were they ossified aswell? Could you grow old as a hacker, keep wrapping around to those thirty-hour days? "I wasreally proud," Gosper would say later, "of being able to hack around the clock and not really carewhat phase of the sun or moon it was. Wake up and find it twilight, have no idea whether it wasdawn or sunset." He knew, though, that it could not go on forever. And when it could not, whenthere was no Gosper or Greenblatt wailing away for thirty hours, how far would the hacker dreamgo? Would the Golden Age, now drawing to its close, really have meant anything?It was in 1970 that Bill Gosper began hacking LIFE. It was yet another system that was a world initself, a world where behavior was "exceedingly rich, but not so rich as to be incomprehensible." Itwould obsess Bill Gosper for years.LIFE was a game, a computer simulation developed by John Conway, a distinguished Britishmathematician. It was first described by Martin Gardner, in his "Mathematical Games" column inthe October 1970 issue of Scientific American. The game consists of markers on a checkerboard-likefield, each marker representing a "cell." The pattern of cells changes with each move in the game(called a "generation"), depending on a few simple rules cells die, are born, or survive to the nextgeneration according to how many neighboring cells are in the vicinity. The principle is thatisolated cells die of loneliness, and crowded cells die from overpopulation; favorable conditionswill generate new cells and keep old ones alive. Gardner's column talked of the complexities madepossible by this simple game and postulated some odd results that had not yet been achieved byConway or his collaborators.Gosper first saw the game when he came into the lab one day and found two hackers fooling aroundwith it on the PDP-6. He watched for a while. His first reaction was to dismiss the exercise as notinteresting. Then he watched the patterns take shape a while longer. Gosper had always appreciatedhow the specific bandwidth of the human eyeball could interpret patterns; he would often use weirdalgorithms to generate a display based on mathematical computations. What would appear to berandom numbers on paper could be brought to life on a computer screen. A certain order could bediscerned, an order that would change in an interesting way if you took the algorithm a fewiterations further, or alternated the x and y patterns. It was soon clear to Gosper that LIFE presentedthese possibilities and more. He began working with a few AI workers to hack LIFE in anextremely serious way. He was to do almost nothing else for the next eighteen months.The group's first effort was to try to find a configuration in the LIFE universe which was possible intheory but had not been discovered. Usually, no matter what pattern you began with, after a fewgenerations it would peter out to nothing, or revert to one of a number of standard patterns namedafter the shape that the collection of cells formed. The patterns included the beehive, honey farm(four beehives), spaceship, powder keg, beacon, Latin cross, toad, pinwheel, and swastika.Sometimes, after a number of generations, patterns would alternate, flashing between one and theother: these were called oscillators, traffic lights, or pulsars. What Gosper and the hackers wereseeking was called a glider gun. A glider was a pattern which would move across the screen,periodically reverting to the same pointed shape. If you ever created a LIFE pattern which actuallyspewed out gliders as it changed shape, you'd have a glider gun, and LIFE'S inventor, John Conway,offered fifty dollars to the first person who was able to create one.The hackers would spend all night sitting at the PDP-6's high-quality "340" display (a special, high-

speed monitor made by DEC), trying different patterns to see what they'd yield. They would logeach "discovery" they made in this artificial universe in a large black sketchbook which Gosperdubbed the LIFE Scrap-book. They would stare at the screen as, generation by generation, thepattern would shift. Sometimes it looked like a worm snapping its tail between sudden reverses, asif it were alternating between itself and a mirror reflection. Other times, the screen would eventuallydarken as the cells died from aggregate overpopulation, then isolation. A pattern might end with thescreen going blank. Other times things would stop with a stable "still life" pattern of one of thestandards. Or things would look like they were winding down, and one little cell thrown off by adying "colony" could reach another pattern and this newcomer could make it explode with activity."Things could run off and do something incredibly random," Gosper would later recall of thosefantastic first few weeks, "and we couldn't stop watching it. We'd just sit there, wondering if it wasgoing to go on forever."As they played, the world around them seemed connected in patterns of a LIFE simulation. Theywould often type in an arbitrary pattern such as the weaving in a piece of clothing, or a pattern oneof them discerned in a picture or a book. Usually what it would do was not interesting. Butsometimes they would detect unusual behavior in a small part of a large LIFE pattern. In that casethey would try to isolate that part, as they did when they noticed a pattern that would be called "theshuttle," which would move a distance on the screen, then reverse itself. The shuttle left behindsome cells in its path, which the hackers called "dribbles." The dribbles were "poison," becausetheir presence would wreak havoc on otherwise stable LIFE populations.Gosper wondered what might happen if two shuttles bounced off each other, and figured that therewere between two and three hundred possibilities. He tried out each one, and eventually cameacross a pattern that actually threw off gliders. It would move across the screen like a jitterbuggingwhip, spewing off limp boomerangs of phosphor. It was a gorgeous sight. No wonder this wascalled LIFE the program created life itself. To Gosper, Con-way's simulation was a form of geneticcreation, without the vile secretions and emotional complications associated with the Real World'sversion of making new life. Congratulations you've given birth to a glider gun!Early the next morning Gosper made a point of printing out the coordinates of the pattern thatresulted in the glider gun, and rushed down to the Western Union office to send a wire to MartinGardner with the news. The hackers got the fifty dollars.This by no means ended the LIFE craze on the ninth floor. Each night, Gosper and his friendswould monopolize the 340 display running various LIFE patterns, a continual entertainment,exploration, and journey into alternate existence. Some did not share their fascination, notablyGreenblatt. By the early seventies, Greenblatt had taken more of a leadership role in the lab. Heseemed to care most about the things that had to be done, and after being the de facto caretaker ofthe ITS system he was actively trying to transform his vision of the hacker dream into a machinethat would embody it. He had taken the first steps in his "chess machine," which responded with aquickness unheard of in most computers. He was also trying to make sure that the lab itself ransmoothly, so that hacking would progress and be continually interesting.He was not charmed by LIFE. Specifically, he was unhappy that Gosper and the others werespending "unbelievable numbers of hours at the console staring at those soupy LIFE things" andmonopolizing the single 340 terminal. Worst of all, he considered the program they were using as"clearly non-optimal." This was something the LIFE hackers readily admitted, but the LIFE casewas the rare instance of hackers tolerating some inefficiency. They were so thrilled at the unfoldingdisplay of LIFE that they did not want to pause even for the few days it might take to hack up a

etter program. Greenblatt howled in protest "the heat level got to be moderately high," he lateradmitted and did not shut up until one of the LIFE hackers wrote a faster program, loaded withutilities that enabled you to go backward and forward for a specified number of generations, focusin on various parts of the screen, and do all sorts of other things to enhance exploration.Greenblatt never got the idea. But to Gosper, LIFE was much more than your normal hack. He sawit as a way to "basically do science in a new universe where all the smart guys haven't already nixedyou out two or three hundred years ago. It's your life story if you're a mathematician: every timeyou discover something neat, you discover that Gauss or Newton knew it in his crib. With LIFEyou're the first guy there, and there's always fun stuff going on.You can do everything from recursive function theory to animal husbandry. There's a community ofpeople who are sharing these experiences with you. And there's the sense of connection betweenyou and the environment. The idea of where's the boundary of a computer. Where does thecomputer leave off and the environment begin?"Obviously, Gosper was hacking LIFE with near-religious intensity. The metaphors implicit in thesimulation of populations, generations, birth, death, survival were becoming real to him. He beganto wonder what the consequences would be if a giant supercomputer were dedicated to LIFE ... andimagined that eventually some improbable objects might be created from the pattern. The mostpersistent among them would survive against odds which Gosper, as a mathematician, knew werealmost impossible. It would not be randomness which determined survival, but some sort ofcomputer Darwinism. In this game which is a struggle against decay and oblivion, the survivorswould be the "maximally persistent states of matter." Gosper thought that these LIFE forms wouldhave contrived to exist they would actually have evolved into intelligent entities."Just as rocks wear down in a few billion years, but DNA hangs in there," he'd later explain. "Thisintelligent behavior would be just another one of those organizational phenomena like DNA whichcontrived to increase the probability of survival of some entity. So one tends to suspect, if one's nota creationist, that very very large LIFE configurations would eventually exhibit intelligent[characteristics]. Speculating what these things could know or could find out is very intriguing ...and perhaps has implications for our own existence."Gosper was further stimulated by Ed Fredkin's theory that it is impossible to tell if the universe isn'ta computer simulation, perhaps being run by some hacker in another dimension. Gosper came tospeculate that in his imaginary ultimate LIFE machine, the intelligent entities which would formover billions of generations might also engage in those very same speculations. According to theway we understand our own physics, it is impossible to make a perfectly reliable computer. Sowhen an inevitable bug occurred in that super-duper LIFE machine, the intelligent entities in thesimulation would have suddenly been presented with a window to the metaphysics whichdetermined their own existence. They would have a clue to how they were really implemented. Inthat case, Fredkin conjectured, the entities might accurately conclude that they were part of a giantsimulation and might want to pray to their implementors by arranging themselves in recognizablepatterns, asking in readable code for the implementors to give clues as to what they're like. Gosperrecalls "being offended by that notion, completely unable to wrap my head around it for days,before I accepted it."He accepted it.

Maybe it is not so surprising. In one sense that far-flung conjecture was already reality. What werethe hackers but gods of information, moving bits of knowledge around in cosmically complexpatterns within the PDP-6? What satisfied them more than this power? If one concedes that powercorrupts, then one might identify corruption in the hackers' failure to distribute this power and thehacker dream itself beyond the boundaries of the lab. That power was reserved for the winners, aninner circle that might live by the Hacker Ethic but made little attempt to widen the circle beyondthose like themselves, driven by curiosity, genius, and the Hands-On Imperative.Not long after his immersion in LIFE, Gosper himself got a glimpse of the limits of the tight circlethe hackers had drawn. It happened in the man-made daylight of the 1972 Apollo 17 moon shot. Hewas a passenger on a special cruise to the Caribbean, a "science cruise" timed for the launch, andthe boat was loaded with sci-fi writers, futurists, scientists of varying stripes, cultural commentators,and, according to Gosper, "an unbelievable quantity of just completely empty-headed cruise-niks."Gosper was there as part of Marvin Minsky's party. He got to engage in discussion with the likes ofNorman Mailer, Katherine Anne Porter, Isaac Asimov, and Carl Sagan, who impressed Gosper withhis Ping-Pong playing. For real competition, Gosper snuck in some forbidden matches with theIndonesian crewmen, who were by far the best players on the boat.Apollo 17 was to be the first manned space shot initiated at night, and the cruise boat was sittingthree miles off Cape Kennedy for an advantageous view of the launch. Gosper had heard all thearguments against going to the trouble of seeing a liftoff why not watch it on television, since you'llbe miles away from the actual launching pad? But when he saw the damn thing actually lift off, heappreciated the distance. The night had been set ablaze, and the energy peak got to his very insides.The shirt slapped on his chest, the change in his pocket jingled, and the PA system speakers brokefrom their brackets on the viewing stand and dangled by their power cords. The rocket, which ofcourse never could have held to so true a course without computers, leapt into the sky, hell-bent forthe cosmos like some naming avenger, a Spacewar nightmare; the cruise-niks were stunned intotrances by the power and glory of the sight. The Indonesian crewmen went berserk. Gosper laterrecalled them running around in a panic and throwing their Ping-Pong equipment overboard, "likesome kind of sacrifice."The sight affected Gosper profoundly. Before that night, Gosper had disdained NASA's humanwaveapproach toward things. He had been adamant in defending the AI lab's more individualisticform of hacker elegance in programming, and in computing style in general. But now he saw howthe Real World, when it got its mind made up, could have an astounding effect. NASA had notapplied the Hacker Ethic, yet it had done something the lab, for all its pioneering, never could havedone. Gosper realized that the ninth-floor hackers were in some sense deluding themselves, workingon machines of relatively little power compared to the computers of the future yet still trying to doit all, change the world right there in the lab. And since the state of computing had not yetdeveloped machines with the power to change the world at large certainly nothing to make yourchest rumble as did the NASA operation all that the hackers wound up doing was making Tools toMake Tools. It was embarrassing.Gosper's revelation led him to believe that the hackers could change things just make the computersbigger, more powerful, without skimping on expense. But the problem went even deeper than that.While the mastery of the hackers had indeed made computer programming a spiritual pursuit, amagical art, and while the culture of the lab was developed to the point of a technological WaldenPond, something was essentially lacking.

The world.As much as the hackers tried to make their own world on the ninth floor, it could not be done. Themovement of key people was inevitable. And the harsh realities of funding hit Tech Square in theseventies: ARPA, adhering to the strict new Mansfield Amendment passed by Congress, had to askfor specific justification for many computer projects. The unlimited funds for basic research weredrying up; ARPA was pushing some pet projects like speech recognition (which would havedirectly increased the government's ability to mass-monitor phone conversations abroad and athome). Minsky thought the policy was a "losing" one, and distanced the AI lab from it. But therewas no longer enough money to hire anyone who showed exceptional talent for hacking. Andslowly, as MIT itself became more ensconced in training students for conventional computerstudies, the Institute's attitude to computer studies shifted focus somewhat. The AI lab began to lookfor teachers as well as researchers, and the hackers were seldom interested in the bureaucratichassles, social demands, and lack of hands-on machine time that came with teaching courses.Greenblatt was still hacking away, as was Knight, and a few newer hackers were provingthemselves masters at systems work ... but others were leaving, or gone. Now, Bill Gosper headedWest. He arranged to stay on the AI lab payroll, hacking on the ninth-floor PDP-6 via the ARPAnet... but he moved to California, to study the art of computer programming with Professor DonaldKnuth at Stanford. He became a fixture at Louie's, the best Chinese restaurant in Palo Alto, but wasmissing in action at Tech Square. He was a mercurial presence on computer terminals there but nolonger a physical center of attention, draped over a chair, whispering, "Look at that," while the 340terminal pulsed insanely with new forms of LIFE. He was in California, and he had bought a car.With all these changes, some of the hackers sensed that an era was ending. "Before [in the sixties],the attitude was 'Here's these new machines, let's see what they can do,'" hacker Mike Beeler laterrecalled. "So we did robot arms, we parsed language, we did Spacewar ... now we had to justifyaccording to national goals. And [people pointed out that] some things we did were curious, but notrelevant ... we realized we'd had a Utopian situation, all this fascinating culture. There was a certainamount of isolation and lack of dissemination, spreading the word. I worried that it was all going tobe lost."It would not be lost. Because there was a second wave of hackers, a type of hacker who not onlylived by the Hacker Ethic but saw a need to spread that gospel as widely as possible. The naturalway to do this was through the power of the computer, and the time to do it was now. Thecomputers to do it would have to be small and cheap making the DEC minicomputers look like IBMHulking Giants by comparison. But small and powerful computers in great numbers could trulychange the world. There were people who had these visions, and they were not the likes of Gosperor Greenblatt: they were a different type of hacker, a second generation, more interested in theproliferation of computers than in hacking mystical AI applications. This second generation werehardware hackers, and the magic they would make in California would build on the culturalfoundation set by the MIT hackers to spread the hacker dream throughout the land.* A pseudonym.

Part TwoHardware HackersNorthern California:The Seventies8Revolt in 2100THE first public terminal of the Community Memory project was an ugly machine in a clutteredfoyer on the second floor of a beat-up building in the spaciest town in the United States of America:Berkeley, California. It was inevitable that computers would come to "the people" in Berkeley.Everything else did, from gourmet food to local government. And if, in August 1973, computerswere generally regarded as inhuman, unyielding, warmongering, and nonorganic, the imposition ofa terminal connected to one of those Orwellian monsters in a normally good-vibes zone like thefoyer outside Leopold's Records on Durant Avenue was not necessarily a threat to anyone's wellbeing.It was yet another kind of flow to go with.Outrageous, in a sense. Sort of a squashed piano, the height of a Fender Rhodes, with a typewriterkeyboard instead of a musical one. The keyboard was protected by a cardboard box casing, with aplate of glass set in its front. To touch the keys, you had to stick your hands through little holes, asif you were offering yourself for imprisonment in an electronic stockade. But the people standing bythe terminal were familiar Berkeley types, with long stringy hair, jeans, T-shirts, and a dementedgleam in their eyes that you would mistake for a drug reaction if you did not know them well. Thosewho did know them well realized that the group was high on technology. They were getting off likethey had never gotten off before, dealing the hacker dream as if it were the most potent strain ofsinsemilla in the Bay Area.The name of the group was Community Memory, and according to a handout they distributed, theterminal was "a communication system which allows people to make contact with each other on thebasis of mutually expressed interests, without having to cede judgement to third parties." The ideawas to speed the flow of information in a decentralized, non-bureaucratic system. An idea bornfrom computers, an idea executable only by computers, in this case a time-shared XDS-940

mainframe machine in the basement of a warehouse in San Francisco. By opening a hands-oncomputer facility to let people reach each other, a living metaphor would be created, a testament tothe way computer technology could be used as guerrilla warfare for people against bureaucracies.Ironically, the second-floor public area outside Leopold's, the hippest record store in the East Bay,was also the home of the musicians' bulletin board, a wall completely plastered with notices ofvegetarian singers looking for gigs, jug bands seeking Dobro players, flutists into Jethro Tullseeking songwriters with similar fixations. The old style of matchmaking. Community Memoryencouraged the new. You could place your notice in the computer and wait to be instantly andprecisely accessed by the person who needed it most. But it did not take Berkeley-ites long to findother uses for the terminal:FIND 1984, YOU SAYHEH, HEH, HEH ... JUST STICK AROUND ANOTHER TEN YEARSLISTEN TO ALVIN LEEPART YOUR HAIR DIFFERENTDROP ASPIRINMAKE A JOINT EFFORTDRIFT AWAYKEEP A CLEAN NOSEHOME {ON THE RANGE}QUIT KICKING YORE HEARTS SEE ME FEEL MEU.S. GET OUT OF WASHINGTONFREE THE INDIANAPOLIS 500GET UP AND GET AWAYFALL BY THE WAYSIDEFLIP OUTSTRAIGHTEN UPLET A SMILE BE YOUR UMBRELLA ..... AND .....BEFORE YOU KNOW IT {}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}1984WILLFINDYOU!AND ITS GO' BE RIGHTEOUS ..... KEYWORDS: 1894 BENWAY TLALCLATLANINTERZONE2-20-74It was an explosion, a revolution, a body blow against the establishment, spearheaded by onedemented User userism, come to the people who called himself Doctor Benway in tribute to asadistically perverted character in Burroughs' Naked Lunch. This cat Benway was taking thingsfurther than even the computer radicals at Community Memory had suspected they would go, andthe computer radicals were delighted.None was happier than Lee Felsenstein. He was one of the founders of Community Memory andthough he was not necessarily its most influential member, he was symbolic of the movement whichwas taking the Hacker Ethic to the streets. In the next decade, Lee Felsenstein was to promote aversion of the hacker dream that would, had they known, appall Greenblatt and the Tech Square AIworkers with its technological nai'vete, political foundation, and willingness to spread the computer

gospel through, of all things, the marketplace. But Lee Felsenstein felt he owed nothing to that firstgeneration of hackers. He was a new breed, a scrappy, populist hardware hacker. His goal was tobreak computers out of the protected AI towers, up from the depths of the dungeons of corporateaccounting departments, and let people discover themselves by the Hands-On Imperative. He wouldbe joined in this struggle by others who simply hacked hardware, not for any political purpose butout of sheer delight in the activity for its own sake; these people would develop the machines andaccessories through which the practice of computing would become so widespread that the veryconcept of it would change it would be easier for everyone to feel the magic. Lee Felsenstein wouldcome as close as anyone to being a field general to these rabidly anarchistic troops; but now, as amember of Community Memory, he was part of a collective effort to take the first few steps in amomentous battle that the MIT hackers had never considered worth fighting: to spread the HackerEthic by bringing computers to the people.It was Lee Felsenstein's vision of the hacker dream, and he felt he had paid his dues in acquiring it.Lee Felsenstein's boyhood might well have qualified him for a position among the hacker elite onthe ninth floor of Tech Square. It was the same fixation with electronics, something that took holdso eerily that it defied rational explanation. Lee Felsenstein, though, would later try to give his lovefor electronics a rational explanation. In his reconstructions of his early years (reconstructionsshaped by years of therapy), he would attribute his fascination with technology to a complexamalgam of psychological, emotional, and survival impulses as well as the plain old Hands-OnImperative. And his peculiar circumstances guaranteed that he would become a different stripe ofhacker than Kotok, Silver, Gosper, or Greenblatt.Born in 1945, Lee grew up in the Strawberry Mansion section of Philadelphia, a neighborhood ofrow homes populated by first- and second-generation Jewish immigrants. His mother was thedaughter of an engineer who had invented an important diesel fuel injector, and his father, acommercial artist, had worked in a locomotive plant. Later, in an unpublished autobiographicalsketch, Lee would write that his father Jake "was a modernist who believed in the perfectability ofman and the machine as the model for human society. In play with his children he would oftenimitate a steam locomotive as other men would imitate animals."Lee's home life was not happy. Family tension ran high; there was sibling warfare between Lee, hisbrother Joe (three years older), and a cousin Lee's age who was adopted as the boys' sister. Hisfather Jake's political adventures as a member of the Communist Party had ended in the mid-fiftieswhen infighting led to Jake's losing his post as district organizer, but politics were central to thefamily. Lee participated in marches on Washington, D.C., at the age of twelve and thirteen, andonce picketed Woolworth's in an early civil rights demonstration. But when things at home got toointense for him, he would retreat to a basement workshop loaded with electronic parts fromabandoned televisions and radios. He would later call the workshop his Monastery, a refuge wherehe took a vow to technology.It was a place where his brother's inescapable physical and aca demic superiority did not extend.Lee Felsenstein had a skill with electronics which allowed him to best his brother for the first time.It was a power he was almost afraid to extend he would build things but never dare to turn them on,fearing a failure that would uphold his brother's contention that "those things are never going towork." So he'd build something else instead.

He loved the idea of electronics. He filled the cover of his sixth-grade notebook with electricaldiagrams. He would go to his neighborhood branch of the Free Library of Philadelphia and thumbthrough the pages of the Radio Amateur's Handbook. He got the biggest thrill from a HeathCompany instruction manual for building a shortwave receiver. The Heath Company specialized indo-it-yourself electronics projects, and this particular manual had very detailed diagrams of wiresand connections. Comparing the actual parts for that five-tube project with the perfect diagram, withits octagons linked to other octagons, Lee saw the connection ... this line of the schematicrepresented that pin on the tube socket. It gave him an almost sensual thrill, this linking of hisfantasy electronics world to reality. He carried around the manual everywhere, a pilgrim toting aprayerbook. Soon he was completing projects, and was vindicated when at age thirteen he won aprize for his model space satellite its name a bow to Mother Russia, the Fel-snik.But even though he was realizing himself in a way he never had before, each of Lee's new productswas a venture in paranoia, as he feared that he might not be able to get the part to make it work. "Iwas always seeing these [Popular Mechanics] articles saying, 'Gee, if you have this transistor youcould make a regular radio you always wanted, and talk to your friends and make new friends' ...but I never could get that part and I didn't really know how to go about getting it, or I couldn't getthe money to get it." He imagined the mocking voice of his brother, labeling him a failure.When Lee was a freshman at Central High, Philadelphia's special academic high school for boys,brother Joe, a senior, drafted him to become chief engineer at the school's budding Computer Club,showing Lee a diagram of some obsolete flip-flops and challenging his younger brother to buildthem. Lee was too terrified to say no, and tried unsuccessfully to complete the project. The effortmade him wary of computers for a decade afterward.But high school uplifted Lee he was involved in political groups, did some work on the school'scyclotron, and did some significant reading particularly some novels by Robert Heinlein. Theslightly built, spectacled Jewish teen-ager somehow identified with the futuristic protagonists,particularly the virginal young soldier in Revolt in 2100. The novel's setting is a twenty-first-centurydictatorship, where a devoted, idealistic underground is plotting to fight the forces of the Prophet,an omnipotent Orwellian thug supported by unthinking masses who worship him. The protagoniststumbles upon evidence of the Prophet's hypocrisy, and, forced to choose between good and evil, hetakes the drastic step of joining the revolutionary Cabal, which provides him with the teachings tostir his imagination.For the first time in my life I was reading things which had not been approved by theProphet's censors, and the impact on my mind was devastating. Sometimes I wouldglance over my shoulder to see who was watching me, frightened in spite of myself. Ibegan to sense faintly that secrecy is the keystone of all tyranny.(from Revolt in 2100)Reading that novel, and later reading Stranger in a Strange Land, in which Heinlein'sextraterrestrial protagonist becomes a leader of a spiritual group which has a profound effect onsociety, Lee Felsenstein began to see his own life as something akin to a science-fiction novel. The

ooks, he later said, gave him courage to dream big, to try out risky projects, and to rise above hisown emotional conflicts. The great fight was not so much internal as broad it was the choicebetween good and evil. Taking that romantic notion to heart, Lee saw himself as the ordinary personwith potential who is seized by circumstances, chooses the difficult path of siding with the good,and embarks on a long odyssey to overthrow evil.It was not long before Lee was able to apply this metaphor in reality. After graduation, he went tothe University of California at Berkeley to matriculate in Electrical Engineering. He was unable toget a scholarship. His freshman year did not parallel that of a typical MIT hacker: he more or lesstoed the line, failing to qualify for a scholarship by a fraction of a grade point. But he got whatseemed as good a work-study job at NASA's Flight Research Center at Edwards Air Force Base, atthe edge of the Mohave Desert. To Lee, it was admission to Paradise the language people spokethere was electronics, rocket electronics, and the schematics he had studied would now betransmogrified into the stuff of science fiction come alive. He reveled in it, the brotherhood ofengineers, loved wearing a tie, walking out of an office and seeing neat rows of other offices, andwater coolers. Heinlein was forgotten Lee was comforming, an engineer out of a cookie cutter.Deliri-ously happy in the service of the Prophet. Then, after two months of that "seventh heaven,"as he later called it, he was summoned to a meeting with a security officer.The officer seemed ill at ease. He was accompanied by a witness to the proceedings. The officerkept notes and had Lee sign each page as he finished it. He also had the form Lee had filled outupon entering Edwards, Security Form 398. The officer kept asking Lee if he knew anyone whowas a member of the Communist Party. And Lee kept saying no. Finally he asked, in a gentle voice,"Don't you understand that your parents were Communists?"Lee had never been told. He had assumed that "Communist" was just a term, red-baiting, thatpeople flung at activist liberals like his parents. His brother had known his brother had been namedafter Stalin! but Lee had not been told. He had been perfectly honest when he had filled out Form398 with a clear "no" on the line that asked if you knew any known Communists."So there I was, ejected from Paradise," Lee would later say, "and the security chief said, 'You keepyour nose clean for a couple years more, you won't have any problem getting back in.' Now I'dalways been setting myself up to be abandoned, always expected to be abandoned. Suddenly I was.Literally thrown out in the wilderness. There's the Mohave Desert out there, for God's sake!"On the night of October 14, 1964, Lee Felsenstein, failed engineer, took a train back to Berkeley.Lee had heard radio reports of student demonstrations there beginning two weeks before; he haddismissed them as a modem version of the legendary panty raids that had occurred in 1952. Butupon his return he found the whole community alive with the Free Speech Movement. "Secrecy isthe keystone of all tyranny," said Heinlein's Revolt in 2100 protagonist, voicing not only the cry ofBerkeley revolution, but the Hacker Ethic. Lee Felsenstein made the leap he joined the Cabal. Buthe would merge his fervor with his own particular talent. He would use technology to fuel therevolt.Since he owned a tape recorder, he went to Press Central, the media center of the movement, andoffered his talents as an audio technician. He did a little of everything: mimeographed, did shitwork. He was inspired by the decentralized structure of the Free Speech Movement. On December2, when over eight hundred students occupied Sproul Hall, Lee was there with his tape recorder. Hewas arrested, of course, but the administration backed down on the issues. The battle had been won.

But the war was just beginning. For the next few years, Lee balanced the seemingly incompatibleexistences of a political activist and a socially reclusive engineer. Not many in the movement wereso technically inclined, technology and especially computers being perceived as evil forces. Leeworked furiously to organize the people in his co-op dorm, Oxford Hall the most political oncampus. He edited the activist dorm newspaper. But he was also learning more about electronics,playing with electronics, immersing himself in the logical environment of circuits and diodes. Asmuch as he could, he merged the two pursuits he designed, for instance, a tool which was acombination bullhorn and club to fend on "cops". But unlike many in the movement who were alsodeeply into Berkeley's wild, freewheeling social activity, Lee shied away from close human contact,especially with women. An unwashed figure in work clothes, Lee self-consciously lived up to thenerdy engineer stereotype. He did not bathe regularly, and washed his unfashionably short hairperhaps once a month. He did not take drugs. He did not engage in any sex, let alone all the free sexthat came with free speech. "I was afraid of women and had no way of dealing with them," he laterexplained. "I had some proscription in my personality against having fun. I was not allowed to havefun. The fun was in my work ... It was as if my way of asserting my potency was to be able to buildthings that worked, and other people liked."Lee dropped out of Berkeley in 1967, and began alternating between electronics jobs and work inthe movement. In 1968, he joined the underground Berkeley Barb as the newspaper's "militaryeditor." Joining the company of such other writers as Sergeant Pepper and Jefferson Fuck Poland,Lee wrote a series of articles evaluating demonstrations not on the basis of issues, but onorganization, structure, conformation to an elegant system. In one of his first articles, in March1968, Lee talked of an upcoming demonstration for Stop-the-Draft Week, noting the probable resultof insufficient planning and bickering among organizers: "The activity will be half-baked, chaotic,and just like all the other demonstrations. The movement politicians seem not to realize that in thereal world action is carried on not by virtue of ideological hairsplitting, but with time and physicalresources ... it is my responsibility as a technician not to simply criticize but to make suggestions."And he did make suggestions. He insisted that demonstrations should be executed as cleanly aslogic circuits defined by the precise schematics he still revered. He praised demonstrators when theysmashed "the right windows" (banks, not small businesses). He advocated attack only to draw theenemy out. He called the bombing of a draft board "refreshing." His column called "MilitaryEditor's Household Hints" advised: "Remember to turn your stored dynamite every two weeks inhot weather. This will prevent the nitroglycerin from sticking."Heinlein's protagonist in Revolt in 2100 said: "Revolution is not accompanied by a handful ofconspirators whispering around a guttering candle in a deserted ruin. It requires countless supplies,modem machinery, and modem weapons ... and there must be loyalty ... and superlative stafforganization." Lee Felsenstein in 1968 wrote: "Revolution is a lot more than a random street brawl.It takes organization, money, dogged determination, and willingness to accept and build on pastdisasters."Felsenstein had his effect. During the trial of the Oakland Seven, the defense attorney MalcolmBurnstein said, "We shouldn't have these defendants here ... it should have been Lee Pelsenstein."In the summer of 1968, Lee Felsenstein placed an ad in the Barb. The ad itself was less thanexplicit: Renaissance Man, Engineer and Revolutionist, seeking conversation. Not long after, a

woman named Jude Milhon found the ad. Compared to the other sleazy come-ons in the back pagesof the Barb ("GIRLS ONLY! I crave your feet!"), it looked as though it came from a decent man,she thought. It was what Jude needed in that tumultuous year a veteran of the civil rights movementand a long-time activist, she had been dazed by 1968's political and social events. The very worldseemed to be coming apart.Jude was not only an activist, but a computer programmer. She had been close to a man namedEfrem Lipkin who was also in the movement, and he was a computer wizard who sent her puzzlesfor entertainment she would not sleep until she solved them. She learned programming and found itdelightful, though she never did see why hackers found it obsessively consuming. Efrem wascoming from the East to join her on the Coast in several months, but she was lonely enoughmeanwhile to contact the man who wrote the ad in the Barb.Jude, a thin, plucky blond woman with steady blue eyes, immediately pegged Lee as a"quintessential technocreep," but solely of his own making. Almost unwittingly, by her company,and particularly by her consistent straightforwardness, honed in countless self-evaluation sessions invarious collectives, Jude began the long process of drawing out Lee Felsenstein's personality. Theirfriendship was deeper than a dating relationship, and continued well after her friend Efrem arrivedfrom the East Coast. Lee made friends with Efrem, who was not only an activist but a computerhacker as well. Efrem did not share Lee's belief that technology could help the world; nevertheless,Lee's decade-long wariness about computers was coming to an end. Because, in 1971, Lee had anew roommate an XDS-940 computer.It belonged to a group called Resource One, part of the Project One umbrella of Bay Area groupsfostering community activism and humanistic programs. "One" had been started by an architectengineerwho wanted to give unemployed professionals something useful to do with their skills,help the community, and begin to dissipate the "aura of elitism, and even mysticism, that surroundsthe world of technology." Among the projects in One's five-story, mustard-yellow warehouse in anindustrial section of San Francisco, was the Resource One collective, formed of people "whobelieve that technological tools can be tools of social change when controlled by the people."Resource One people had cajoled the Transamerica Corporation into lending an unused XDS-940timesharing computer to the group, so One could start gathering alternative mailing lists and settingup its program of computer education, economic research projects, and "demystification for thegeneral public."The computer was a Hulking Giant, an $800,000 machine that was already obsolete. It filled aroom, and required twenty-three tons of air-conditioning. It needed a full-time systems person to getit going. Resource One needed a hacker, and Lee Felsenstein seemed a logical choice.The systems software was set up by a Xerox PARC (Palo Alto Research Center) hacker who hadwritten the original time-sharing system for the 940 at Berkeley. He was a long-haired, beardedPeter Deutsch, the same Peter Deutsch who at age twelve had peered over the console of the TX-0twelve years before. A Berkeley graduate, he had managed to blend the whole-earth California lifestylewith intense hacking at PARC.But it was Lee who was the machine's caretaker. In his continual mythologizing of his life as ascience-fiction novel, he saw this period as a re-immersion into the asocial role of a person whosebest friend was a machine, a technological esthete sacrificing himself in the service of the Cabal.The monastery this time was in the basement of the Resource One warehouse; for thirty dollars a

month he rented a room. It was below sewer level, had no running water, was filthy. For Lee it wasperfect "I was going to be an invisible servant. Part of this machine."But Resource One failed Lee, who was far ahead of the group in realizing that the social uses oftechnology would depend on exercising something akin to the Hacker Ethic. The others in the groupdid not grow up yearning for hands-on technology ... their connection to it was not visceral butintellectual. As a result, they would argue about how the machine should be used instead ofthrowing back the sheets and using it. It drove Lee crazy.Lee later explained: "We were prigs, we were intolerable es-thetes. Anybody who wanted to use themachine had to come argue their case before our meeting. They had to plead to use it." Lee wantedto change the group's outlook to a more hacker-like, hands-on openness, but did not have the pluckto make the social effort his self-esteem had hit a low point. He rarely even had the courage toventure out of the building to face the world when he did, he'd glumly note that the tenderloindistrict bums looked cleaner, more prosperous than he did. Other people in the collective tried toopen him up; once during a meeting they borrowed a television camera from a video collectiveupstairs, and every time there was laughter in the group they would zoom in on Lee, invariablypoker-faced. Looking at the tape afterward, he could see what he was becoming heartless. "I feltlike I couldn't afford to have a heart," he later said. "I could see this happening, but I was pushingthem away."After that experience, he tried to become more active in influencing the group. He confronted onegoldbricker who spent most of the day slowly sipping coffee. "What have you been doing?"Felsenstein demanded. The guy began talking about vague ideas, and Lee said, "I'm not asking youwhat you want to do, I'm asking what have you done?" But he soon realized that calling peopledown for their bullshit was futile: like an inefficient machine, the group's architecture itself wasflawed. It was a bureaucracy. And the hacker in Lee could not abide that. Fortunately around thattime, the spring of 1973, Efrem Lipkin came to Resource One, to rescue Lee Felsenstein and getCommunity Memory off the ground.Efrem Lipkin was the kind of person who could look at you with hooded eyes in a long, Semiticface, and without saying a word let you know that the world was sadly flawed and you were noexception. It was the air of a purist who could never meet his own exacting standards. Efrem hadjust gotten back from Boston, where he had been on the payroll of a computer consulting company.The company had been doing military-related contracting, and Efrem had stopped going to work.The idealistic programmer did not inform his employer he just stopped, hoping that the projectwould grind to a halt because of his nonparticipation. After nine months during which the companyassumed he was hacking away, it became clear that there was no program, and the president of thecompany came to his cockroach-infested Cambridge crash pad and asked him, "Why did you dothis?" He told Efrem that he had started the company after Martin Luther King had died to do good.He insisted the projects he took on would keep the country strong against the Japanesetechnological threat. Efrem saw only that the company they were under contract to had beeninvolved in anti-personnel weapons during the war. How could he do work for that company? Howcould he be expected to do any computer work, considering its all too often harmful uses?It was a question that had plagued Efrem Lipkin for years.Efrem Lipkin had been a hacker since high school. His affinity for the machine was instant, and hefound programming "the ultimate disembodied activity 1 would forget to speak English. My mind

works in computer forms." But unlike some of his companions in a special city-wide program forhigh school computerists in New York, Efrem also considered his uncanny talent for the computer acurse. Like Lee, he came from a virulently left-wing political family, and besides dazzling his mathteachers, he'd been thrown out of class for not saluting the flag, and booted out of History forcalling the teacher a liar. Unlike Lee, who sought to combine technology and politics, Efrem sawthem in opposition an attitude which kept him in constant turmoil."I love computers and hate what computers can do," he would say later. When he went to highschool, he considered the commercial applications of big computers sending bills and such asmerely uninteresting. But when the Vietnam war started, he began seeing his favorite toys asinstruments of destruction. He lived in Cambridge for a while, and one day ventured up to the ninthfloor at Tech Square. He saw the PDP-6, saw the perfect little beach-head of the Hacker Ethic thathad been established there, saw the concentrated virtuosity and passion but could think only of thesource of the funding and the eventual applications of this unchecked wizardry. "I got so upset Istarted crying," he later said. "Because these people had stolen my profession. They made itimpossible to be a computer person. They sold out. They sold out to the military uses, the evil uses,of the technology. They were a wholly owned subsidiary of the Department of Defense."So Efrem drifted to California, then back East again, then back to California. It took a while for himto see how computers could be used for social good, and each time he glimpsed the possibilities hesuspected betrayal. One interesting project he'd been involved with was the World Game. A groupof California programmers, philosophers, and engineers constructed a simulation of the world. Itwas based on an idea by Buckminster Fuller, where you could try out all sorts of changes and seetheir effect on the world. For days, people ran around suggesting things and running the game onthe computer. Not much came of it in terms of suggestions on how to run the world, but a lot ofpeople met others with similar views.Not long afterward, Efrem stumbled upon Resource One, with Lee mired in its bowels. He thoughtit was a crock. There was this great setup with a computer and some software for community databases and switchboard, but the group wasn't doing all it could. Why not take that great setup to thestreets? Efrem began to get excited about the idea, and for perhaps the first time in his life he sawhow computers might really be used for some social good. He got Lee thinking about it, andbrought in some other people he'd met in the World Game.The idea was to form an offshoot of Resource One called Community Memory. Computers out onthe streets, liberating the people to make their own connections. Felsenstein lobbied the ResourceOne people into paying for an office in Berkeley which would double as an apartment for him. Sothe Community Memory faction moved across the bay to Berkeley to get the system going. AndLee felt freed from his self-imposed institutionalization. He was part of a group imbued with thehacker spirit, ready to do something with computers, all charged up with the idea that access toterminals was going to link people together with unheard-of efficiency, and ultimately change theworld.Community Memory was not the only ongoing attempt to bring computers to the people. All overthe Bay Area, the engineers and programmers who loved computers and had become politicizedduring the anti-war movement were thinking of combining their two activities. One place inparticular seemed to combine an easygoing counterculture irreverence with an evangelical drive to

expose people, especially kids, to computers. This was the People's Computer Company. True to thewhimsical style of its founder, the People's Computer Company was not really a company. Theorganization, a misnomer if one ever existed, did publish a periodical by that name, but the onlything actually manufactured was an intense feeling for computing for its own sake. Lee Felsensteinoften attended PCC's Wednesday night potluck dinners, which provided a common meeting groundfor Bay Area computer countercul-turists, as well as a chance to see Bob Albrecht try, for theumpteenth time, to teach everybody Greek folk dancing.Bob Albrecht was the visionary behind the People's Computer Company. He was a man, LeeFelsenstein would later say, to whom "bringing a kid up to a computer was like child molesting."Like child molesting, that is, to an obsessive pederast.In the spring of 1962, Bob Albrecht had walked into a classroom and had an experience which wasto change his life. Albrecht, then working for the Control Data Company as a senior applicationsanalyst, had been asked to speak to the high school math club at Denver's George Washington HighSchool, a bunch of everyday, though well-mannered, Jewish achiever types. Albrecht, a large manwith a clip-on tie, a beefy nose, and sea-blue eyes which could gleam with creative force or sagbasset-like behind his square-rimmed lenses, gave his little talk on computers and casually asked ifany of the thirty-two students might want to learn how to program a computer. Thirty-two handswaved in the air.Albrecht had never seen any kind of response like that when he was teaching Remedial FORTRAN,his "one-day course for people who had been to IBM school and hadn't learned anything," as helater put it. Albrecht couldn't understand how IBM could have given those people classes and not letthem do anything. He knew even then that the name of the game was Hands On, as it had alwaysbeen since he had started with computers in 1955 at Honeywell's aeronautical division. Through asuccession of jobs, he had been constantly frustrated with bureaucracies. Bob Albrecht preferred aflexible environment; he was a student of serendipity in life-style and outlook. His hair was short,his shirt button-down, and his family profile wife, three kids, dog was unexceptional. Underneath itall, though, Bob Albrecht was a Greek dancer, eager to break out the ouzo and the bouzouki. Greekdancing, liquor, and computers those were the elements for Bob Albrecht. And he was startled tofind how eager the high school students were to indulge in the latter pleasure, the most seductive ofthe three.He began teaching evening classes for the students at Control Data's office. Albrecht discovered thatthe youngsters' delight in learning to take control of the Control Data 160A computer was intense,addictive, visceral. He was showing a new way of life to kids. He was bestowing power.Albrecht didn't realize it then, but he was spreading the gospel of the Hacker Ethic, as the studentswere swapping programs and sharing techniques. He began to envision a world where computerswould lead the way to a new, liberating life-style. I/only they were available... Slowly, he began tosee his life's mission he would spread this magic throughout the land.Albrecht hired four of his top students to do programming for around a buck an hour. They wouldsit there at desks, happily typing in programs to solve quadratic functions. The machine wouldaccept their cards and crunch away while they watched blissfully. Then Albrecht asked these acestudents to teach their peers. "His idea was to make us multiply as fast as possible," one of thegroup, a redheaded kid named Bob Kahn, said later.

Albrecht used the four as "barkers" for a "medicine show" at their high school. The students wereentirely in charge. Twenty math classes were involved in the program, for which Albrecht hadconvinced his employers to part with the 160A and a Flexowriter for a week. After showing theclasses some math tricks, Kahn was asked if the computer could do the exercises in the back of amath text and he proceeded to do that day's homework assignment, using the Flexowriter to cut amimeograph form so that each student would have a copy. Sixty students were motivated by themedicine show to sign up for computer classes; and when Albrecht took the medicine show to otherhigh schools, the response was just as enthusiastic. Soon Albrecht triumphantly presented hismedicine show to the National Computer Conference, where his whiz kids astounded the industry'shigh priests. We don't do that, they told Albrecht. He rocked with glee. He would do it.He convinced Control Data to allow him to take the medicine show across the country, and hemoved his base to CD's Minnesota headquarters. It was there that someone showed him BASIC, thecomputer language developed by John Kemeny of Dartmouth to accommodate, Kemeny wrote, "thepossibility of millions of people writing their own computer programs ... Profiting from years ofexperience with PORTRAN, we designed a new language that was particularly easy for the laymanto leam [and] that facilitated communication between man and machine." Albrecht immediatelydecided that BASIC was it, and FORTRAN was dead. BASIC was interactive, so that peoplehungry for computer use would get instant response from the machine (FORTRAN was geared forbatch-processing). It used English-like words like INPUT and THEN and GOTO, so it was easier toleam. And it had a built-in random number generator, so kids could use it to write games quickly.Albrecht knew even then that games would provide the seductive scent that would lure kids toprogramming and hackerism. Albrecht became a prophet of BASIC and eventually co-founded agroup called SHAFT Society to Help Abolish FORTRAN Teaching.As he became more involved in the missionary aspects of his work, the Bob Albrecht simmeringunder the button-down exterior finally surfaced. As the sixties hit full swing, Albrecht swung intoCalifornia divorced, with long hair, blazing eyes, and a head full of radical ideas about exposingkids to computers. He lived at the top of Lombard Street (San Francisco's tallest, crookedest hill),and begged or borrowed computers for his evangelistic practice. On Tuesday nights he opened hisapartment up for sessions that combined wine tasting, Greek dancing, and computer programming.He was involved with the influential Midpeninsula Free University, an embodiment of the area's doyour-own-thingattitude which drew people like Baba Ram Dass, Timothy Leary, and the former AIsage of MIT, Uncle John McCarthy. Albrecht was involved in starting the loosely run "computereducation division" of the nonprofit foundation called the Portola Institute, which later spawned theWhole Earth Catalog. He met a teacher from Wood-side High School on the peninsula, namedLeRoy Finkel, who shared his enthusiasm about teaching kids computers; with Finkel he began acomputer-book publishing company named Dymax, in honor of Buckminster Fuller's trademarkedword "dymaxion", combining dynamism and maximum. The for-profit company was funded byAlbrecht's substantial stock holdings (he had been lucky enough to get into DEC'S first stockoffering), and soon the company had a contract to write a series of instructional books on BASIC.Albrecht and the Dymax crowd got hold of a DEC PDP-8 minicomputer. To house this marvelousmachine, they moved the company to a new headquarters in Memo Park. According to his deal withDEC, Bob would get a computer and a couple of terminals in exchange for writing a book for DECcalled My Computer Likes Me, shrewdly keeping the copyright (it would sell over a quarter of amillion copies). The equipment was packed into a VW bus, and Bob revived the medicine showdays, taking his PDP-8 road show to schools. More equipment came, and in 1971 Dymax became apopular hangout for young computerists, budding hackers, would-be gurus of computer education,and techno-social malcontents. Bob, meanwhile, had moved to a forty-foot ketch docked off Beach

Harbor, about thirty miles south of The City. "I had never done sailing in my life. I just had decidedit was time to live on a boat," he later said.Albrecht was often criticized by the hip, technology-is-evil Palo Alto crowd for pushing computers.So his method of indoctrinating people into the computer world became subtle, a sly dope-dealerapproach: "Just take a hit of this game ... feels good, doesn't it? ... You can program this thing, youknow ..." He later explained: "We were covert. Unintentionally, we were taking the long-term view,encouraging anyone who wanted to to use computers, writing books that people could leam toprogram from, setting up places where people could play with computers and have fun."But there was plenty of counterculture at Dymax. The place was full of long-haired, populistcomputer freaks, many of them of high school age. Bob Albrecht acted the role of bearded guru,spewing ideas and concepts faster than anyone could possibly carry them out. Some of his ideaswere brilliant, others garbage, but all of them were infused with the charisma of his personality,which was often charming but could also be overbearing. Albrecht would take the crew onexcursions to local piano bars where he would wind up with the microphone in hand, leading thegroup in songfests. He set up part of Dymax's offices as a Greek tavema, with blinking Christmaslights, for his Friday night dancing classes. His most demonic ideas, though, involved popularizingcomputers.Albrecht thought that some sort of publication should chronicle this movement, be a lightning rodfor new developments. So the group started a tabloid publication called People's ComputerCompany, in honor of Janis Joplin's rock group Big Brother and the Holding Company. On thecover of the first issue, dated October 1972, was a wavy drawing of a square-rigged boat sailing intothe sunset somehow symbolizing the golden age into which people were entering and the followinghandwritten legend:COMPUTERS ARE MOSTLY USED AGAINST PEOPLE INSTEAD OF FORPEOPLEUSED TO CONTROL PEOPLE INSTEAD OF TO FREE THEMTIME TO CHANGE ALL THAT WE NEED A...PEOPLE'S COMPUTER COMPANYThe paper was laid out in similar style to the Whole Earth Catalog, only more impromptu, andsloppier. There could be four or five different type fonts on a page, and often messages werescribbled directly onto the boards, too urgent to wait for the typesetter. It was a perfect expressionof Albrecht's all-embracing, hurried style. Readers got the impression that there was hardly any timeto waste in the mission of spreading computing to the people and certainly no time to waste doingrandom tasks like straightening margins or laying out stories neatly or planning too far ahead-Eachissue was loaded with news of people infused with the computer religion, some of them startingsimilar operations in different parts of the country. This information would be rendered inwhimsical missives, high-on-computer dispatches from the front lines of the people's computerrevolution. There was little response from the ivory towers of academia or the blue-sky institutionsof research. Hackers like those at MIT would not even blink at PCC which, after all, printedprogram listings in BASIC, for God's sake, not their beloved assembly language. But the new breedof hardware hackers, the Lee Felsenstein types who were trying to figure out ways for morecomputer access for themselves and perhaps others, discovered the tabloid and would write in,

offering program listings, suggestions on buying computer parts, or just plain encouragement.Felsenstein, in fact, wrote a hardware column for PCC.The success of the newspaper led Dymax to spin off the operation into a nonprofit company calledPCC, which would include not only the publication, but the operation of the burgeoning computercenter itself, which ran classes and offered off-the-street computing for fifty cents an hour to anyonewho cared to use it.PCC and Dymax were located in a small shopping center or Menalto Avenue, in the spacepreviously occupied by a cornel drugstore. The space was furnished with diner-style booths"Whenever someone wanted to talk to us, we'd go out and get a six-pack and talk in our booths,"Albrecht later recalled. In the computer area next door was the PDP-8, which looked like a giantstereo receiver with flashing lights instead of an FM dial, and a row of switches in front. Most of thefurniture, save for some chairs in front of the gray teletype-style terminals, consisted of largepillows which people variously used as seat cushions, beds, or playful weapons. A faded green rugcovered the area, and against a wall was a battered bookshelf loaded with one of the best, and mostactive, paperback science-fiction collections in the area.The air was usually filled with the clatter of the terminals, one hooked to the PDP-8, anotherconnected to the telephone lines, through which it could access a computer at Hewlett-Packard,which had donated free time to PCC. More likely than not, someone would be playing one of thegames that the growing group of PCC hackers had written. Sometimes housewives would bringtheir kids in, try the computers themselves, and get hooked, programming so much that husbandsworried that the loyal matriarchs were abandoning children and kitchen for the joys of BASIC.Some businessmen tried to program the computer to predict stock prices, and spent infinite amountsof time on that chimera. When you had a computer center with the door wide open, anything couldhappen. Albrecht was quoted in the Saturday Review as saying, "We want to start friendlyneighborhood computer centers, where people can walk in like they do in a bowling alley or pennyarcade and find out how to have fun with computers."It seemed to be working. As an indication of how captivating the machines could be, one reporterdoing a story on PCC came in around five-thirty one day, and the workers sat him down at ateletype terminal running a game called Star Trek. "The next thing I remember," the reporter wrotein a letter to PCC, "is that somebody tapped me on the shoulder at 12:30 A.M. the next morning andtold me it was time to go home." After a couple of days of hanging out at PCC, the reporterconcluded, "I still have nothing to tell an editor beyond that I spent a total of twenty-eight hours sofar just playing games on these seductive machines."Every Wednesday night PCC had its potluck dinners. After a typically disorganized PCC staffmeeting Bob, with ideas zipping into his head like Spacewar torpedoes, could not easily follow anagenda long tables would be covered with cloths, and gradually the room would fill up with avirtual who's who of alternative computing in Northern California.Of the distinguished visitors dropping in, none was so welcome as Ted Nelson. Nelson was the selfpublishedauthor of Computer Lib, the epic of the computer revolution, the bible of the hackerdream. He was stubborn enough to publish it when no one else seemed to think it was a good idea.Ted Nelson had a self-diagnosed ailment of being years ahead of his time. Son of actress CelesteHolm and director Ralph Nelson ("Lilies of the Field"), product of private schools, student at fancy

liberal arts colleges. Nelson was an admittedly irascible perfectionist, his main talent that of an"innovator." He wrote a rock musical in 1957. He worked for John Lilly on the dolphin project, anddid some film work. But his head was, he later explained, helplessly "swimming in ideas" until hecame in contact with a computer and learned some programming.That was in 1960. For the next fourteen years he would bounce from one job to another. He wouldwalk out of his office in a job at a high-tech corporation and see "the incredible bleakness of theplace in these corridors." He began to see how the IBM batch-process mentality had blinded peopleto the magnificent possibilities of computers. His observations about this went universallyunheeded. Would no one listen?Finally, out of anger and desperation, he decided to write a "counterculture computer book." Nopublisher was interested, certainly not with his demands on the format a layout similar to the WholeEarth Catalog or the PCC, but even looser, with oversized pages loaded with print so small youcould hardly read it, along with scribbled notations, and manically amateurish drawings. The bookwas in two parts: one was called "Computer Lib," the computer world according to Ted Nelson; andthe other, "Dream Machines," the computer future according to Ted Nelson. Shelling out twothousand dollars out of pocket "a lot to me," he would say later he printed a few hundred copies ofwhat was a virtual handbook to the Hacker Ethic. The opening pages shouted with urgency, as hebemoaned the generally bad image of computers (he blamed this on the lies that the powerful toldabout computers, lies he called "Cybercrud") and proclaimed in capital letters that THE PUBLICDOES NOT HAVE TO TAKE WHAT IS DISHED OUT. He brazenly declared himself acomputer/an, and said:I have an axe to grind. I want to see computers useful to individuals, and the soonerthe better, without necessary complication or human servility being required. Anyonewho agrees with these principles is on my side. And anyone who does not, is not.THIS BOOK IS FOR PERSONAL FREEDOM. AND AGAINST RESTRICTION ANDCOERCION... A chant you can take to the streets:COMPUTER POWER TO THE PEOPLE! DOWN WITHCYBERCRUD!"Computers are where it's at," Nelson's book said, and though it sold slowly, it sold, eventuallygoing through several printings. More important, it had its cult following. At PCC, Computer Libwas one more reason to believe it would soon be no secret that computers were magic. And TedNelson was treated like royalty at potluck dinners.But people were not coming to potluck dinners to see the wizards of the computer revolution: theywere there because they were interested in computers. Some were middle-aged, hard-core hardwarehackers, some were grammar-school kids who had been lured by the computers, some were longhairedteen-age boys who liked to hack the PCC PDP-8, some were educators, some were just plainhackers. As always, planners like Bob Albrecht would talk about the issues of computing, while thehackers concentrated on swapping technical data, or complained about Albrecht's predilection for

BASIC, which hackers considered a "fascist" language because its limited structure did notencourage maximum access to the machine and decreased a programmer's power. It would not takemany hours before the hackers slipped away to the clattering terminals, leaving the activistsengaged in heated conversation about this development or that. And always, there would be BobAlbrecht. Glowing in the rapid progress of the great computer dream, he would be at the back of theroom, moving with the climactic iterations of Greek folk dance, whether there was music orwhether there was not.In that charged atmosphere of messianic purpose, the Community Memory people unreservedlythrew themselves into bringing their project on-line. Efrem Lipkin revised a large program thatwould be the basic interface with the users, and Lee set about fixing a Model 33 teletype donated bythe Tymshare Company. It had seen thousands of hours of use and been given to CM as junk.Because of its fragility, someone would have to tend to it constantly; it would often jam up, or thedamper would get gummy, or it wouldn't hit a carriage return before printing the next line. Later inthe experiment, CM would get a Hazeltine 1500 terminal with a CRT which was a little morereliable, but someone from the collective still had to be there in case of a problem. The idea was forLee to eventually develop a new kind of terminal to keep the project going, and he was alreadybeginning to hatch ideas for that hardware project.But that was for later. First they had to get CM on the streets. After weeks of activity, Efrem andLee and the others set up the Model 33 and its cardboard box shell protecting against coffee spillsand marijuana ashes at Leopold's Records. They'd drawn up posters instructing people how to usethe system, bright-colored posters with psychedelic rabbits and wavy lines. They envisioned peoplemaking hard connections, for things like jobs, places to live, rides, and barter. It was simple enoughso that anyone could use it just use the commands ADD or FIND. The system was an affectionatevariation of the hacker dream, and they found compatible sentiment in a poem which inspired themto bestow a special name on Community Memory's parent company: "Loving Grace Cybernetics."The poem was by Richard Brautigan:ALL WATCHED OVER BY MACHINES OF LOVING GRACEI like to think (andthe sooner the better!)of a cybernetic meadowwhere mammals and computerslive together in mutuallyprogramming harmonylike pure watertouching clear skyI like to think(right now, please!)of a cybernetic forestfilled with pines and electronicswhere deer stroll peacefullypast computers as if they were flowerswith spinning blossoms.

I like to think(it has to be!)of a cybernetic ecologywhere we are free of our laborsand joined back to nature,returned to our mammalbrothersand sisters, and all watched overby machines of loving grace.That was no mere terminal in Leopold's it was an instrument of Loving Grace! It was to shepherdthe ignorant flock into a grazing meadow fertilized by the benevolent Hacker Ethic, shielded fromthe stifling influence of bureaucracy. But some within Community Memory had doubts. Evengreater than Lee's nagging doubts of the terminal's durability was his fear that people would reactwith hostility to the idea of a computer invading the sacred space of a Berkeley record store; hisworst fears saw the Community Memory "barkers" who tended the terminal forced to protect thehardware bodily against a vicious mob of hippie Luddites.Unfounded fears. From the first day of the experiment, people reacted warmly to the terminal. Theywere curious to try it out, and racked their brains to think of something to put on the system. In theBerkeley Barb a week after the experiment began, Lee wrote that during the Model 33 teletypeterminal's first five days at Leopold's, it was in use 1,434 minutes, accepting 151 new items, andprinting out 188 sessions, 32 percent of which represented successful searches. And the violencelevel was nonexistent: Lee reported "100 percent smiles."Word spread, and soon people came seeking important connections. If you typed in FINDHEALTH CLINICS, for instance, you would get information on any of eight, from the Haight-Ashbury Medical Research Clinic to the George Jackson People's Free Clinic. A request forBAGELS someone asking where in the Bay Area one could find good New York-style bagels gotfour responses: three of them naming retail outlets, another one from a person named Michael whogave his phone number and offered to show the inquirer how to make his or her own bagels. Peoplefound chess partners, study partners, and sex partners for boa constrictors. Passed tips on restaurantsand record albums. Offered services like baby-sitting, hauling, typing, tarot reading, plumbing,pantomime, and photography ("MELLOW DUDE SEEKS FOLKS INTO NON-EXPLOITABLEPHOTOGRAPHY/MODELING/BOTH ... OM SHANTI").A strange phenomenon occurred. As the project progressed, users began venturing into unchartedapplications. As the Community Memory people looked over the days' new additions they foundsome items which could fit into no category at all ... even the keywords entered at the bottom of theitem were puzzling. There were messages like "YOU ARE YOUR OWN BEST FRIEND,"followed by keywords FRIEND, LOVER, DOG, YOU, WE, US, THANK YOU. There weremessages like "ALIEN FROM ANOTHER PLANET NEEDS COMPETENT PHYSICIST TOCOMPLETE REPAIRS AND SPACECRAFT. THOSE WITHOUT KNOWLEDGE OFGEOMAGNETIC INDUCTION NEED NOT APPLY." There were messages like "MY GODWHY HAVE YOU FORSAKEN ME." There were messages that gave cryptic quotes fromGinsberg, The Grateful Dead, Arlo Guthrie, and Shakespeare. And there were messages fromDoctor Benway and the mysterious Interzone.Doctor Benway, the Naked Lunch character, was "a manipulator and coordinator of symbol

systems, an expert on all phases of interrogation, brainwashing, and control." No matter. Whoeverthis demented user was, he began arranging the storage bits inside the XDS-940 into frazzledscreeds, flip commentaries of the times spiked with unspeakable visions, calls to armed revolution,and dire predictions of big-brotherism predictions rendered ironically by the use of 1984-stylecomputer technology in a radical and creative fashion. "Benway here," he'd announce himself in atypical entry, "just a daytripper in the sands of this fecund data base." Benway was not the only onewho took on weird personas as hackers had already discovered, the computer was a limitlessextension of one's own imagination, a non-judgmental mirror in which you could frame any kind ofself-portraiture you desired. No matter what you wrote, the only fingerprints your message borewere those of your imagination. The fact that non-hackers were getting off on these ideas indicatedthat the very presence of computers in accessible places might be a spur for social change, a chanceto see the possibilities offered by new technology.Lee would later call it "an epiphany, an eye-opener. It was like my experience with the Free SpeechMovement and People's Park. My God! I didn't know people could do this!"Jude Milhon developed on-line personalities, wrote poems. "It was great fun," she'd later recall."Your dreams incarnate." One CM regular swapped electronic missives with Benway, elaboratingon the Naked Lunch theme to create a computer "Interzone," in honor of the decadent flesh marketof the soul created by Burroughs. At first Benway's messages indicated surprise at this variation;then, almost as if realizing the democratic possibilities of the medium, he gave his blessing."Certain nefarious pirates have spoken of cloning the Benway Logo ... go right ahead ... it's publicdomain," he wrote.Jude Milhon met Benway. He was, as she described him, "very shy but capable of functioning in theworld of Community Memory."The group flourished for a year and a half, moving the terminal at one point from Leopold's to theWhole Earth Access Store, and placing a second terminal at a public library in San Francisco'sMission District. But the terminals kept breaking down, and it became clear that more reliableequipment was essential. A whole new system was needed, since CM could only go so far with theHulking Giant XDS-940, and in any case the relationship between CM and Resource One (itsfunding source) was breaking down. But there was no system waiting in the wings, and CommunityMemory, low in funds and technology, and quickly burning up the store of personal energy of itspeople, needed something soon.Finally, in 1975, a burned-out group of Community Memory idealists sat down to decide whether tocontinue the project. It had been an exhilarating and exhausting year. The project "showed whatcould be done. It showed the way," Lee would later claim. But Lee and the others considered it "toorisky" to continue the project in its present state. They had too much invested, technically andemotionally, to see the project peter out through a series of frustrated defections and random systemcrashes. The consensus was to submerge the experiment into a state of temporary remission. Still, itwas a traumatic decision. "We were just developing when it got cut off," Jude Milhon later said,"[Our relationship to] Community Memory was like Romeo to Juliet our other half-soul. Then all ofa sudden CHOP it's gone. Nipped in early flower."Efrem Lipkin went off and tried once more to think of a way he could get out of computers. Othersgot involved in various other projects, some technical, some social. But nobody, least of all LeeFelsenstein, gave up the dream.

9Every Man a GodJ.N June 1974, Lee Felsenstein moved into a one-room apartment over a garage inBerkeley. It didn't have much in the way of amenities not even a thermostat but itonly cost $185 a month, and Lee could fit a workbench in the corner, and call ithome. He preferred low overhead, portability, utility in a place.Felsenstein had a specific design project in mind. A computer terminal built on theCommunity Memory concept. Lee abhorred terminals built to be utterly secure inthe face of careless users, black boxes which belch information and are otherwiseopaque in their construction. He believed that the people should have a glimpse ofwhat makes the machine go, and the user should be urged to interact in the process.Anything as flexible as computers should inspire people to engage in equallyflexible activity. Lee considered the computer itself a model for activism, andhoped the proliferation of computers to people would, in effect, spread the HackerEthic throughout society, giving the people power not only over machines but overpolitical oppressors.Lee Felsenstein's father had sent him a book by Ivan Illich entitled Tools forConviviality, and Illich's contentions bore out Lee's views ("To me, the bestteachers tell me what I know is already right," Lee would later explain). Illichprofessed that hardware should be designed not only for the people's ease, but withthe long-term view of the eventual symbiosis between the user and the tool. Thisinspired Felsenstein to conceive of a tool which would embody the thoughts ofIllich, Bucky Fuller, Kari Marx, and Robert Heinlein. It would be a terminal for thepeople. Lee dubbed it the Tom Swift Terminal, "in honor of the American folkhero most likely to be found tampering with the equipment." It would be LeeFelsenstein bringing the hacker dream to life.Meanwhile, he would live off income from free-lance engineering contracts. Oneplace he sought work was Systems Concepts, the small company which employedMIT veterans Stew Nelson (the phone wizard and coding genius), and TMRC andTX-0 alumnus Peter Samson. Felsenstein was leery of anything to do with MIT;typical of hardware hackers, he was offended at what he considered the excessive

purity of those hackers, particularly their insouciance when it came to spreadingthe technology among the "losers." "Anyone who's been around artificialintelligence is likely to be a hopeless case," he'd later explain. "They're so farremoved from reality that they cannot deal with the real world. When they startsaying, 'Well, essentially all you need to do is dot dot dot,' I just glaze over andsay, 'OK, buddy, but that's the easy part. Where we do our work is the rest of that.'"His suspicions were confirmed when he met diminutive but strong-willed StewNelson. Almost instantly, they were involved in a disagreement, an arcanetechnical dispute which Lee later termed an "I'm-smarter-than-you-are, typicalhacker dispute." Stew was insisting that you could pull off a certain hardware trick,while Lee, whose engineering style was shaped by his early childhood paranoiathat things might not work, said he wouldn't risk it. Sitting in the big, wooden,warehouse-like structure that housed Systems Concepts, Lee felt that these guyswere not as interested in getting computer technology out to the people as theywere in elegant, mind-blowing computer pyrotechnics. To Lee, they weretechnological Jesuits. He was unconcerned about the high magic they couldproduce and the exalted pantheon of canonical wizards they revered. What aboutthe people?So when Stew Nelson, the archetypal MIT hacker type, gave Felsenstein theequivalent of an audition, a quick design test for a hardware product, Lee did notplay the game. He could care less about producing the technological bon motwhich Stew was looking for. Lee walked out.He'd look for work elsewhere. He figured he could make it if he brought in eightthousand dollars a year. Because of the recession, work had been hard to find, butthings were picking up. Fifty miles south of Berkeley, Silicon Valley wasbeginning to come alive.The twenty miles or so between Palo Alto on the peninsula and San Jose at thelower end of San Francisco Bay had earned the title "Silicon Valley" from thematerial, made of refined sand, used to make semiconductors. Two decades before,Palo Alto had been the spawning ground of the transistor; this advance had beenparlayed into the magic of integrated circuits (ICs) tiny networks of transistorswhich were compressed onto chips, little plastic-covered squares with thin metallicconnectors on the bottom. They looked like headless robot insects. And now, in theearly 1970s, three daring engineers working for a Santa Clara company called Intelhad invented a chip called a microprocessor: a dazzlingly intricate layout ofconnections which duplicated the complex grid of circuitry one would find in thecentral processing unit (CPU) of a computer.The bosses of these engineers were still pondering the potential uses of the

microprocessor.Lee Felsenstein, in any case, was reluctant to take a chance on brand-newtechnology. His "junk-box" style of engineering precluded using anything butproducts which he knew would be around for a while. The success of themicrochip, and the rapid price-cutting process that occurred after the chips weremanufactured in volume (it cost a fortune to design a chip and make a prototype; itcost very little to produce one chip after an assembly line existed to chum themout), resulted in a chip shortage in 1974, and Felsenstein had little confidence thatthe industry would keep these new microprocessors in sufficient supply for hisdesign. He pictured the users of his terminal treating it the way hackers treat acomputer operating system, changing parts and making improvements ... "a livingsystem rather than a mechanical system," he'd later explain. "The tools are part ofthe regenerative process." These users would need steady access to parts. So whilewaiting for clear winners in the microchip race to develop, he took his time,pondering the lessons of Ivan Illich, who favored the design of a tool "thatenhances the ability of people to pursue their own goals in their unique way." Onsunny days in laid-back Berkeley, Lee would take his drawing board down toPeople's Park, the strip of greenery which he had helped liberate in the not-toodistantsixties, and make sketches of schematics, getting a sunburn from thereflection off the white drafting paper.Felsenstein was only one of hundreds of engineers in the Bay Area whosomewhere along the line had shed all pretenses that their interest was solelyprofessional. They loved the hands-on aspects of circuitry and electronics, andeven if many of them worked by day in firms with exotic names like Zilog and Iteland National Semiconductor, they would come home at night and build, buildfantastic projects on epoxy-based silk-screened boards loaded with etched lines andlumpy rows of ICs. Soldered into metal boxes, the boards would do strangefunctions: radio functions, video functions, logic functions. Less important thanmaking these boards perform tasks was the act of making the boards, of creating asystem that got something done. It was hacking. If there was a goal at all, it wasconstructing a computer in one's very own home. Not to serve a specific function,but to play with, to explore. The ultimate system. But these hackers of hardwarewould not often confide their objective to outsiders, because, in 1974, the idea of aregular person having a computer in his home was patently absurd.Still, that's where things were going. You could sense an excitement everywherethese hardware hackers congregated. Lee would get involved in technicaldiscussions at the PCC potlucks. He also attended the Saturday morning bullshitsessions at Mike Quinn's junk shop.Quinn's was the Bay Area counterpart of Eli Heffron's at Cambridge, where the

Tech Model Railroad hackers scrounged for crossbar switches and step relays.Holding court at the shop, a giant, battleship gray, World War II vintage, hangarlikestructure on the grounds of the Oakland Airport, was Vinnie "the Bear"Golden. At a counter cluttered with boxes of resistors and switches marked downto pennies, Vinnie the Bear would bargain with the hardware hackers he lovinglyreferred to as "reclusive cheapskates." They'd haggle over prices on used circuitboards, government surplus oscilloscopes, and lots of digital clock LEDs (lightemitting diodes). Moving around the mammoth structure's well-wom woodenfloor, the hacker-scavengers would pick through the rows of boxes holdingthousands of ICs, capacitors, diodes, transistors, blank circuit boards,potentiometers, switches, sockets, clips, and cables. A sign in Gothic letters read IFYOU CAN NOT FIND IT DIG FOR IT and it was advice well taken. A hundredfailed companies used Quinn's to dump excess, and you might stumble on a giantgas control unit, a stack of used computer tapes, or even a used computer tapedrive the size of a file cabinet. Vinnie the Bear, a bearded, big-bellied giant, wouldpick up the parts you offered for his observations, guess at the possible limits oftheir uses, wonder if you could pull off a connection with this part or that, andadhere to the legend on the sign above him: "Price Varies as to Attitude ofPurchaser." All sorts of technical discussions would rage on, ultimately endingwith Vinnie the Bear mumbling vague insults about the intelligence of theparticipants, all of whom would come back the next week for more junk and moretalk.Next door to Mike Quinn's was the operation of Bill Godbout, who bought junk ona more massive scale usually government surplus chips and parts which wererejected as not meeting the exacting standards required for a specific function, butperfectly acceptable for other uses. Godbout, a gruff, beefy, still-active pilot whohinted at a past loaded with international espionage and intrigues for governmentagencies whose names he could not legally utter, would take these parts, throw hisown brand name on them, and sell them, often in logic circuitry kits which youcould buy by mail order. From his encyclopedic knowledge about what companieswere ordering and what they were throwing out, Godbout seemed to knoweverything going on in the Valley, and as his operation got bigger he supplied moreand more parts and kits to eager hardware hackers.Lee got to know Vinnie and Godbout and dozens of otners. But he developed aparticularly close relationship with a hardware hacker who had contacted him viathe Community Memory terminal before the experiment went into indefiniteremission. It was someone Lee had known vaguely from his Oxford Hall days atBerkeley. His name was Bob Marsh.Marsh, a small, Pancho Villa-moustached man with long dark hair, pale skin, and atense, ironic way of talking, had left a message for Lee on the terminal asking him

if he wanted to get involved in building a project Marsh had read about in a recentissue of Radio Electronics. An article by a hardware hacker named Don Lancasterdescribed how readers could build what he called a "TV Typewriter" somethingthat would allow you to put characters from a typewriter-style keyboard onto atelevision screen, just like on a fancy computer terminal.Marsh had been a hardware freak since childhood; his father had been a radiooperator, and he worked on ham sets through school. He majored in engineering atBerkeley,-but got diverted, spending most of his time playing pool. He droppedout, went to Europe, fell in love, and came back to school, but not in engineering itwas the sixties, and engineering was extremely uncool, almost right-wing. But hedid work in a hi-fi store, selling, fixing, and installing stereos, and he kept workingat the store after graduating with a biology degree. Infused with idealism, hewanted to be a teacher of poor kids, but this did not last when he realized that nomatter how you cut it, school was regimented students sitting in precise rows, notable to talk. Years of working in the free-flow world of electronics had infusedMarsh with the Hacker Ethic, and he saw school as an inefficient, repressivesystem. Even when he worked at a radical school with an open classroom, hethought it was a sham, still a jail.So, after an unsuccessful try at running a stereo shop he wasn't a very goodbusinessman he went back to engineering. A friend named Gary Ingram whoworked at a company called Dictran got him a job, working on the first digitalvoltmeter. After a couple of years at that, he got into the idea of computers, andwas amazed to see Lancaster's article. He figured he might use the TV Typewriteras a terminal to hook up to a computer.Buying parts from Mike Quinn's to enhance the equipment in the kit offered in themagazine, he worked for weeks on the project, trying to improve on the designhere and there. He never did get it working 100 percent, but the point was doing it,learning about it. He later explained: "It was the same as ham radio. I didn't want tospend my money to get on the air bragging about my equipment. I wanted to buildthings."Lee responded to Marsh's message on CM and they met at the storefrontheadquarters of the group. Lee told him of the Tom Swift Terminal, a terminalwhich would use a home TV set as a character display, a "cybernetic buildingblock" which could expand into almost anything. Marsh was impressed. He wasalso unemployed at the time, spending most of his time hacking the TV Typewriterin a rented garage on Fourth Street, near the bay. Marsh was married and had a kidmoney was running low. He asked Lee to split the $175 garage rent with him, andLee moved his workbench down there.

So Marsh worked on his project, while also cooking up a scheme to buy digitalclock parts from Bill Godbout and mount them in fancy wooden cases. He had afriend who was a great woodworker. Meanwhile, Lee, president of the one-manLGC Engineering Company (named after Loving Grace Cybernetics), was workingon his terminal, which was as much a philosophic venture as a design project.Unlike your usual design in which all the parts would be controlled by one centralchip, Lee's project had a complex multi-backup way of operating. It would have a"memory" a place where characters could be stored and that memory would be ona circuit "card," or board. Other cards would get the characters from the keyboardand put characters on the screen. Instead of a processor directing the flow, thecards would constantly be sending or receiving "Gimme, gimme, gimme," they'dsay, in effect, to the inputs such as the keyboard. The memory would be theterminal's crossroads. Even if you put a microprocessor on the terminal later on, todo computer-like functions, that powerful chip would be connected to the memory,not running the whole show the task to which microprocessors are accustomed. Itwas a design that enshrined the concept of decentralization. It was alsoFelsenstein's paranoia coming to the fore. He wasn't ready to cede all the power toone lousy chip. What if this part fails? What if that one does? He was designing asif his brother were still looking over his shoulder, ready to deliver witheringsarcasm when the system crashed.But Lee had figured out how the Tom Swift Terminal could extend itself untoeternity. He envisioned it as a system for people to form clubs around, the center oflittle Tom Swift Terminal karasses of knowledge. It would revive CommunityMemory, it would galvanize the world, it would be the prime topic of conversationat Mike Quinn's and PCC potlucks, and it would even lay a foundation for thepeople's entry into computers which would ultimately topple the evil IBM regime,thriving on Cybercrud and monopolistic manipulation of the marketplace.But even as Lee's nose was reddening from the reflection of the sun on theschematics of his remarkable terminal, the January 1975 issue of PopularElectronics was on its way to almost half a million hobbyist-subscribers. It carriedon its cover a picture of a machine that would have as big an impact on thesepeople as Lee imagined the Tom Swift Terminal would. The machine was acomputer. And its price was $397.It was the brainchild of a strange Floridian running a company in Albuquerque,New Mexico. The man was Ed Roberts and his company was named MITS, shortfor Model Instrumentation Telemetry Systems, though some would come to

elieve it an acronym for "Man In The Street." Ed Roberts, an enigma even to hisclosest friends, inspired that kind of speculation. He was a giant, six feet four andover two hundred and fifty pounds, and his energy and curiosity were awesome.He would become interested in a subject and devour it wholesale. "I tend toconsume shelves in libraries," he'd later explain. If one day his curiosity wasaroused about photography, within a week he would not only own a complete colordeveloping darkroom but be able to talk shop with experts. Then he would be offstudying beekeeping, or American history. The subject that enthralled him mostwas technology and its uses. His curiosity made him, as an early employee ofMITS named David Bunnell would say, "The world's ultimate hobbyist." Andthose days, being a hobbyist in digital electronics meant you were probably ahardware hacker.It was model rocketry that led him to start MITS, which initially produced lightflashers for hobbyist rocket ships, so backyard von Brauns could photograph thetrajectories of their attempts to poke holes in the sky. From there, Roberts tookMITS into test equipment temperature sensors, audio sweep generators, and thelike. Then Roberts became interested in things using LEDs, so MITS made digitalclocks, both assembled and in kits, and his company was perfectly placed to takeadvantage of advances in microchip technology that made small digital calculatorspossible. He sold those in kits, too, and the company took off, expanding to nearlyone hundred employees. But then the "Big Boys" came in, giant companies likeTexas Instruments making their own microchips, and smaller companies reacted bycutting calculator prices so low that MITS could not compete. "We went through aperiod where our cost to ship a calculator was thirty-nine dollars and you couldbuy one in a drugstore for twenty-nine dollars," Roberts later recalled. It wasdevastating. By mid-1974, Ed Roberts' company was three hundred sixty-fivethousand dollars in debt.But Ed Roberts had something up his sleeve. He knew about Intel's newmicroprocessor chips and knew it was possible to take one and build a computeraround it. A computer. Ever since he'd first had contact with them, during his timein the Air Force, he had been in awe of their power and disgusted with theconvoluted steps one had to take to get access to them. Around 1974, Ed Robertswould talk often to his boyhood friend from Florida, Eddie Currie, so much so thatto keep phone bills down they had taken to exchanging cassette tapes. The tapesbecame productions in and of themselves, with sound effects, music in thebackground, and dramatic readings. One day Eddie Currie got this tape from EdRoberts which was unlike any previous one. Currie later remembered Ed, in themost excited cadences he could muster, speaking of building a computer for themasses. Something that would eliminate the Computer Priesthood for once and forall. He would use this new microprocessor technology to offer a computer to theworld, and it would be so cheap that no one could afford not to buy it.

He followed up the tape with calls to Currie. Would you buy it if it were fivehundred dollars? Four hundred? He talked it over with what staff was left in hisfailing company (the staff had shrunk to a relative handful) and, MITS employeeDavid Bunnell would later recall, "We thought he was off the deep end."But when Ed Roberts had his mind made up, no force could compel him toreconsider. He would build a computer, and that was it. He knew that Intel'scurrent chip, the 8008, was not powerful enough, but when Intel came out with anew one, the 8080, which could support a good deal of memory as well as otherhardware, Roberts called up the company for some horse-trading. Bought in smalllots, the chips would cost $350 each. But Roberts was not thinking in small lots, sohe "beat Intel over the head" to get the chips for $75 apiece.With that obstacle cleared, he had his staff engineer Bill Yates design a hardware"bus," a setup of connections where points on the chip would be wired to outputs("pins") which ultimately would support things like a computer memory, and allsorts of peripheral devices. The bus design was not particularly elegant in fact,later on hackers would universally bitch about how randomly the designer hadchosen which point on the chip would connect to which point on the bus but itreflected Ed Roberts' dogged determination to get this job done now. It was anopen secret that you could build a computer from one of those chips, but no onehad previously dared to do it. The Big Boys of computerdom, particularly IBM,considered the whole concept absurd. What kind of nut would want a littlecomputer? Even Intel, which made the chips, thought they were better suited forduty as pieces of traffic-light controllers than as minicomputers. Still, Roberts andYates worked on the design for the machine, which Bunnell urged Roberts to call"Little Brother" in an Orwellian swipe at the Big Boys. Roberts was confident thatpeople would buy the computer once he offered it in kit form. Maybe even a fewhundred buyers in the first year.While Ed Roberts was working on his prototype, a short, balding magazine editorin New York City was thinking along the same lines as Roberts was. Les Solomonwas a vagrant from a Bernard Malamud story, a droll, Brooklyn-bom formerengineer with a gallows sense of humor. This unremarkable-looking fellow boasteda past as a Zionist mercenary fighting alongside Menachem Begin in Palestine. Hewould also talk of strange journeys which led him to the feet of South AmericanIndian brujos, or witch doctors, with whom he would partake of ritual drugs andingest previously sheltered data on the meaning of existence. In 1974, he waslooking for someone who'd designed a computer kit so that the electronics-crazyreaders of the magazine he worked for. Popular Electronics, would be in thevanguard of technology and have plenty of weird projects to build. Later on,Solomon would attempt to shrug off any cosmic motives. "There are only two

kinds of gratification that a human being can possess," he would say, "ego andwallet. That's it, baby. If you got those you're in business. It was my job to getarticles. There was another magazine [Radio Electronics], which was also doingdigital things. They came out with a computer kit based on the Intel 8008.1 knewthe 8080 could run rings around it. I talked to Ed Roberts, who had publishedthings about his calculators in our magazine, about his computer, and I realized itwould be a great project in the magazine. Hopefully, I would get a raise."But Solomon knew that this was not just another project, and in fact there weremany factors here beyond ego and wallet. This was a computer. Later on, whencoaxed, Les Solomon would speak in hushed terms of the project he was about tointroduce to his readers: "The computer is a magic box. It's a tool. It's an art form.It's the ultimate martial art... There's no bullshit in there. Without truth, thecomputer won't work. You can't bullshit a computer, God damn it, the bit is thereor the bit ain't there." He knew of the act of creation that is a natural outgrowth ofworking with the computer with a hacker's obsessive passion. "It's where everyman can be a god," Les Solomon would say.So he was eager to see Ed Roberts' machine. Ed Roberts sent him the onlyprototype via air freight, and it got lost in transit. The only prototype. So Solomonhad to look at the schematics, taking Roberts' word that the thing worked. Hebelieved. One night, he flippantly asked his daughter what might be a good namefor this machine, and she mentioned that on the TV show "Star Trek" that evening,the good ship Enterprise was rocketing off to the star called Altair. So it was thatEd Roberts' computer was named Altair.Roberts and his design helper Bill Yates wrote an article describing it. In January1975, Solomon published the article, with the address of MITS, and the offer tosell a basic kit for $397. On the cover of that issue was a phonied-up picture of theAltair 8800, which was a blue box half the size of an air conditioner, with anenticing front panel loaded with tiny switches and two rows of red LEDs. (Thisfront panel would be changed to an even spiffier variation, anchored by a chromestrip with the MITS logo and the legend "Altair 8800" in the variegated type fontidentified with computer readouts.)Those who read the article would discover that there were only 256 bytes (a "byte"is a unit of eight bits) of memory inside the machine, which came with no input oroutput devices; in other words, it was a computer with no built-in way of gettinginformation to or from the world besides those switches in front, by which youcould painstakingly feed information directly to the memory locations. The onlyway it could talk to you was by the flashing lights on the front. For all practicalpurposes, it was deaf, dumb, and blind. But, like a totally paralyzed person whosebrain was alive, its noncommunicative shell obscured the fact that a computer brain

was alive and ticking inside. It was a computer, and what hackers could do with itwould be limited only by their own imaginations.Roberts hoped that perhaps four hundred orders would trickle in while MITSperfected its assembly line to the point where it was ready to process reliable kitsto the dedicated hobbyists. He knew he was gambling his company on the Altair.In his original brainstorm he had talked about spreading computing to the masses,letting people interact directly with computers, an act that would spread the HackerEthic across the land. That kind of talk, he later admitted, had an element ofpromotion in it. He wanted to save his company. Before the article came out hewould rarely sleep, worrying about possible bankruptcy, forced retirement.The day the magazine reached the subscribers it was clear that there would be nodisaster. The phones started ringing, and did not stop ringing. And the mail boreorders, each one including checks or money orders for hundreds of dollars' worthof MITS equipment not just computers, but the add-on boards that would make thecomputers more useful. Boards which hadn't even been designed yet. In oneafternoon, MITS took orders for four hundred machines, the total response that EdRoberts had dared hope for. And there would be hundreds more, hundreds ofpeople across America who had burning desires to build their own computers. Inthree weeks, MITS' status with its bank went from a negative value to plus$250,000.How did Les Solomon describe the phenomenon? "The only word which couldcome into mind was 'magic.' You buy the Altair, you have to build it, then youhave to build other things to plug into it to make it work. You are a weird-typeperson. Because only weird-type people sit in kitchens and basements and placesall hours of the night, soldering things to boards to make machines go flicketyflock.The worst horror, the horrifying thing is, here's a company in Albuquerque,New Mexico, that nobody ever heard of. And they put together a machine which isa computer. And a magazine who publishes this article and puts it on the coversays, 'Now you can build your own computer for four hundred bucks. All you gottado is send a check to MITS in Albuquerque and they will send you a box of parts.'Most people wouldn't send fifteen cents to a company for a flashlight dial, right?About two thousand people, sight unseen, sent checks, money orders, three, four,five hundred dollars apiece, to an unknown company in a relatively unknown city,in a technically unknown state. These people were different. They wereadventurers in a new land. They were the same people who went West in the earlydays of America. The weirdos who decided they were going to California, orOregon, or Christ knows where."They were hackers. They were as curious about systems as the MIT hackers were,but, lacking daily access to PDP-6s, they had to build their own systems. What

would come out of these systems was not as important as the act of understanding,exploring, and changing the systems themselves the act of creation, the benevolentexercise of power in the logical, unambiguous world of computers, where truth,openness, and democracy existed in a form purer than one could find anywhereelse.Ed Roberts later spoke of the power: "When you talk about wealth, what you'rereally saying is, 'How many people do you control?' If I were to give you an armyof ten thousand people, could you build a pyramid? A computer gives the averageperson, a high school freshman, the power to do things in a week that all themathematicians who ever lived until thirty years ago couldn't do."Typical of the people who were galvanized by the Altair article was a thirty-yearoldBerkeley building contractor with long blond hair and gleaming green eyesnamed Steve Dompier. A year before the Popular Electronics article had come outhe had driven up the steep, winding road above Berkeley which leads to theLawrence Hall of Science, a huge, ominous, bunker-like concrete structure whichwas the setting for the movie The Forbin Project, about two intelligent computerswho collaborate to take over the world. This museum and educational center wasfunded by a grant to support literacy in the sciences, and in the early 1970s itscomputer educa tion program was run by one of Bob Albrecht's original medicineshowbarkers, Bob Kahn. It had a large HP time-sharing computer connected todozens of gunmetal-gray teletype terminals, and when Steve Dompier first visitedthe hall he stood in line to buy a fifty-cent ticket for an hour of computer time, as ifhe were buying a ride on a roller coaster. He looked around the exhibits whilewaiting for his turn on a terminal, and when it was time he stepped into a roomwith thirty clattering teletypes. It felt like being inside a cement mixer. He flickedon the terminal, and with violent confidence the line printer hammered out thewords, HELLO. WHAT'S YOUR NAME. He typed in STEVE. The line printerhammered out HI STEVE WHAT DO YOU WANT TO DO, and Steve Dompierwas blown away.He later described it: "It was the magic machine that had intelligence. Of course Ididn't understand how it worked. But on everybody's face you could see the samething for the first four or five months until they understood it really wasn'tintelligent. That's the addictive part, that first magic where this machine talks backto you and does mathematics incredibly fast." For Steve Dompier, the addictioncontinued. He played games on the system, like Star Trek, or carried on a dialoguewith a version of Joseph We-izenbaum's ELIZA program. He got a book of BASICprogramming and worked on making little routines. He read Computer Lib and gottechnologically politicized. He bought a teletype for his home so he could accessLawrence Hall's computer by phone, where he'd play the new space game Trek '73for hours on end. And then he heard about the Altair.

He was instantly on the phone to Albuquerque, asking for their catalog, and whenhe got it, everything looked great the computer kit, the optional disk drives,memory modules, clock modules. So he sent for everything. Four thousand dollars'worth. His excuse to himself was that he would use his new computer system tocatalog all his Popular Science magazines; if he wondered where that article about,say, heat pipes was, he'd type HEAT PIPES on the computer and it would say,ISSUE 4, PAGE 76, STEVE! Ten years and many computers later, he stillwouldn't have gotten around to that task. Because he really wanted a computer tohack on, not to make any stupid index.MITS wrote back to him saying he sent too much money; half the equipment heordered was only in vague planning stages. The other half of the equipment heordered didn't exist either, but MITS was working on those products. So SteveDompier waited.He waited that January, he waited that February, and in early March the wait hadbecome so excruciating that he drove down to the airport, got into a plane, flew toAlbuquerque, rented a car, and, armed only with the street name, began drivingaround Albuquerque looking for this computer company. He had been to variousfirms in Silicon Valley, so he figured he knew what to look for ... a long,modernistic one-story building on a big green lawn, sprinklers whirring, with asign out front with "MITS" chiseled in rustic wood. But the neighborhood wherethe address seemed to be was nothing like that. It was a shabby industrial area.After he drove back and forth a few times he saw a little sign, "MITS," in thecomer of a window in a tiny shopping center, between a massage parlor and aLaundromat. If he'd looked in the parking lot nearby, he would have seen a trailerthat some hacker had been living in for the past three weeks while waiting for hismachine to be ready for delivery.Dompier went in and saw that MITS headquarters was two tiny offices, with onesecretary trying to cope with a phone that would ring as soon as the receiver washung up. She was assuring one phone caller after another that yes, one day thecomputer would come. Dompier met Ed Roberts, who was taking all this withgood cheer. Roberts spun a golden tale of the computer future, how MITS wasgoing to be bigger than IBM, and then they went into the back room, piled to theceiling with parts, where an engineer held up a front panel in one hand and ahandful of LEDs in the other. And that was all there was of the Altair so far.The MITS system of kit delivery did not quite conform to United States postalregulations, which frowned upon accepting money through the mail for items thatdid not exist except in pictures on magazine covers. But the post office did notreceive many complaints. When Ed Roberts' friend Eddie Currie joined the

company to help out in the crunch, he found that his experience with some MITScustomers in Chicago was typical: one guy in particular complained about sendingover a thousand dollars more than a year before, with no response. "You guys areripping me off, not even offering me my money back!" he shouted. Currie said,"Fine, give me your name, I'll have the accounting department issue you a checkimmediately, with interest." The man quickly turned humble. "Oh, no. I don't wantthat." He wanted his equipment. "That was the mentality," Currie later recalled. "Itwas incredible how badly people wanted this."Ed Roberts was on a high, too busy trying to get things done to worry about howfar behind in orders his company was. He had over a million dollars in orders, andplans which were much bigger than that. Every day, it seemed, new thingsappeared to make it even clearer that the computer revolution had occurred rightthere. Even Ted Nelson, author of Computer Lib, called with his blessing. BobAlbrecht also called, and said he'd write a book about games on the Altair, ifRoberts would send him a working model to review for PCC.Eventually, MITS managed to get some kits out the door. Steve Dompier had leftthe office only after Roberts had given him a plastic bag of parts he could beginworking with, and over the next couple of months more parts would arrive by UPS,and finally Dompier had enough parts to put together an Altair with a serialnumber of four. Number three went to the guy in the parking lot who would workwith a battery-powered soldering system. Every time he had a problem he wouldleap out of the trailer and bug a MITS engineer until he understood the problem.An even earlier assembled prototype went to PCC, which had the fantasticadvantage of getting an already constructed model.It was not easy to put an Altair together. Eddie Currie later acknowledged thiswhen he said, "One of the nice things about the kit [from MITS' point of view] wasyou didn't have to test the parts you sent, you didn't have to test the subunits, youdidn't have to test the finished units. You just put all the stuff in envelopes andshipped them. It was left to the poor customer to figure out how to put all thosebags of junk together." (Actually, Ed Roberts would explain, it would have beencheaper to assemble the things at the factory, since frustrated hobbyists wouldoften send back their semi-completed machines to MITS, which would finish thetask at a loss.)It was an education in itself, a course of digital logic and soldering skills andinnovation. But it could be done. The problem was that, when you were finished,what you had was a box of blinking lights with only 256 bytes of memory. Youcould put in a program only by flicking octal numbers into the computer by thosetiny, finger-shredding switches, and you could see the answer to your problem onlyby interpreting the flickety-flock of the LED lights, which were also laid out in

octal. Hell, what did it matter. It was a start. It was a computer.Around the People's Computer Company, the announcement of the Altair 8800was cause for celebration. Everybody had known about the attempts to get asystem going around the less powerful Intel 8008 chip; the unofficial sisterpublication of PCC was the "Micro-8 Newsletter," a byzantinely arrangeddocument with microscopic type published by a teacher and 8008 freak in Lompoc,California. But the Altair, with its incredibly low price and its 8080 chip, wasspoken about as if it were the Second Coming.The first issue of PCC in 1975 devoted a page to the new machine, urging readersto get hold of the Popular Electronics article, and including a handwrittenaddendum by Bob Albrecht: "We will put our chips on the chip. If you areassembling a home computer, school computer, community memory computer ...game-play-ing-fun-loving computer ... using an Intel 8008 or Intel 8080, pleasewrite a letter to the PCC Dragon!"Lee Felsenstein, who was doing hardware reviews for PCC, was eager to see themachine. The biggest thing before that had been the TV Typewriter that his garagemateBob Marsh had been working on, and Lee had been corresponding with itsdesigner, Don Lancaster. The design seemed to have the fatal flaw of blanking outat the end of each page of text a "whirling dervish" scheme of erasing what wentbefore when the screen was refreshed with a new output and Lee had been thinkingof designing a board to fix that. But when the Altair came out all bets were off.Felsenstein and Marsh read the Popular Electronics article, and they instantlyrealized that the model pictured in the magazine was a dummy, and that even whenthe real Altair was ready, it would be a box with flashing lights. There was nothingin it! It was just a logical extension of what everyone knew and no one had daredto take advantage of.This did not upset Lee in the least; he knew that the significance of the Altair wasnot as a technological advance, or even as a useful product. The value would be inthe price and the promise both of which would entice people to order kits and buildtheir own computers. Lee, who had no respect for the elitist ivory-toweruniversities like MIT, was exultant at the opening of the first college with a majorin hardware hacking: University of Altair. Your degree would come aftercompleting courses in Soldering, Digital Logic, Technical Improvisation,Debugging, and Knowing Whom to Ask for Help. Then you would be ready for alifelong matriculation toward a Ph.D. in Getting the Thing to Do Something.When Altair sent one of the first assembled computers to PCC, Bob Albrecht lentit to Lee for a week. He took it to Efrem Lipkin's place and they set it down,treating it as a curiosity, a piece of sculpture. Lee got the thing apart and began

dreaming of things to put in it to make a system out of the machine. In his reviewof the machine in PCC, which ran with a picture of lightning striking a small town,he wrote: "The Altair 8800 has two things (at least) going for it: it's here and itworks. These facts alone will guarantee that it is THE amateur computer for atleast the next year..."PCC devoted pages to the machine, which was the center of the now imminentrevolution. But as enthusiastic as Bob Albrecht was about the Altair, he still feltthat the key thing his operation had to offer was the initial magic of computingitself, not the hard-wired craziness experienced by the hardware hackers rushing toorder Altairs. There were plenty of hardware people hanging out at PCC, but whenone of them, Fred Moore, an idealist with some very political ideas aboutcomputers, asked Albrecht if he could teach a PCC class in computer hardware,Albrecht demurred.It was a classic hacker-planner conflict. Albrecht the planner wanted magic spreadfar and wide, and considered the intense fanaticism of high-level hacking assecondary. Hardware hackers wanted to go all the way into the machines, so deepthat they reached the point where the world was in its purest form, where "the bit isthere or it ain't there," as Lee Solomon put it. A world where politics and socialcauses were irrelevant.It was ironic that it was Fred Moore who wanted to lead that descent into hardwaremysteries, because in his own way Moore was much more a planner than a hacker.Fred Moore's interest in computers was not only for the pleasure they gave todevoted programmers, but also for their ability to bring people together. Fred was avagabond activist, a student of nonviolence who believed that most problems couldbe solved if only people could get together, communicate, and share solutions.Sometimes, in the service of these beliefs, Fred Moore would do very strangethings.One of his more notable moments had come four years earlier, in 1971, during thedemise party of the Whole Earth Catalog. Editor Stewart Brand had thrown thisfarewell-to-the-Catalog bash into turmoil by announcing that he was going to giveaway twenty thousand dollars: it was up to the fifteen hundred party-goers todecide whom he should give it to. The announcement was made at 10:30 P.M., andfor the next ten hours the party turned, variously, from town meeting toparliamentary conference, to debate, to brawl, to circus, and to hitching session.The crowd was dwindling: around 3 A.M. the I Ching was thrown, withinconclusive results. It was then that Fred Moore spoke. Described later by areporter as "a young man with wavy hair and a beard and an intense, earnestexpression," Moore was upset that money was being labeled a savior and people

were being bought. He thought the whole thing was getting to be a downer. Heannounced to the crowd that more important than the money was the eventoccurring right then. He noted that a poet had asked for money to publish a book ofpoems and someone had said, "We know where you can get paper," and someoneelse had suggested a cheap printer ... and Fred thought that maybe people didn'tneed money to get what they wanted, just themselves. To illustrate the point, Fredbegan setting fire to dollar bills. Then people decided to take a vote whether tobother to spend the money; Moore opposed the vote, since voting in his view was away of dividing people against each other. His opposition to the concept of votingso confused the issue that polling the audience didn't work. Then, after much moretalk, Moore began circulating a petition which said, in part, "We feel the union ofpeople here tonight is more important than money, a greater resource," and heurged people to sign their names to a piece of paper to keep in contact through apragmatic networking. Finally, well after dawn, when there were around twentypeople left, they said to hell with it, and gave the money to Fred Moore. To quote aRolling Stone reporter's account, "Moore seemed to get the money by default, bypersistence... Moore wandered around for a while, bewildered and awed, trying toget riders to accompany him back to Palo Alto and wondering aloud whether heshould deposit the money in a bank account ... then realized he had no bankaccount."Fred Moore never did put the money in a bank ("They make war," he said), buteventually distributed thousands of dollars to worthy groups. But the experienceshowed him two things. One, he knew: money was evil. The other was the powerof people getting together, how they could do things without money, just bybanding together and using their natural resources. That was why Fred Moore gotso excited about computers.Moore had been involved with computers for a few years, ever since wanderinginto the computer center at the Stanford Medical Center in 1970. He was travelingaround then in a Volkswagen bus with his young daughter, and he wouldsometimes leave her in the bus while he played with the computer. Once he got sowrapped up in the machine that a policeman came to the computer center asking ifanyone knew anything about the little girl left out in the parking lot...He saw the computer as an incredible facilitator, a way for people to get control oftheir environment. He could see it in the kids he taught games to, in classes atPCC. The kids would just play and have a good time. Fred was teaching aboutthirteen of these classes a week, and thinking a lot about how computers mightkeep alternative people together in big data bases. And then the Altair wasannounced, and he thought that people should get together and teach each otherhow to use it. He didn't know much about hardware, had little idea how to build thething, but he figured that people in the class would help each other, and they'd get

things done.Bob Albrecht did not like the idea, so there was no hardware class.Fred Moore got to talking about this with another frustrated hanger-on in the PCCorbit, Gordon French, the consulting engineer who'd built "homebrewed," as thehardware hackers called it a computer which more or less worked, centered on theIntel 8008 chip. He named his system Chicken Hawk. Gordon French liked tobuild computers the way people like to take engines out of automobiles and rebuildthem. He was a gangly fellow with a wide, crooked smile and long, prematurelygray hair. He loved to talk computers, and it sometimes seemed, when GordonFrench got going on the subject, a faucet opened up that would not stop until asquad of plumbers with big wrenches and rubber coats came to turn off the flow. Ayearning to meet people with similar likes led him to PCC, but French wasunsuccessful in his application to be on the PCC board of directors. He was alsounhappy that the Wednesday potlucks seemed to be phasing out. The Altair wasfor sale, people were going crazy, it was time to get together, and there was no wayto do it. So French and Moore decided to start up a group of people interested inbuilding computers. Their own hardware group, and it would be full of goodcomputer talk, shared electronic technique, and maybe a demonstration or two ofthe latest stuff you could buy. Just a bunch of hardware hackers seeing what mightcome of a somewhat more than random meeting.So on crucial billboards in the area at PCC, at Lawrence Hall, at a few schools andhigh-tech corporations Fred Moore tacked up a sign that read:AMATEUR COMPUTER USERS GROUP HOMEBREWCOMPUTER CLUB ... you name it. Are you building your owncomputer? Terminal? TV Typewriter? I/O device? or some otherdigital black magic box? Or are you buying time on a time-sharingservice? If so, you might like to come to a gathering of people withlikeminded interests. Exchange information, swap ideas, help workon a project, whatever...The meeting was called for March 5, 1975, at Gordon's Menio Park address. FredMoore and Gordon French had just set the stage for the latest flowering of thehacker dream.

10The Homebrew Computer ClubTHE fifth of March was a rainy night in Silicon Valley. All thirty-two participantsin the first meeting of the yet unnamed group could hear the rain while sitting onthe hard cement floor of Gordon French's two-car garage.Some of the people at the meeting knew each other; others had come into randomcontact through the flier that Fred Moore had posted. Lee Felsenstein and BobMarsh had driven down from Berkeley in Lee's battered pickup truck. BobAlbrecht had come over to give the group his blessing, and to show off the Altair8800 that MITS had loaned PCC. Tom Pittman, a free-lance engineer who'd builtan improbable homebrew computer around the early Intel 4004 chip, had met FredMoore at a computer conference the previous month and had been looking forwardto meeting others with similar interests. Steve Dompier, still waiting for the rest ofhis Altair parts, had seen the notice posted at Lawrence Hall. Marty Spergel had asmall business selling electronic parts and figured it would be a good idea to rap tosome engineers about chips. An engineer at Hewlett-Packard named Alan Baumhad heard about the meeting and wondered if the talk would be of the new, lowcostcomputers; he dragged along a friend he'd known since high school, a fellowHP employee named Stephen Wozniak.Almost every person in the garage was passionate about hardware, with thepossible exception of Fred Moore, who envisioned sort of a social group in whichpeople would "bootstrap" themselves into learning about hardware. He didn't quiterealize this was, as Gordon French would later put it, "the damned finest collectionof engineers and technicians that you could possibly get under one roof," Thesewere people intensely interested in getting computers into their homes to study, toplay with, to create with..., and the fact that they would have to build thecomputers was no deterrent. The introduction of the Altair had told them that theirdream was possible, and looking at others with the same goal was a thrill in itself.And in the front of Gordon French's cluttered garage workshop you could neverhave fit a car in there, let alone two there it was, an Altair. Bob Albrecht turned iton and the lights flashed and everyone knew that inside that implacable front panelthere were seething little binary bits, LDA-ing and JMP-ing and ADD-ing.

Fred Moore had set up a table in the front and took notes, while Gordon French,who was unspeakably proud of his own homebrew 8008 setup, moderated.Everybody introduced himself, and it turned out that six of the thirty-two had builttheir own computer system of some sort, while several others had ordered Altairs.Right away, there was some debate about the relative merits of chips, particularlythe 8008. In fact, there were endless topics for debate: hex (base sixteen numbers)versus octal (base eight); operating codes for the 8080; paper tape storage versuscassette versus paper and pencil listings... They discussed what they wanted in aclub, and the words people used most were "cooperation" and "sharing." Therewas some talk about what people might do with computers in the home, and somesuggested games, control of home utilities, text editing, education. Lee mentionedCommunity Memory. Albrecht distributed the latest issue of PCC. And SteveDompier told about his pilgrimage to Albuquerque, how MITS was trying to fillfour thousand orders, and how they were so busy trying to get basic kits out thedoor that they were unable to even think of shipping the extra stuff that wouldenable the machine to do more than flash its lights.Fred Moore was very excited about the energy the gathering generated. It seemedto him that he had put something in motion. He did not realize at the time that thesource of the intellectual heat was not a planner-like contemplation of the socialchanges possible by mass computing, but the white-hot hacker fascination withtechnology. Buoyed by the willingness everyone seemed to have to work together,Moore suggested the group meet every fort night. As if to symbolize the conceptof free exchange that the group would embody, Marty Spergel, the electric partssupplier who would be known as "the Junk Man" within the group, held up anIntel 8008 chip, just as everyone was leaving. "Who wants this?" he asked, andwhen the first hand went up, he tossed the chip, the fingernail-sized chunk oftechnology that could provide a good percentage of the multimillion-dollar powerof the TX-0.Over forty people came to the second meeting, which was held at the Stanford AIlab in the foothills, home of Uncle John McCarthy's Tolkien-esque hackers. Muchof the meeting was taken up by a discussion of what the group should be called.Suggestions included Infinitesimal Computer Club, Midget Brains, Steam BeerComputer Club, People's Computer Club, Eight-Bit Byte Bangers, Bay AreaComputer Experimenters' Group, and Amateur Computer Club of America.Eventually people decided on Bay Area Amateur Computer Users GroupHomebrew Computer Club. The last three words became the de facto designation.In true hacker spirit the club had no membership requirement, asked no minimumdues (though French's suggestion that anyone who wanted to should give a dollarto cover meeting notice and newsletter expenses had netted $52.63 by the thirdmeeting), and had no elections of officers.

By the fourth meeting, it was clear that the Homebrew Computer Club was goingto be a hacker haven. Well over a hundred people received the mailing whichannounced the meeting would be held that week at the Peninsula School, anisolated, private school nestled in a wooded area of Memo Park.Steve Dompier had built his Altair by then: he had received the final shipment ofparts at ten one morning, and spent the next thirty hours putting it together, only tofind that the 256-byte memory wasn't working. Six hours later he figured out thebug was caused by a scratch on a printed circuit. He patched that up, and then triedto figure out what to do with it.It seems that the only option supplied by MITS for those who actually finishedbuilding the machine was a machine language program that you could key into themachine only by the row of tiny switches on the front panel. It was a programwhich used the 8080 chip instructions LDA, MOV, ADD, STA, and JMP. Ifeverything was right, the program would add two numbers together. You would beable to tell by mentally translating the code of the flashing LEDs out of their octalform and into a regular decimal number. You would feel like the first manstepping on the moon, a figure in history you would have the answer to thequestion stumping mankind for centuries: What happens when you add six andtwo? Eight! "For an engineer who appreciates computers, that was an excitingevent," early Altair owner and Homebrew Club member Harry Garland wouldlater say, admitting that "you might have a hard time explaining to an outsider whyit was exciting." To Steve Dompier it was thrilling.He did not stop there. He made little machine language programs to test all thefunctions of the chips. (They had to be little programs, since the Altair's memorywas so minuscule.) He did this until his own ten "input devices" his fingers hadthick calluses. The 8080 chip had a 72-function instruction set, so there was plentyto do. An amateur pilot, Dompier listened to a low-frequency radio broadcastingthe weather while he worked, and after he tested a program to sort some numbers,a very strange thing happened when he hit the switch to "run" the program: theradio started making ZIPPPP! ZIIIP! ZIIIIIIIPPPP! noises. It was apparentlyreacting to the radio frequency interference caused by the switching of bits fromlocation to location inside the Altair. He brought the radio closer, and ran theprogram again. This time the ZIPs were louder. Dompier was exultant: he haddiscovered the first input/output device for the Altair 8800 computer.Now the idea was to control the device. Dompier brought his guitar over andfigured out that one of the noises the computer made (at memory address 075) wasequivalent to an F-sharp on the guitar. So he hacked away at programming until hefigured the memory locations of other notes. After eight hours or so, he had

charted the musical scale and written a program for writing music. Although it wasa simple program, nothing like Peter Samson's elegant music program on the PDP-1, it took Dompier a hell of a long (and painful) time to enter it by thosemaddening switches. But he was ready with his rendition of the Beatles' "Fool onthe Hill" (the first piece of sheet music he came across) for the meeting ofHomebrew at the Peninsula School.The meeting was held in a room on the second floor of the school, a huge, ancientwooden building straight out of "The Ad-dams Family." Dompier's Altair was, ofcourse, the object of much adoration, and he was dying to show them the firstdocumented application. But when Dompier tried to turn on the Altair, it wouldn'twork. The electrical outlet was dead. The nearest working outlet was on the firstfloor of the building, and after locating an extension cord long enough to stretchfrom there to the second floor, Dompier finally had his Altair plugged in, thoughthe cord was not quite long enough, and the machine had to stand a bit outside thedoorway. Dompier began the long process of hitting the right switches to enter thesong in octal code, and was just about finished when two kids who had beenplaying in the hallway accidentally tripped over the cord, pulling it out of the wall.This erased the contents of the computer memory which Dompier had beenentering bit by bit. He started over, and finally shushed everyone up in preparationfor the first public demonstration of a working Altair application.He hit the RUN switch.The little radio on top of the big, menacing computer box began to make raspy,buzzy noises. It was music of a sort, and by the time the first few plaintive bars ofPaul McCartney's ballad were through, the room of hackers normally abuzz withgossip about the latest chip fell into an awed silence. Steve Dompier's computer,with the pure, knee-shaking innocence of a first-grader's first recital, was playing asong. As soon as the last note played, there was total, stunned silence. They hadjust heard evidence that the dream they'd been sharing was real. A dream that onlya few weeks before had seemed vague and distant.Well before they had a chance to recover ... the Altair started to play again. Noone (except Dompier) was prepared for this reprise, a rendition of "Daisy," whichsome of them knew was the first song ever played on a computer, in Bell Labs in1957; that momentous event in computer history was being matched right beforetheir ears. It was an encore so unexpected that it seemed to come from themachine's genetic connection to its Hulking Giant ancestors (a notion apparentlyimplicit in Kubrick's 2007 when the HAL computer, being dismantled, regressedto a childlike rendition of that very song).

When the Altair finished, the silence did not last for long. The room burst intowild applause and cheers, the hackers leaping to their feet as they slammed handstogether. The people in Homebrew were a melange of professionals too passionateto leave computing at their jobs, amateurs transfixed by the possibilities oftechnology, and techno-cultural guerrillas devoted to overthrowing an oppressivesociety in which government, business, and especially IBM had relegatedcomputers to a despised Priesthood. Lee Pel-senstein would call them "a bunch ofescapees, at least temporary escapees from industry, and somehow the bossesweren't watching. And we got together and started doing things that didn't matterbecause that wasn't what the big guys were doing. But we knew this was ourchance to do something the way we thought it should be done." This involved noless than a major rewriting of computer history, and somehow this simple littlemusic recital by Steve Dompier's Altair seemed the first step. "It was a majorachievement in computer history, in my estimation," Bob Marsh later said.Dompier wrote up the experience, along with the machine language code for theprogram, in the next issue of PCC under the title "Music, of a Sort," and formonths afterward Altair owners would call him in the middle of the night,sometimes three at once on conference calls, playing him Bach fugues.Dompier got over four hundred calls like that. There were a lot more hackers outthere than anyone imagined.Bob Marsh, Lee Felsenstein's unemployed garage-mate, left the first meeting ofHomebrew almost dazed with excitement from what he'd been a part of in thatlittle garage. He knew that until now only a tiny number of people had dared toconceive of the act of personal computing. Now here was long-haired SteveDompier saying that this random company, MITS, had thousands of orders. BobMarsh realized right then and there that the hacker brotherhood was going to growexponentially in the next few years. But like a raging fire, it needed fuel. Theflashing LEDs on the Altair were exciting, but he knew that hackers being hackersthere would be a demand for all sorts of peripheral devices, devices this MITScompany obviously could not provide.But someone would have to, because the Altair was the basis for a fantastic systemto build new systems, new worlds. Just as the PDP-1, or the PDP-6, had arrived atMIT as a magic box without a satisfactory operating system, and just as the MIThackers had supplied it with assemblers, debuggers, and all sorts of hardware andsoftware tools to make it useful in creating new systems and even someapplications, it was up to these as yet unorganized hardware hackers to make theirown mark on the Altair 8800.

Bob Marsh understood that this was the beginning of a new era, and a terrificopportunity. Sitting on the cold floor in Gordon French's garage, he decided thathe would design and build some circuit boards that would plug into one of theblank slots on the Altair bus.Bob Marsh wasn't the only one with that idea. In fact, right there in Palo Alto (thetown next to Memo Park, where the meet ing was being held), two Stanfordprofessors named Harry Garland and Roger Melen were already working on addonboards to the Altair. They hadn't heard about the meeting, but would come tothe second meeting of hardware enthusiasts, and be regulars thereafter.The two Ph.D.s had first heard about the Altair when Melen, a tall, heavy manwhose wittiness was only slightly impeded by a recurrent stutter, was visiting LesSolomon in late 1974 at the New York office of Popular Electronics. Melen andGarland had done articles outlining hobbyist projects for the magazine in theirspare time, and were just putting to bed an article telling how to build a TVcameracontrol device.Melen noticed a strange box on Solomon's desk and asked what it was. Solomoninformed him that the box, the prototype Altair that Ed Roberts had sent to replacethe one lost in air freight, was an 8080 microcomputer that sold for under fourhundred dollars. Roger Melen did not think that such a thing was possible, and LesSolomon told him that if he doubted it, he should call Ed Roberts in Albuquerque.Melen did this without hesitation, and arranged to make a stopover on his wayback West. He wanted to buy two of those computers. Also, Ed Roberts hadpreviously licensed a project that Melen and Garland had written about in PopularElectronics, and had never gotten around to paying them royalties. So there weretwo things that Melen wanted to talk to Roberts about.The Altair computer was the more important by far the right toy at the right time,Melen thought and he was so excited about the prospect of owning one that hecouldn't sleep that night. When he finally got to MITS' modest headquarters, hewas disappointed to find that there was no Altair ready to take home. But EdRoberts was a fascinating fellow, a dyed-in-the-wool engineer with a blazingvision. They talked until five in the morning about the technical aspects of thisvision. This was before the Popular Electronics article was out, though, andRoberts was concerned at what the response might be. He figured it would not hurtto have some people manufacturing boards to put into the Altair to make it useful,and he agreed to send Melen and Garland an early prototype, so they could makesomething to connect a TV camera to the machine, and then a board to output avideo image as well.

So Garland and Melen were in business, naming their company Cromemco, inhonor of the Stanford dorm they'd once lived in, Crowthers Memorial. They weredelighted to find similar spirits at the Homebrew Club, among them Marsh, whohad talked his friend Gary Ingram into helping start a company called ProcessorTechnology.Marsh knew that the biggest immediate need of an Altair owner was a memorybigger than the lousy 256 bytes that came with the machine, so he figured he'dmake a board which would give 2K of memory. (Each "K" equals 1,024 bytes.)MITS had announced its own memory boards, and had delivered some tocustomers. They were nice memory boards, but they didn't work. Marsh borrowedthe PCC's Altair and looked it over carefully, read the manual backward andforward. This was a necessity because he couldn't initially afford to spend themoney to make a Xerox copy. He figured that he would run the company the wayRoberts was apparently running MITS announce his product first, then collect themoney required to design and manufacture the product.So on April Fools' Day, Marsh and Ingram, a reclusive engineer who didn't go toHomebrew meetings ("It's not the kind of thing he did," Marsh later explained),officially inaugurated the company. Marsh was able to scrape up enough money toXerox fifty fliers explaining the line of proposed products. On April 2, Marshstood up at the third Homebrew meeting, handed out the fliers, and announced a20 percent discount to anyone who ordered in advance. After a week, he hadn'theard anything. As Marsh later said, "Despair had set in. We felt, we've blown it,it's not going to work. Then our first order came in, for a ROM [memory] boardcosting only forty-five dollars. A purchase order asking 'Net 30 terms,' from thiscompany called Cromemco. We thought, 'Who is this Cromemco? And why don'tthey pay cash?' Despair set in once more. IT'S NOT GOING TO FLY! The nextday three orders came in, and within a week after that we had twenty-five hundreddollars cash. We took a thousand, ponied up for a sixth-page ad in PopularElectronics, and all hell broke loose after that. It took us only two months to get ahundred thousand dollars in orders."The irony was that Marsh and the other hacker-run operations were not setting upto be huge businesses. They were looking for a way to finance their avocation ofplaying with electronics, of exploring this new realm of little bitty computers. ForMarsh and the others who left the first few Homebrew meetings with boardbuildingfervor, the fun was beginning: designing and building stuff, expressingthemselves by the twists and tangles of a digital logic integrated circuit board to beattached to Ed Roberts' byzantine bus.As Marsh found out, building a board for the Altair was the Homebrew hacker'sequivalent of attempting a great novel. It would be something that harsh

Homebrew reviewers would examine carefully, and they would not only notewhether it worked or not but judge the relative beauty and stability of itsarchitecture. The layout of circuits on the board was a window into the designer'spersonality, and even superficial details like the quality of the holes by which onemounted the board would betray the designer's motives, philosophy, andcommitment to elegance. Digital designs, like computer programs, "are the bestpictures of minds you can get," Lee Felsenstein once said. "There are things I cantell about people from hardware designs I see. You can look at something and say,'Jesus Christ, this guy designs like an earthworm goes from one place through tothe end and doesn't even know what it was he did in the middle.'"Bob Marsh wanted Processor Technology to be known for quality products, and hespent the next few months in a frazzled state, trying not only to finish his projects,but to do them right. It was important for the company and for his pride as well.The process was not a terribly simple one. After figuring out what your boardwould do, you would spend long nights designing the layout. Looking in themanual that described the workings of the 8080 chip, you would jot down thenumbers for the various sections you wanted designating this section for an input,that one for memory and the labyrinthine grid inside that piece of black plasticwould begin to reshape inside your head. The effectiveness of your choice ofwhich sections to access would depend on how well and how accurately you keptthat vision up there. You would make a pencil drawing of those connections, withthe stuff destined to go on one side of the board written in blue, stuff for the otherside in red. Then you would get sheets of Mylar, lay them on a grid on a lighttable, and begin laying out the outline of the connections, using crepe paper tape.You might find out that your scheme had some problems too much traffic in onepart, the interconnections too tight and have to realign some things. One mistakecould blow everything. So you'd be sure to do an overlay of the schematic: placingthat on top of your taped-up design, you could see if you made some grievouserror, like hooking three things together. If the schematic itself was in error, forgetit.You would design it so that the board would have several layers; a different set ofconnections on the top and the bottom. You would flip the layout back and forth asyou worked, and sometimes the tape would peel off, or you would have littlepieces of tape left over, or a hair would get stuck somewhere: any of theseuncalled-for phenomena would be faithfully duplicated in the sepia reproductionsmade for you at a blueline house (if you didn't have money for that, you'd do acareful Xerox), and result in a disastrous short circuit. Then you'd mark up thelayout for the board company, telling where to drill and what needed gold-plating,and so on.

Finally, you'd go to a local board house with drawings in hand. You'd give it tothem. Since it was still a recession, they would be happy for the business, evenbusiness coming from a scruffy, small-time, glassy-eyed hardware hacker. Theywould put the thing on a digitizer, drill the holes, and produce on greenish epoxymaterial a mess of silvery interconnections. That was the deluxe method BobMarsh at first could not afford that, so he hand-etched the board over the kitchenstove, using printed circuit laminate material, making barely discernible lines thatthe material would melt into. That method was a tortuous courting of the bitchgoddess Disaster, but Marsh was a compulsively careful worker. He laterexplained: "I really get into it. I become one with my schematic design."For this first memory board, Marsh was under particular pressure. Every otherweek at the Homebrew meeting, every day on the phone, frantic people weregasping for static memory boards like divers gasping for air. Marsh later recalledtheir cries: "Where's my board? I need it. I GOTTA HAVE IT."Finally Marsh was done. There wasn't time for a prototype. He had his board,which was the green epoxy rectangle with a little protrusion of etched goldconnectors underneath, sized to fit into a slot in the Altair bus. He had the chipsand wires which the kit-builders would solder onto it. (Processor Tech would onlysell unassembled boards at first.) Marsh had it all ready and no Altair to test it outon. So despite the fact that it was three in the morning he called that guy Dompierhe knew from Homebrew and told him to bring the machine over. Dompier'sAltair was at least as valuable to him as a human infant offspring would be if heweren't in Bachelor Mode, so he carefully wrapped it up in a little red blanket tobring it over. Dompier had gone by the book in assembling the machine, evenwearing a copper bracelet around his wrist when he soldered (to keep static down),and taking care not to touch the fragile 8080 heart of the machine. So he wasstunned, after lovingly setting the machine down in Marsh's workshop, when thehardware veterans Marsh and Ingram began handling chips like a couple of garagemechanics installing a muffler. They'd grab chips with their grubby fingers andthrow chips around and pull chips out and stuff them back in. Dompier watched inhorror. Finally they had the board all ready, and Ingram nicked the switch on, andSteve Dompier's precious computer fizzled into unconsciousness. They'd put theboard in backward.It took a day to fix Dompier's Altair, but Steve Dompier harbored no anger: infact, he loaned his machine to Processor Technology for future testing. It wasindicative of Homebrew behavior. These were a different breed of hacker than theunapproachable wizards of MIT, but they still held to the Hacker Ethic thatsublimated possession and selfishness in favor of the common good, which meantanything that could help people hack more efficiently. Steve Dompier was nervousabout his Altair, but he wanted little in the world more than a memory board, so he

could run some real programs on the machine. And then he wanted i/o devices,display devices ... so that he could write utilities to make the machine morepowerful. Tools to Make Tools, to go deep into the world that centered on themysterious 8080 microprocessor inside his machine. Bob Marsh and the others inHomebrew, whether they were offering products for sale or were simply curioushackers like himself, were all in this together, and together they formed acommunity that may not have been as geographically centered as MIT's PDP-6community was it stretched from Sacramento to San Jose but was strongly bondednonetheless.When Bob Marsh showed up at a Homebrew meeting in early June with the firstshipment of boards, the people who ordered them were so thankful you mightthink that he'd been giving them away. He handed over the little plastic blisterwrappedpackets of board and ICs, along with the instruction manual LeeFelsenstein had written. "Unless you are an experienced kit-builder," Lee warned,"don't build this kit."There was very little experience in the world at building those kinds of things, butmuch of the experience that did exist in the world was centered in that meetingroom, which was now the auditorium at the Stanford Linear Accelerator (SLAC).It was four months after the first casual meeting of the club, and its membershiphad grown almost tenfold.The little club formed by Fred Moore and Gordon French had grown to somethingneither could have imagined. It was the vanguard of a breed of hardware hackerswho were "bootstrapping" themselves into a new industry which, they were sure,would be different from any previous industry. The microcomputer industry wouldbe ruled by the Hacker Ethic. (The term "bootstrap" was indicative of the newjargon spoken by these hackers: the term literally describes the process by which acomputer program feeds itself into a machine when the machine is first turned on,or "booted." Part of the program will feed the code into the computer; this codewill program the machine to tell itself to feed the rest of the code in. Just likepulling yourself up by your bootstraps. It is symbolic of what the Homebrewpeople were doing creating a niche in the world of small computer systems, thendigging deeper to make the niche a cavern, a permanent settlement.)But the club's founders were both soon outdistanced by the technical brilliancearound them. In French's case, he suffered from what seemed to be a latentbureaucratic attitude. In some respects, his mania to keep the club progressing inan orderly, controlled manner was helpful. He acted as secretary and librarian,

keeping a list of everyone's phone number and what equipment everyone owned.As he later recalled, "My phone rang off the hook. It was incredible. Everybodyneeded information, and they needed each other in order to get going becausethere was an absolute paucity of equipment. For example: 'If you have a terminalcould I borrow it for a couple days while I get my program in it so it'll read mypunch paper tape reader?' That sort of thing."But in other respects, particularly in the way he moderated the meetings, French'sstyle was not consistent with the hacker spirit brewing in Homebrew. "Gordon wasa didactic sort," Lee Felsen-stein would later recall. "He would try to push thediscussion to where he wanted it to go. He wanted it to be an educational event,holding lectures, teaching people about certain things, especially stuff he wasexpert on. He was very upset if the discussion strayed from people literallyteaching other people in a schoolish sense. He would jump into whatever peoplewere saying and get involved in the content, injecting his opinions and tellingthem 'There's an important point that shouldn't be missed, and I know more aboutthis kind of stuff.' " After the first part of the meeting, in which people wouldintroduce themselves and say what they were working on, Gordon would stand upin front of the room and give what amounted to a tutorial, explaining the way themachine uses the code you feed into it, and informing the restless members howlearning good coding habits will save you headaches in the future ... and sooner orlater people would get so impatient they'd slip out of the meetings and startexchanging information in the hall. It was a touchy situation, the kind of complexhuman dilemma that hackers don't generally like to confront. But the feelingemerged that a new moderator should take over.The logical choice might have been Fred Moore, who sat in the front of the roomfor the first few months of Homebrew with his tape recorder and notebook,capturing the meeting so he could summarize highlights in the newsletter he putout every month. He was putting a lot of his time into the group, because he sawthat the hackers and their Altairs were on the verge of what might be a significantsocial force. "By sharing our experience and exchanging tips we advance the stateof the art and make low-cost computing possible for more folks," he wrote in thenewsletter, adding his social commentary: "The evidence is overwhelming thatpeople want computers, probably for self-entertainment and education usage. Whydid the Big Companies miss this market? They were busy selling overpricedmachines to each other (and the government and the military). They don't want tosell directly to the public. I'm all in favor of the splash MITS is having with theAltair because it will do three things: (1) force the awakening of other companiesto the demand for low-cost computers in the home ... (2) cause local computerclubs and hobby groups to form to fill the technical knowledge vacuum, (3) helpdemystify computers..."

Moore explicitly identified the purpose of the club as an information exchange.Like the unfettered flow of bits in an elegantly designed computer, informationshould pass freely among the participants in Homebrew. "More than any otherindividual, Fred Moore knew what sharing was all about," Gordon French laterrecalled. "That was one of the expressions he was always using sharing, sharing,sharing."But the majority of the club preferred a path that diverged from Fred Moore's.Fred was always harping on applications. Every so often in the early meetings hewould urge the members of this basically anarchistic group to get together and dosomething, though he was usually vague on what that something might be. Maybeusing computers to aid handicapped people, maybe compiling mailing lists fordraft resistance. Moore might have been correct in perceiving that the thrust of theclub was in some way political, but his view seemed at odds with the reality thathackers do not generally set about to create social change hackers act like hackers.Moore was less fascinated with the workings of computer systems than with theidea of bringing about a sharing, benevolent social system; he seemed to regardHomebrew not as a technical stronghold of people hungry for the pyramidbuildingpower of in-home computers, but as a cadre devoted to social change, likethe draft resistance or anti-nuke groups he'd been involved in. He would, suggestcake sales to raise funds for the group, or publish cute little poems in thenewsletter like "Don't complain or fuss / It is up to each of us / To make the Clubdo / What we want it to." Meanwhile, most of the club members would be turningto the back of the newsletter to study the schematics in the contribution called"Arbitrary Logic Function Generation Via Digital Multiplexers." That was the wayto change the world, and a lot more fun than a cake sale.Lee Felsenstein later reflected that he didn't think Moore "got his politics straight.At the surface level he remained at the point of the protest or the gesture of protest.But we were much more interested in what you might call the Propaganda of theDeed."So when an opening fortuitously appeared to make the meetings more compatiblewith the free-flowing hacker spirit Gordon French, doing consulting work for theSocial Security Administration, was temporarily called to Baltimore it was notMoore that some club members asked to moderate, but Lee Felsenstein. He turnedout to be an ideal choice, since he was as much a hardware hacker as any, but alsoa political computerist. He looked upon the call to moderate these meetings as asignificant elevation. He could now be the point man of the revolution on thehardware front, allowing the meetings to progress with just the right blend ofanarchism and direction, continuing his own guerrilla hardware design schemeswhich would lead to the triumph of the Tom Swift Terminal, and participating inthe resurrection of the dormant Community Memory concept a process which was

eginning that summer with the publication of a mimeographed periodical calledJournal of Community Communication, which would spread the concept ofmicrocomputer devices "created and used by people in their daily lives asmembers of communities."When he first stood in front of the room at a June 1975 meeting of Homebrew,though, he was terrified. As he recalls it, someone asked who the new moderatorwould be, and Marty Spergel, the "Junk Man" who owned the M&R Electronicssupply house, suggested Lee, and "the cry went up." It was as if he'd beencrowned. Nervous as he was, it was a chance he could hot pass up. As usual forLee, the risks of failing were less intimidating than the risks that came from nottrying at all.He knew a bit about running a forum. During his student radical days in 1968, he'dbeen listening to a Berkeley radio call-in show which was so badly engineered,with inaudible callers and fuzz and things, that he ran over to the studio waving hisportable radio and saying, "Listen to this, you idiots!" He wound up helping runthe show, and part of his role was to prime the guests before they went on the air.He thought that his role in Homebrew could draw from that; he urged people notfamiliar with addressing any audience larger than a tableful of electronic parts totalk to other humans about their interests. As Fred Moore sensed, this was to bethe heart of the meeting, the exchange of information. So Lee, creating anarchitecture for the meeting as if he were tackling an electronic design problem,flowcharted the session. There would be a time to go around the room and letpeople say what they were doing or what they wanted to know that would be the"mapping" section, akin to drawing a schematic. Then there would be a "randomaccess" section, where you would drift over to the people who suggested thingsthat interested you, or could answer your questions, or seemed to have informationyou wanted, or just seemed interesting to talk to. After that, there would beperhaps a brief talk, or someone would demonstrate a system or show a newproduct, and then there would be more mapping, and more random access. WhenLee saw that people were reluctant to return from the first random access sectionsometimes you could get lost in some technical point, or some religious issue likea technique for wire-wrapping a board or something he changed the structure toinclude only one random access section, at the end of the meeting. Thus debugged,the structure worked fine.Lee found that standing in front of a group of people who accepted him and wereappreciative of his role as a "stack pointer" the computer function whichdetermines the order by which computational tasks get done helped his consciouseffort to bring himself out of his mole-like shell. Soon into his tenure asmoderator, he felt confident enough to give the group a talk on his Tom SwiftTerminal; scrawling on the blackboard at the front of the small auditorium at

SLAC, he talked of video displays, hardware reliability, Ivan Illich, and the idea ofincorporating the user in the design. It was a good blend of social commentary andtechnical esoterica, and the Homebrewers appreciated it. Lee found himselftalented in the ready quip, and eventually hacked a little routine that he'd deliver atthe beginning of each meeting. He came to take a fierce pride in his job as clubmaster of ceremonies: in his thinking he was now the ringmaster of a hackermovement, a group that was central in shaping a microprocessor way of life.Not long after Lee took over, a troubled Fred Moore resigned his roles astreasurer, secretary, and editor of the newsletter. He was having some personalproblems; the woman he'd been seeing had left him. It was a rough time for him toleave: he felt that the club had been his legacy, in a sense, but it was probably clearby then that his hopes of it being devoted to public service work were futile.Instead there was the Propaganda of the Deed, and, more disturbing, some peoplewho came to meetings, Fred later recalled, "with dollar bill signs in their eyes,saying, 'Wow, here's a new industry, I'll build this company and make theseboards, and make a million...'" There were other computer-related social issuesMoore wanted to pursue, but he had come to realize, he later explained, that "thepeople in the club were way ahead [of him] as far as their knowledge ofelectronics or computing, [and because of this] the people were enamored withthose very devices, devices which were very seductive." So Fred was unhappy athow blindly people accepted technology. Someone had told Fred about the cheapfemale labor in Malaysia and other Asian countries who physically assembledthose magical chips. He heard how the Asian women were paid pitiful wages,worked in unsafe factories, and were unable to return to their villages, since theynever had a chance to leam the traditional modes of cooking or raising a family.He felt he should tell the club about it, force the issue, but by then he realized thatit was not the kind of issue that the Homebrew Club was meant to address.Still, he loved the club, and when his personal problems forced him to bow out andgo back East, he would later say it was "one of the saddest days of my life." Asmall, wistful figure, he stood at the blackboard at a mid-August meeting andwrote down his duties, asking who would do the newsletter, who would do thetreasury, the notes... And someone came up and began writing "Fred Moore"beside each item. It broke his heart, yet he felt for him it was over, and while hecouldn't share all his reasons he had to let his brothers know he couldn't be thereany more."I saw myself as a person who had helped those people get together and share theirskills and energy," Moore said later. And those goals had been reached. Indeed,each meeting seemed to crackle with spirit and excitement as people swappedgossip and chips, bootstrapping themselves into this new world. At the mappingperiod, people would stand up and say that they had a problem in setting up this or

that part of the Altair, and Lee would ask, "Who can help this guy?" and three orfour hands would go up. Fine. Next? And someone would say that he needed a1702 chip. Someone else might have an extra 6500 chip, and there'd be a trade.Then there would be people standing up to announce the latest rumors in SiliconValley. Jim Warren, a chunky former Stanford computer science grad student, wasa particularly well-connected gossipmonger who would pop up in the randomaccess period and go on for ten minutes about this company and the next, oftenslipping in some of his personal views on the future of computer communicationsby digital broadcasts.Another notorious purveyor of this weird form of gossip was a novice engineernamed Dan Sokol, who worked as a systems tester at one of the big Valley firms.His tidbits were often startlingly prescient (to keep them guessing, Sokol lateradmitted, he'd fabricate about half his rumors). Sokol, a long-haired, beardeddigital disciple who threw himself into Homebrew with the energy of the newlyconverted, quickly adhered to the Hacker Ethic. He considered no rumor tooclassified to share, and the more important the secret the greater his delight in itsdisclosure. "Is anybody here from Intel?" he might ask and, if there wasn't, hewould divulge the news of the chip that Intel had previously been successful inshielding from every company in the Valley (and perhaps from a cadre of Russianspies).Sometimes Sokol, an inveterate barterer, would actually reach into his pocket andproduce the prototype of a chip. For instance, one day at work, he recalled, somemen from a new company called Atari came in to test some chips. They wereextremely secretive, and didn't say what the chips were. Sokol examined them:some were marked Syntech, some AMI. Sokol knew guys at both companies, andthey told him the chips were custom parts, laid out and designed by the Ataripeople. So he took one home, put it on a board, and tested it out. The chip turnedout to contain a program to play the new video game "Pong" the new Atari firmwas just beginning to put together a home setup to play that game, in which twopeople control "paddles" of light on a TV screen and try to keep a blip-like "ball"in play. Sokol laid out the design on a circuit board, took it to Homebrew anddisplayed it. He took a few extra chips along with him, and traded the chips withothers, eventually winding up with a keyboard and a few RAM chips. "We'retalking outright thievery," he later explained; but in Homebrew terms, Sokol wasliberating a neat hack from the proprietary oppressors. Pong was neat, and shouldbelong to the world. And in Homebrew, exchanges like that were free and easy.Years earlier, Buckminster Fuller had developed the concept of synergy thecollective power, more than the sum of the parts, that comes of people and/orphenomena working together in a system and Homebrew was a textbook example

of the concept at work. One person's idea would spark another person intoembarking on a large project, and perhaps beginning a company to make a productbased on that idea. Or, if someone came up with a clever hack to produce arandom number generator on the Altair, he would give out the code so everyonecould do it, and by the next meeting someone else would have devised a game thatutilized the routine.The synergy would continue even after the meeting, as some of the Homebrewpeople would carry on their conversations till midnight at The Oasis, a raucouswatering hole near the campus. (The location had been suggested by Roger Melen;Jim Warren, a virulent anti-smoker, once tried to lure people over to the nosmokingsection at The Village Host, but that never caught on.) Piling into woodenbooths with tables deeply etched with the initials of generations of Stanfordstudents, Garland and Melen and Marsh and Felsenstein and Dompier and Frenchand whoever else felt like showing up would get emboldened by the meeting'senergy and the pitchers of beer. They would envision developments so fantasticthat no one ever believed they could be more than fantasies, far-flung fancies likethe day when home computers with TV displays would engender pornographicprograms SMUT-ROMs, they called them which would not be illegal becausethey'd only be pornographic if you scanned them the way the computer did. Howcould the raw computer code be pornographic? It was just one of dozens ofperversely improbable musings that would be not only realized but surpassedwithin a few years.Synergy: Marty Spergel, the Junk Man, knew exactly how that worked. A tanned,middle-aged baggier with a disarmingly wide smile, he thought that Homebrewwas like "having your own little Boy Scout troop, everybody helping everybodyelse. I remember I had trouble with a teletype machine at my office and one guy[at Homebrew] said he'd check it out. Not only did he check it out but he came outwith a little kit and he put in four or five different parts, oiled it, lubed it, adjustedall the gears. I said, 'How much do I owe you?' He said, 'Nothing.'" To the JunkMan, that was the essence of Homebrew.Spergel always kept track of what parts people needed; he'd sometimes bring abox of them to a meeting. After the Tom Swift Terminal talk, he asked Lee if hecared to build one for Spergel's company, M&R Electronics. Well, the Swiftterminal wasn't ready, Lee told him, but how about this design for a modem adevice which enables computers to communicate by the phone lines that Lee haddone a couple of years back? "He probably even knew what a modem was, thoughthat was not clear from the way he reacted," Lee said later. Modems sold then forfour to six hundred dollars, but Marty was able to construct Lee's cleanly designed"Pennywhistle" modem to sell for $109. They sent a copy of the schematics to LeeSolomon at Popular Electronics and he put a picture of Lee's modem on the cover.

Synergy. The increasing number of Homebrew members who were designing orgiving away new products, from game joysticks to i/o boards for the Altair, usedthe club as a source of ideas and early orders, and for beta-testing of theprototypes. Whenever a product was done you would bring it to the club, and getthe most expert criticism available. Then you'd distribute the technicalspecifications and the schematics if it involved software, you would distribute thesource code. Everybody could leam from it, and improve on it if they cared to andwere good enough.It was a sizzling atmosphere that worked so well because, in keeping with theHacker Ethic, no artificial boundaries were maintained. In fact, every principle ofthat Ethic, as formed by the MIT hackers, was exercised to some degree withinHomebrew. Exploration and hands-on activities were recognized as cardinalvalues; the information gathered in these explorations and ventures in design werefreely distributed even to nominal competitors (the idea of competition cameslowly to these new companies, since the struggle was to create a hacker versionof an industry a task which took all hands working together); authoritarian ruleswere disdained, and people believed that personal computers were the ultimateambassadors of decentralization; the membership ranks were open to anyonewandering in, with respect earned by expertise or good ideas, and it was notunusual to see a seventeen-year-old conversing as an equal with a prosperous,middle-aged veteran engineer; there was a keen level of appreciation of technicalelegance and digital artistry; and, above all, these hardware hackers were seeing ina vibrantly different and populist way how computers could change lives. Thesewere cheap machines that they knew were only a few years away from becomingactually useful.This, of course, did not prevent them from becoming totally immersed in hackingthese machines for the sake of hacking itself, . for the control, the quest, and thedream. Their lives were directed to that moment when the board they designed, orthe bus they wired, or the program they keyed in would take its first run... Oneperson later referred to that moment as akin to backing up a locomotive over asection of track you'd just fixed, and running it over that track at ninety miles anhour. If your track wasn't strong, the train would derail calamitously ... smoke ...fire ... twisted metal... But if you hacked well, it would rush through in anexhilarating rush. You would be jolted with the realization that thousands ofcomputations a second would be flashed through that piece of equipment withyour personal stamp on it. You, the master of information and lawgiver to a newworld.Some planners would visit Homebrew and be turned off by the technical ferocityof the discussions, the intense flame that burned brightest when people directed

themselves to the hacker pursuit of building. Ted Nelson, author of Computer Lib,came to a meeting and was confused by all of it, later calling the scruffily dressedand largely uncombed Homebrew people "chip-monks, people obsessed withchips. It was like going to a meeting of people who love hammers." Bob Albrechtrarely attended, later explaining that "I could understand only about every fourthword those guys were saying ... they were hackers." Jude Milhon, the woman withwhom Lee remained friends after their meeting through the Barb and theirinvolvement in Community Memory, dropped in once and was repelled by theconcentration on sheer technology, exploration, and control for the sake of control.She noted the lack of female hardware hackers, and was enraged at the malehacker obsession with technological play and power. She summed up her feelingswith the epithet "the boys and their toys," and like Fred Moore worried that thelove affair with technology might blindly lead to abuse of that technology.None of these concerns slowed down the momentum of Homebrew, which wasgrowing to several hundred members, filling the auditorium of SLAC, becomingthe fortnightly highlight in the lives of well over a hundred hard-core Brewers.What they had started was almost a crusade now, something that Ted Nelson,whose book was filled with anti-IBM screeds, should have appreciated. WhileIBM and the Big Guys never gave a thought to these random hackers in computerclubs with their ideas of owning computers, the Homebrew people and others likethem were hacking away not only at 8080 chips, but at the now crumblingfoundations of the Batch-processed Tower of Bit-Babble. "We reinforced eachother," Lee Felsenstein later explained. "We provided a support structure for eachother. We bought each other's products. We covered each other's asses, in effect.There we were the industrial structure was paying no attention to us. Yet we hadpeople who knew as much as anyone else knew about this aspect of technology,because it was so new. We could run wild, and we did."By the time Les Solomon, the New York guru of this movement, arrived for a visitto the West Coast, the golden age of the Homebrew Computer Club was gleamingits brightest. Solomon first checked on Roger Melen and Harry Garland, who hadjust finished the prototype of the Cromemco product that would be on the cover ofPopular Electronics in November 1975 an add-on board for the Altair whichwould allow the machine to be connected to a color television set, yieldingdazzling graphic results. In fact, Melen and Garland were calling the board "theDazzler." Les went over to Roger's apartment to see it, but before they put theboard into Roger's Altair the three of them got to drinking, and they were prettywell lubricated by the time the board was in and the color TV was on.

There were two Altair programs that could take advantage of the Dazzler then.One was called Kaleidoscope, and it shimmered and changed shape. It was a greatmoment for Solomon, seeing the computer he had helped bring to the worldmaking a color television set run beautiful patterns.Then they tried another program: LIFE. The game-that-is-more-than-a-game,created by mathematician John Conway. The game which MIT wizard Bill Gosperhad hacked so intently, to the point where he saw it as potentially generating lifeitself. The Altair version ran much more slowly than the PDP-6 program, ofcourse, and with none of those elegantly hacked utilities, but it followed the samerules. And it did it while sitting on the kitchen table. Garland put in a few patterns,and Les Solomon, not fully knowing the rules of the game and certainly not awareof the deep philosophical and mathematical implications, watched the little blue,red, or green stars (that was the way the Dazzler made the cells look) eat the otherlittle stars, or make more stars. What a waste of time, he thought. Who cares?Then he began idly playing with the machine, sketching out a pattern to run. Hehappened, in his inebriation, to put up somethng resembling the Star of David. Helater recalled: "I ran the program and watched the way it ate itself up. It took aboutten minutes and finally it died. I thought, 'Gee that's interesting does that mean theJewish religion is about to go after 247 generations?' So I drew a crucifix. Thatwent for 121 generations. Does this somehow mean that Judaism will outlastChristianity?" Soon he was putting up crescents and stars and symbols of differentmeanings, and the three of them four of them, including the Altair were exploringthe mysteries of the world's religions and nationalities. "Who the hell needsphilosophy at three o'clock in the mom-ing, drinking?" Solomon later said. "It wasa computer. It was there."But Les Solomon had more magic to transmit. One of the stories he would tell,stories so outrageous that only a penny-pincher of the imagination would complainof their improbability, was of the time he was exploring in pursuit of one of his"hobbies," pre-Colombian archeology. This required much time in jungles,"running around with Indians, digging, pitching around in the dirt ... you know,finding things." It was from those Indians, Les Solomon insisted, that he learnedthe vital principle of vril, a power which allows you to move huge objects withvery little force. Solomon believed that it was the power of vril which enabled theEgyptians to build the pyramids. (Perhaps vril was the power that Ed Roberts wastalking about when he realized that his Altair would give people the power of tenthousand pyramid-building Egyptians.) According to his story, Solomon met avenerable Indian brujo and asked if he might learn this power. Could the brujoteach him? And the brujo complied. Now, after the drunken evening with the LIFEprogram, Solomon attended a Homebrew meeting at SLAC where he wasaccorded the respect of an honored guest the midwife of Ed Roberts' Altair. And

after the meeting, Solomon was telling the hardware hackers about vril. There wassome skepticism.Outside of SLAC were huge orange picnic tables with concrete bases. Solomonhad the Homebrew people touch their hands on one of the tables, and he touchedit, too. They simply had to think it would rise.Lee Felsenstein later described the scene: "He'd said, 'Hey, let me show you... 'Wewere hanging on his every word, we'd do anything. So about six peoplesurrounded the table, put their hands on. He put his hand on top, squinted his eyesand said, 'Let's go.' And the table raised about a foot. It rose like a harmonicmotion, [as elegantly as] a sine wave. It didn't feel heavy. It just happened."Afterward, even the participants, save Solomon, were not sure that it had reallyhappened. But Lee Felsenstein, seeing another chapter close in that earthshatteringscience-fiction novel that was his life, understood the mythic impact ofthis event. They, the soldiers of the Homebrew Computer Club, had taken theirtalents and applied the Hacker Ethic to work for the common good. It was the actof working together in unison, hands-on, without the doubts caused by holdingback, which made extraordinary things occur. Even impossible things occur. TheMIT hackers had discovered that when their desire to hack led them to persist sosingle-mindedly that the barriers of security, exhaustion, and mental limits seemedto shrink away. Now, in the movement to wipe away generations of centralized,anti-hacker control of the computer industry, to change the world's disapprovingview of computers and computer people, the combined energy of hardwarehackers working together could do anything. If they did not hold back, not retreatwithin themselves, not yield to the force of greed, they could make the ideals ofhackerism ripple through society as if a pearl were dropped in a silver basin.Homebrew Club was sitting atop the power of vril.

11Tiny BASICWHILE the hunger to build and expand the Altair was as insatiable in thehardware hackers of the seventies as the desire to hack PDP-ls and 6s was to theMIT hackers of the sixties, a conflict was developing around the HomebrewComputer Club which had the potential to slow the idealistic, bootstrappingprocess and stem the rising tide lifting them all. At the heart of the problem wasone of the central tenets of the Hacker Ethic: the free flow of information,particularly information that helped fellow hackers understand, explore, and buildsystems. Previously, there had not been much of a problem in getting thatinformation from others. The "mapping section" time at Homebrew was a goodexample of that secrets that big institutional companies considered proprietarywere often revealed. And by 1976 there were more publications plugging intowhat was becoming a national pipeline of hardware hackers besides PCC and theHomebrew newsletter there was now Byte magazine in New Hampshire you couldalways find interesting assembly language programs, hardware hints, and technicalgossip. New hacker-formed companies would give out schematics of theirproducts at Homebrew, not worrying about whether competitors might see them;and after the meetings at The Oasis the young, blue-jeaned officers of the differentcompanies would freely discuss how many boards they shipped, and what newproducts they were considering. Then came the outcry over Altair BASIC. Itwould give the hardware hackers a hint of the new fragility of the Hacker Ethic.And indicate that as computer power did come to the people other, less altruisticphilosophies might prevail.It all started out as a typical hacker caper. Among the products that MITS hadannounced, but not yet sent out to those who had ordered it, was a version of theBASIC computer language. Among the tools an Altair owner could have, this wasto be one of the most highly coveted: because, once you had a BASIC on yourAltair, the machine's power to implement systems, to move mental pyramids,would improve "by orders of magnitude," as the expression went. Instead ofhaving to laboriously type in machine language programs onto paper tape and thenhave to retranslate the signals back (by then many Altair owners had installed i/ocards which would enable them to link the machines to teletypes and paper-tape

eaders), you would have a way to write quick, useful programs. While softwarehackers (and certainly such ancient assembly-language zealots as Gosper andGreenblatt) disdained BASIC as a fascist language, to hardware hackers trying toextend their systems it was an incredibly valuable tool.The problem was that at first you couldn't get a BASIC. It was particularlymaddening because MITS supposedly had one, though no one at Homebrew hadseen it run.Indeed, MITS did have a BASIC. It had had the language running since earlyspring 1975. Not long before MITS began shipping Altairs to computer-starvedPopular Electronics readers, Ed Roberts had gotten a phone call from two collegestudents named Paul Alien and Bill Gates.The two teen-agers hailed from Seattle. Since high school the two of them hadbeen hacking computers; large firms paid them to do lucrative contractprogramming. By the time Gates, a slim, blond genius who looked even youngerthan his tender years, had gone off to Harvard, the two had discovered there wassome money to be made in making interpreters for computer languages likeBASIC for new computers.The Altair article, while not impressing them technically, was exciting to them: itwas clear microcomputers were the next big thing, and they could get involved inall the action by writing BASIC for this thing. They had a manual explaining theinstruction set for the 8080 chip, and they had the Popular Electronics article withthe Altair schematics, so they got to work writing something that would fit in 4Kof memory. Actually, they had to write the interpreter in less than that amount ofcode, since the memory would not only be holding their program to interpretBASIC into machine language, but would need space for the program that the userwould be writing. It was not easy, but Gates in particular was a master at bummingcode, and with a lot of squeezing and some innovative use of the elaborate 8080instruction set, they thought they'd done it. When they called Roberts, they did notmention they were placing the call from Bill Gates' college dorm room. Robertswas cordial, but warned them that others were thinking of an Altair BASIC; theywere welcome to try, though. "We'll buy from the first guy who shows up withone," Roberts told them.Not long afterward, Paul Alien was on a plane to Albuquerque with a paper tapecontaining what he and his friend hoped would run BASIC on the machine. Hefound MITS a madhouse. "People would work all day long, rush home, eat theirdinner and come back," MITS executive Eddie Currie later recalled. "You couldgo in there any hour of the day or night and there would be twenty or thirty people,

a third to half the staff [excluding manufacturing]. And this went on seven days aweek. People were really caught up in this because they were giving computers topeople who were so appreciative, and who wanted them so badly. It was a grandand glorious crusade."Only one machine at MITS then had 4K of memory, and that barely worked.When Paul Alien stuck the tape in the teletype reader and read the tape in, no onewas sure what would happen. What happened was that the teletype it wasconnected to said, READY. Ready to program! "They got very excited," BillGates later said. "Nobody had ever seen the machine do anything."The BASIC was far from a working version, but it was close enough to completionand its routines were sufficiently clever to impress Ed Roberts. He hired Alien andarranged to have Gates work from Harvard to help get the thing working. When,not long afterward, Gates finally took off from school (he would never return) togo to Albuquerque, he felt like Picasso stumbling upon a sea of blank canvaseshere was a neat computer without utilities. "They had nothing!" he said later, awedyears after the fact. "I mean, the place was not sophisticated, as far as softwarewent. We rewrote the assembler, we rewrote the loader ... we put together asoftware library. It was pretty trashy stuff, but people could have fun using thething."The difference between the Gates-Alien software library and the software libraryin the drawer by the PDP-6 or the Homebrew Club library was that the former wasfor sale only. Neither Bill Gates nor Ed Roberts believed that software was anykind of sanctified material, meant to be passed around as if it were too holy to payfor. It represented work, just as hardware did, and Altair BASIC was listed in theMITS catalog like anything else it sold.Meanwhile, the hunger at Homebrew for an Altair BASIC was getting unbearable.As it turned out, Homebrew members were perfectly capable of writing BASICinterpreters, and some of them would do just that. Others, though, had orderedAltair BASIC and were impatiently awaiting delivery, just as they had impatientlyawaited delivery of other MITS products. Patience with MITS was getting thin,especially since the debacle with the dynamic memory boards which Ed Robertsinsisted should work and never did. People who had been burned by buyingmemory boards began to snort and pout when they spoke of Ed Roberts' company,especially since Roberts himself, who had attained legendary status as a reclusivegenius who never left Albuquerque, was spoken of as a greedy, power-mad foe ofthe Hacker Ethic. It was even rumored that he wished ill on his competitors. Theproper hacker response to competitors was to give them your business plan andtechnical information, so they might make better products and the world in generalmight improve. Not to act as Ed Roberts did at the First World Altair Convention,

held at Albuquerque a year after the machines were introduced, when the strongwilledMITS president refused to rent display booths to competitors, and,according to some, raged with fury when he heard that companies like BobMarsh's Processor Technology had rented suites at the convention hotel and wereentertaining prospective customers.So when the MITS Caravan came to the Rickeys Hyatt House in Palo Alto in Juneof 1975, the stage was set for what some would call a crime and others would callliberation. The "Caravan" was a MITS marketing innovation. Some of the MITSengineers would travel in a motor home, dubbed the MITS-mobile, from city tocity, setting up Altairs in motel seminar rooms and inviting people to see theamazing low-cost computers at work. The turnout would largely be people whoordered Altairs and had questions on when they could expect delivery. People whoowned them would want to know where they went wrong in assembling themonster. People who owned MITS memory boards would want to know why theydidn't work. And people who'd ordered Altair BASIC would complain that theyhadn't gotten it.The Homebrew Computer Club crowd was out in force when the Caravan met atthe Rickeys Hyatt on El Camino Real in Palo Alto in early June, and were amazedwhen they found that the Altair on display was running BASIC. It was connectedto a teletype which had a paper-tape reader, and once it was loaded anyone couldtype in commands and get responses instantly. It looked like a godsend to thosehackers who had already sent in several hundred dollars to MITS and wereimpatiently waiting for BASIC. There is nothing more frustrating to a hacker thanto see an extension to a system and not be able to keep hands-on. The thought ofgoing home to an Altair without the capability of that machine running in thepseudo-plush confines of the Rickeys Hyatt must have been like a prison sentenceto those hackers. But hands-on prevailed. Years later, Steve Dompier tactfullydescribed what happened next: "Somebody, I don't think anyone figured out who,borrowed one of their paper tapes lying on the floor." The paper tape in questionheld the current version of Altair BASIC written by Bill Gates and Paul Alien.Dan Sokol later recalled that vague "someone" coming up to him and, noting thatSokol worked for one of the semiconductor firms, asking if he had any way ofduplicating paper tapes. Sokol said yes, there was a tape-copying machineavailable to him. He was handed the tape.Sokol had all sorts of reasons for accepting the assignment to copy the tapes. Hefelt that MITS' price for the BASIC was excessive. He thought that MITS wasgreedy. He had heard a rumor that Gates and Alien had written the interpreter on abig computer system belonging to an institution funded in part by the government,and therefore felt the program belonged to all taxpayers. He knew that many

people had paid MITS for the product already, and their getting an early copywouldn't hurt MITS financially. But most of all, it seemed right to copy it. Whyshould there be a barrier of ownership standing between a hacker and a tool toexplore, improve, and build systems?Armed with this philosophical rationale, Sokol took the tape to his employer's, satdown at a PDP-11, and threaded in the tape. He ran it all night, churning out tapes,and at the next Homebrew Computer Club meeting he came with a box of tapes.Sokol charged what in hacker terms was the proper price for software: nothing.The only stipulation was that if you took a tape, you should make copies and cometo the next meeting with two tapes. And give them away. People snapped up thetapes, and not only brought copies to the next meeting but sent them to othercomputer clubs as well. So that first version of Altair BASIC was in free-flowingcirculation even before its official release.There were two hackers, however, who were far from delighted at thisdemonstration of sharing and cooperation Paul Alien and Bill Gates. They hadsold their BASIC to MITS on a basis that earned them royalties for every copysold, and the idea of the hacker community blithely churning out copies of theirprogram and giving them away did not seem particularly Utopian. It seemed likestealing. Bill Gates was also upset because the version that people wereexchanging was loaded with bugs that he was in the process of fixing. At first hefigured that people would just buy the debugged version. But even after MITS didrelease the debugged BASIC, it became clear that Altair users were not buying asmany copies as they would if they hadn't had a "pirated" BASIC already running.Apparently, they were either putting up with the bugs or, more likely, having agrand old hacker time debugging it themselves. Gates was becoming very upset,and when David Bunnell (who was then editing the newly begun Altair Users'Newsletter for MITS) asked him what he wanted to do about it, Gates, thennineteen and imbued with a cockiness that comes from technical virtuosity and notnecessarily social tact, said maybe he should write a letter. Bunnell promised himhe could get the letter out to the troublemakers.So Gates wrote his letter, and Bunnell not only printed it in the Altair newsletterbut sent it to other publications, including the Homebrew Computer Clubnewsletter. Entitled an "Open Letter to Hobbyists," it explained that while he andAlien had received lots of good feedback about the interpreter, most of the peoplepraising it hadn't bought it. The letter got to the heart of the matter quickly:Why is this? As the majority of hobbyists must be aware, most of

you steal your software. Hardware must be paid for, but software issomething to share. Who cares if the people who worked on it getpaid?Gates went on to explain that this "theft" of software was holding back talentedprogrammers from writing for machines like the Altair. "Who can afford to doprofessional work for nothing? What hobbyist can put 3 man-years intoprogramming, finding all the bugs, documenting his product and distributing forfree?"Though fairly impassioned, the letter, carefully edited by Bunnell, was far from ascreed. But all hell broke loose in the hacker community. Ed Roberts, thoughagreeing philosophically with Gates, couldn't help but notice the bad feelings, andwas upset that Gates hadn't consulted him before publishing the letter. TheSouthern California Computer Society threatened to sue Gates for callinghobbyists "thieves." Gates received between three and four hundred letters, onlyfive or six containing the voluntary payment he suggested that owners of piratedBASIC send him. Many of the letters were intensely negative. Hal Singer, editorof the Micro-8 Newsletter, which received Gates' letter via special delivery, wrotethat "the most logical action was to tear the letter up and forget about it."But the "software flap," as it came to be known, could not easily be forgotten.When MIT hackers were writing software and leaving it in the drawer for others towork on, they did not have the temptation of royalties. Slug Russell's Spacewar,for instance, had no market (there were only fifty PDP-ls made, and theinstitutions that owned them would hardly spend money to buy a space game).With the growing number of computers in use (not only Altairs but others as well),a good piece of software became something which could make a lot of money ifhackers did not consider it well within their province to pirate the software. Noone seemed to object to a software author getting something for his work butneither did the hackers want to let go of the idea that computer programs belongedto everybody. It was too much a part of the hacker dream to abandon.Steve Dompier thought that Bill Gates was merely whining. "Ironically, Billcomplaining about piracy didn't stop anything. People still believed, 'If you got it,you could run it.' It was like taping music off the air. BASIC had spread all overthe country, all over the world. And it helped Gates the fact that everybody hadAltair BASIC and knew how it worked and how to fix it meant that when othercomputer companies came on line and needed a BASIC, they went to Gates'company. It became a de facto standard."

People around the Homebrew Computer Club tried to ease into this new era, inwhich software had commercial value, without losing the hacker ideals. One wayto do that was by writing programs with the specific idea of distributing them inthe informal, though quasi-legal, manner by which Altair BASIC was distributedthrough a branching, give-it-to-your-friends scheme. So software could continuebeing an organic process, with the original author launching the program code on ajourney that would see an endless round of improvements.The best example of that organic process came in the proliferation of "TinyBASIC" interpreters. When PCC's Bob Albrecht first looked over his Altair, heimmediately realized that the only way to program it then was with the ponderousmachine language of the 8080 chip. He also saw how limited the memory was. Sohe went to Dennis Allison, a PCC board member who taught computer science atStanford, and asked him to make some design notes for a stripped-down BASICthat would be easy to use and wouldn't take up much memory. Allison wrote up aframework for a possible interpreter, labeling his article a "participatory project,"soliciting help from anyone else interested in writing "a minimal BASIC-likelanguage for writing simple programs." Allison later recalled the reaction to thePCC article: "Three weeks later we got responses, including one sent from twoguys from Texas who had written an entirely corrected and debugged TinyBASIC, with a complete code listing in octal." The Texas duo had put a BASIC in2K of memory and had sent it off, just like that, to be printed in PCC. Albrechtcomplied, running the entire source code, and in a few weeks Altair owners begansending in "bug reports" and suggestions for improvement. This was before any i/oboards for the Altair existed; PCC readers had been switching in the two thousandnumbers by hand, repeating the process each time they turned the machine on.Various hackers deluged PCC with new dialects of Tiny BASIC and interestingprograms written in the language. Albrecht, always more planner than hacker, wasworried that running all that code would make PCC too much a technical journal,so he devised a plan to publish a temporary offshoot of PCC called Tiny BASICJournal. But the response was so heavy that he realized an entire new magazinewas called for, devoted to software. He called on Jim Warren to edit it.Warren was the portly, mercurial computer science student who refused to go toThe Oasis after Homebrew because he couldn't stand the smoke. He was a veteranof the Midpeninsula Free University. In addition to several academic degrees, hehad about eight years of consulting experience in computers, and was chairman ofseveral special interest groups of the Association for Computer Machinery. PCCoffered him $350 a month for the job, and he took it right away. "It looked like

fun," he later explained. Knowing some people were militantly opposed to BASIC,he insisted that the journal not be limited to BASIC but publish software ingeneral, to help all those hardware hackers who had set up their machines andwanted the incantations to move the bits around inside them.The journal's very name was indicative of the atmosphere around PCC andHomebrew around then: because Tiny BASIC saves bytes of memory, it wasdubbed "The Dr. Dobbs Journal of Computer Calisthenics and Orthodontia ...Running Light Without Overbyte." Why not?Dr. Dobbs Journal (DDJ) would be, Warren editorialized in the premier issue,about "free and very inexpensive software." In a letter sent out to explain themagazine, he elaborated: "There is a viable alternative to the problems raised byBill Gates in his irate letter to computer hobbyists concerning 'ripping offsoftware. When software is free, or so inexpensive that it's easier to pay for it thanduplicate it, then it won't be 'stolen.'"Warren saw DDJ as a flagship of the hacker dream. He wanted it to be aclearinghouse for assemblers, debuggers, graphics, and music software. Also, hesaw it as a "communication medium and intellectual rabble-rouser." But thingswere happening so fast by 1976 that more often than not the hardware news heheard or the software solution to a problem couldn't wait for publication, and hewould rush to the next meeting of Homebrew where he became a familiar figure,standing up and spouting all the news that had come over his desk that week.Warren's vocal lobbying for a public-domain approach to software was not theonly course of action. Perhaps the most characteristic hacker response to the threatthat commercialization might change the spirit of hacking came from anadamantly independent software wizard named Tom Pittman. Pittman was notinvolved in any of the major projects then in progress around Homebrew. He wasrepresentative of the middle-aged hardware hackers who gravitated towardHomebrew and took pride in associating with the microcomputer revolution, butderived so much satisfaction from the personal joys of hacking that they kept theirprofiles low. Pittman was Lee Felsenstein's age, and had even been at Berkeley atthe same time, but did not live the swashbuckling internal life of Felsenstein.Pittman had been going faithfully to Homebrew since the first meeting, andwithout making much effort to communicate he be came known as one of thepurest and most accomplished engineers in the club. He was a slightly built fellowwith thick glasses and a wide, flickering smile which signaled, despite an obviousshyness, that he'd always be willing to indulge in conversation about hardware. Hehad built an improbably useful computer system based on the relatively low-power

Intel 4004 chip, and for a time maintained the Homebrew mailing list on it. Hetook a perverse pleasure in evoking astonishment from people when he told themwhat he had done with the system, making it perform tasks far beyond itstheoretical limits.Pittman had dreamed of having his own computer since his high school days in theearly sixties. All his life he had been a self-described "doer, not a watcher," but heworked alone, in a private world dominated by the reassuring logic of electronics."I'm not very sensitive to other people's thought patterns," he said later. He wouldgo to the library to take out books on the subject, go through them, then take outmore. "I couldn't read long before I'd set the book down and do things in my headif nowhere else."By the time he had arrived at Berkeley, he had already taken college-level courseson all sorts of math and engineering subjects. His favorite course during hisfreshman year was Numerical Analysis. While the Free Speech Movement wasraging around him, Pittman was blithely tangling with the problems in the labsection of the course, systematically wrestling each mathematical conundrum tothe ground till it howled for mercy. But he was bored by the lecture part of thecourse; it didn't seem "interesting," and his mark in Numerical Analysis was splitbetween an A in lab and an F in lecture. He had identical results upon repeatingthe course. Perhaps he was not destined to fit into the organized structure of auniversity.Then he found his escape. A sympathetic professor helped him get a job at aDepartment of Defense laboratory in San Francisco. He worked on computersthere, helping on game simulations that gauged the radiation effect fromhypothetical nuclear explosions. He had no ethical problem with the job. "Beingbasically insensitive to political issues, I never even noticed," he later said. Hisbeliefs as a devout Christian led him to declare himself a "semi-objector." He laterexplained: "It means I was willing [to serve] but not willing to shoot people. Iworked there at the laboratory to serve my country. I had a lot of fun."He welcomed the chance to finally become addicted to computers; though hiswork hours officially ended at six, he would often work much later, enjoying thepeace of being the only one there. He would work until he was too tired to go on;one night driving home to the East Bay he fell asleep and woke up in a rosebushon the side of the road. He learned the computer system at the lab so well that hebecame the unofficial systems hacker; whenever people had a problem with themachine they came to Tom. He was crushed when, after the war ended anddefense funds withered, the lab closed.

But by then the possibility of making his own computer had materialized. He wentdown to Intel, maker of the first microprocessor, the 4004 chip, and offered towrite an assembler for it. He would take the parts to build a computer in exchangefor the job. Scrunching code like a master, he did a compact assembler, then wrotea debugger in exchange for more parts. The people at Intel began to send any 4004buyers who needed programming down to Tom. By the time he began going toHomebrew meetings, he had moved to San Jose, having built a considerableconsulting business to support himself and his wife, who accepted his computerfanaticism only grudgingly.While he was fascinated by the technological brotherhood of Homebrew, TomPittman was among those who never considered going into business as Bob Marshdid with Processor Technology. Nor did he think of working at any of thoseenergetic start-up firms. "I never hit it off with anyone there. The people didn'tknow me I'm a loner," he later said. "Besides, I don't have managerial skills. I'mmore a software person than an electronic engineer."But after the "software flap" caused by Bill Gates' letter, Pittman decided to takepublic action. "Gates was moaning about the ripens, and people were saying, 'Ifyou didn't charge $150, we'd buy it.' I decided to prove it." He had been followingthe Tiny BASIC news in Dr. Dobbs Journal, and understood the guidelines ofwriting a BASIC. And he noted that there were some new computers, competitorsto MITS, coming out that used the Motorola 6800 chip instead of the Intel 8080,and there was no BASIC interpreter written to work on them. So he decided towrite a 6800 Tiny BASIC interpreter and sell it for the sum of five dollars, afraction of the MITS price, to see if people would buy instead of stealing.Being a true hacker, Pittman was not satisfied with running just any kind of TinyBASIC: he was a captive of the beast he called "the creepy feature creature,"which stands behind the shoulder of every hacker, poking him in the back andurging, "More features! Make it better!" He put in things that some people thoughtimpossible in a "tiny" language like room to insert helpful remarks, and utilizationof a full command set. Inside of two months he had his interpreter running, and hegot lucky when he sold it to the AMI company for $3,500, on the condition thatthe sale be nonexclusive. He still wanted to sell it to hobbyists for five dollars ashot.He sent an ad to Byte magazine, and within days of its appearance he had fiftydollars in his mailbox. Some people sent in ten dollars or more, saying the fivewas too little. Some sent in five dollars with a note saying not to ship anything tothem they'd already copied it from a friend. Pittman kept sending them out. Hiscosts included twelve cents for the paper tape, and fifty cents for printing themanual he'd written. He would sit on the couch of his modest home at night,

listening to the Christian radio station in San Jose or tape cassettes of speakers atChristian conferences, and fold paper tapes, having mastered the skill of foldingevery eight inches. Then he'd go to the post office, and send the packages off. Itwas all done by hand, with the help of his wife, who had been skeptical about thewhole enterprise.It was a triumph for hackerism, but Tom Pittman did not stop there. He wanted totell people about it, show them the example by which they could grow. He latergave a presentation at a Homebrew meeting, and when he loped to the front of theauditorium, Lee saw that his body was knotted with tension. Lee tried to loosenhim up "They call you Tiny Tom Pittman, but you're really not so small," he said."Why is that?" Tom, not used to public repartee, did not respond with more than alaugh. But when he began speaking he gained strength, coiling and uncoiling hisbody, chopping his arm in the air to make points about free software. It had acertain drama to it, this normally taciturn technician speaking with heartfeltopenness about an issue that obviously mattered to him: w the free flow ofinformation.Not long after Tiny BASIC he went a step further, announcing his intention towrite a FORTRAN for microcomputers and sell it for twenty-five dollars. Thiswas to be another gung-ho full-time enterprise, and he was still hacking awaywhen, as he later put it, "my computer widow left me. She decided she didn't wantto be married to an addict."It was a jolt that many Homebrew members those who had convinced a woman tomarry a computer addict in the first place would experience. "I would say thedivorce rate among computer-ists is almost 100 percent certainly in my case,"Gordon French later said. That did not make things easier for Tom Pittman. Hehad no heart to finish the FORTRAN. He did a lot of thinking about the devotionhe'd given to the machine, and where it came from, and sat down to writesomething, not in machine language, but in English.He called the essay "Deus Ex Machina, or The True Computer-ist" (one might usethe last word interehangeably with "hacker"), and it was a telling explanation ofwhat bound together the hardware hackers of Silicon Valley and the artificialintelligence hackers of Cambridge. He wrote about the certain feeling one getsafter hacking something. "In that instant," he wrote, "I as a Christian thought Icould feel something of the satisfaction that God must have felt when He createdthe world." He went on to compile the creed of the computerist the hardwarehacker which included such familiar "articles of faith" (to Homebrew people) as:

The computer is more interesting than most people. I love to spendtime with my computer. It is fun to write programs for it, playgames on it, and to build new parts for it. It is fascinating to try tofigure out what part of the program it is in by the way the lightsnicker or the radio buzzes. It beats dull conversation any day.The computer needs just a little more (memory) (speed)(peripherals) (better BASIC) (newer CPU) (noise suppression on thebus) (debugging on this program) (powerful editor) (bigger powersupply) before it can do this or that.There is no need to buy this software package or that circuitboard; Ican design one better.Never miss a club meeting. This is where it's at. The juicy littlenews bits, the how-to-fixits for the problem that has been buggingme the last two weeks ... that is the real thing! Besides, they mighthave some free software.Pittman's tone shifted at that point. He forced himself to take exception to thosearticles of faith, testifying that he had "been there" and seen the problems withthem. Point by point he demonstrated the folly of hacking, and concluded bywriting: "By now the computer has moved out of the den and into the rest of yourlife. It will consume all of your spare time, and even your vacation, if you let it. Itwill empty your wallet and tie up your thoughts. It will drive away your family.Your friends will start to think of you as a bore. And what for?"Shaken by the breakup of his marriage, Tom Pittman decided to change his habits.And he did. He later described the transformation: "I take a day of rest now. Iwon't turn on the computer on Sunday. The other six days, I'll work like a dog."Lee Felsenstein was gaining confidence and purpose through his role astoastmaster of the Homebrew Computer Club. His express desire was to allow theclub to develop as an anarchist community, a society of non-joiners wed, whetherthey knew it or not, by the Propaganda of the Deed. He saw what Moore andFrench didn't: for maximum political effect in the war of the hardware hackersagainst the evil forces of IBM and such, the strategy should reflect the style ofhackerism itself. This meant that the club would never be run like a formal

ureaucracy.If he desired a blueprint for failure, he need only look to the south, at the SouthernCalifornia Computer Society. Starting up a few months after Homebrew's firstmeeting, SCCS took advantage of the hobbyists in the electronics-intensive area(almost all the high-tech defense contractors are in Southern California) to quicklyboost its membership to eight thousand. Its leaders were not happy with the mereexchange of information: they envisioned group buying plans, a nationalmagazine, and an influence which would allow hobbyists to dictate terms to thegrowing microcomputer industry. Homebrew had no steering committee to conferon goals and directions; it only incorporated as an afterthought, almost a year afterinception; it had no real dues requirements only a suggested contribution of tendollars a year to get its modest newsletter. But SCCS had a formal board ofdirectors, whose regular meetings were often sparked by acrimonious debates onWhat the Club Should Be. It wasn't long before SCCS was publishing a slickmagazine, had a growing group buying program (as much as forty thousanddollars a month), and was considering changing its name to the National ComputerSociety.Bob Marsh, hawking Processor Technology boards, often flew down to the packedSCCS meetings, and even sat on the SCCS board for a few months. He laterdescribed the difference between the two groups: "Homebrew was a place wherepeople came together mysteriously, twice a month. It never was an organization.But SCCS was more organized. Those guys had megalomania. The politics wereterrible, and ruined it." Somehow, the particulars never became clear, a lot ofmoney was misplaced in the buying scheme. The editor they hired to run the slickmagazine felt justified in dropping the publication's relationship with the club andgoing off on his own with the magazine (still publishing as Interface Age); alawsuit resulted. The board meetings became incredibly tempestuous, and the badfeelings spread to the general membership meetings. Eventually the club fadedaway.Though Lee's plans were no less ambitious than those of the leaders of SCCS, herealized that this war must not be waged in a bureaucratic, follow-the-leaderfashion. He was perfectly happy dealing with an army of Bob Marshes and TomPittmans, some changing the world by dint of useful products manufactured in thespirit of hackerism and others just going their way, being hackers. The eventualgoal would be a mass distribution of the wonderment that Lee Felsenstein hadexperienced in his basement monastery. An environment conducive to the Hands-On Imperative. As Lee told a conference of the Institute of Electrical andElectronic Engineers in 1975, "The industrial approach is grim and doesn't work:the design motto is 'Design by Geniuses for Use by Idiots,' and the watchword fordealing with the untrained and unwashed public is KEEP THEIR HANDS OFF! ...

The convivial approach I suggest would rely on the user's ability to leam about andgain some control over the tool. The user will have to spend some amount of timeprobing around inside the equipment, and we will have to make this possible andnot fatal to either the equipment or the person."The piece of equipment to which Felsenstein referred was his Tom SwiftTerminal, which still had not been built in 1975. But it was getting close. BobMarsh, eager to expand the scope of his booming Processor Technology company,offered Lee a deal he couldn't refuse. "I'll pay you to design the video portion ofthe Tom Swift Terminal," he told him. That sounded all right to Lee, who hadbeen doing work in documentation and schematics for Processor Technology allalong. Bob Marsh, in the company's first year of business, was adhering to theHacker Ethic. The company distributed schematics and source code for software,free or at nominal cost. (In partial reaction to MIT's high-priced BASIC, ProcessorTechnology would develop its own and sell it, along with source code, for fivedollars.) For a time, the company had a socialistic salary structure of $800 a monthfor all employees. "We didn't pay attention to profits or management of almost anykind."Lee was not an employee, choosing to work on a contract basis. "I'd quote them aprice," Lee later recalled, and "they had to get the price up by a factor of ten, sinceI was such a small-time thinker. In terms of money."In less than three months, Lee had done a working prototype. Lee's "video displaymodule" (VDM) embodied a different philosophy than the other video board forAltair, Cromemco's Dazzler. The Dazzler used color, and produced its flashyeffects by constantly going back to the memory in the main chip of the Altair (orany of the other new computers that used a similar hardware bus). Steve Dompierliked to use his Dazzler while running BASIC: it threw up patterns on the screenthat gave a Rorschach-like visual impression of the computer memory at a giventime a cryptic output which gave clues to program operation, much like the auralimpression given of the TX-O's memory by the speaker under the console.Lee's video display module, though, was a more stridently focused piece ofequipment, designed with the eventual re-formation of Community Memory inmind. Its output was black and white, and instead of using dots it actually formedalphanumeric characters. (Lee considered adding another alternative hexagrams,as found in the I Ching but that idea got shelved somehow.) The cleverest thingabout Lee's VDM, though, was the way it used the speed of new microprocessorchips to allow the machine's memory to be shared between computational dutiesand display duties. It worked like a mini-time-sharing system, where the two userswere the video display and the computer itself. The VDM, along with an Altairand other expansion cards, made the promise of the TV Typewriter a reality, and

was an instant success, even though it was, like almost every ProcessorTechnology product, not ready till somewhat after the promised delivery date, inlate 1975.One person particularly impressed by the VDM was Les Solomon in New York.He was not content to bask in the reflected glory of launching Ed Roberts' seminalmachine. His magazine had followed up on the coup, he had delivered morecomputer-related cover stories, and now he was hoping to present a completecomputer video display terminal a self-contained item which would have thepower of the computer as well as a display capability. It would be the next stepbeyond the Altair, a combination computer-teletype with video. No more goddamnbloody fingers from the flicking switches on the Altair front panel. In pursuit ofthe product, Solomon went to Phoenix to visit Don Lancaster, inventor of the TVTypewriter (the one Bob Marsh had tried to build in Berkeley), and convinced himto drive down to Albuquerque to meet Ed Roberts; maybe the two giants mightcombine on a terminal project. As Solomon later described it, the meeting was"bang, clash. A clash of egos. Don refused to change his design to match Ed'scomputer because he said Ed's was inefficient. Ed said, 'No way, I can't redesignit.' They immediately decided to kill each other on the spot, and I separated them."So Solomon went to Bob Marsh, whose Processor Technology company alreadyoffered the VDM and memory boards and even a "motherboard" which couldreplace the basic circuitry of the Altair, and asked, "Why don't you put them alltogether? Let's make something we can look at." If Marsh could deliver an"intelligent terminal" in thirty days, Solomon would put it on the cover.Bob talked to Lee, who agreed to do most of the design, and as they discussed itthey realized that what Les Solomon wanted was not merely a terminal, but acomplete computer. In the year since the Altair had been announced, "hobbyist"computers, sold either in kits or assembled, had appeared, most notably one calledthe IMSAI, put out by a company whose employees had taken Wemer Erhard's esttraining. Almost all of these computers used the 100-pin Altair bus as their base.Almost all looked like the Altair, an oversized stereo receiver with lights andswitches instead of an FM dial. All required some sort of terminal, usually aklunky teletype, for the user to do anything with it.For that month, December of 1975, Lee and Bob worked on the design. Marshwanted to use an 8080 chip, an idea which Lee at first still opposed for politicalreasons (why one centralized silicon dictator?) but came to accept as he realizedthat a truly "intelligent" terminal one which gave you all the power of a computerwould need a brain. Lee figured he would use his junkyard-paranoid style tobalance out the rest of the design, so that the brain would not be tempted to run

amok. Marsh would often interrupt Lee's design-in-progress to reveal his latestinspiration from the "feature creature."Lee later recounted this process in a magazine article: "When [Marsh] had littleelse with which to concern himself, he was continually turning up with newfeatures and economies that he suddenly wanted incorporated in the design. Hewould explain the problem or opportunity and then preface his technical solutionwith an inevitable, 'All's ya gotta do is...' Were the designer a prima donna, therelationship would terminate after the second such incident, with the designerfuming about 'professionalism' and 'interference.' Of course since my workshopwas in the same room as his, I could not have gotten very far if I had wanted tostamp out in a rage."Marsh, like Lee, was thinking of the machine as a political tool as well as a good,fun product to design. "We wanted to make the microcomputer accessible tohuman beings," he later said. "The public didn't know it yet, but the computer wasthe coming thing and every home would have one and people could use computersfor useful things. We really weren't sure what they were [but] we felt we wereparticipating in a movement, in a way."Lee suggested that since they were putting the wisdom of Solomon into themachine, it should be called the Sol. (Les Solomon later commented: "If it works,they'll say Sol means 'sun' in Spanish. If it don't work, they're gonna blame it onthe Jewish guys.")Completing the Sol was a process that took six weeks of fourteen- to seventeenhourdays, seven days a week. Lee, just about living on orange juice, spent endlesshours staring at the Mylar spaghetti of the layout on the fluorescent light table.Meanwhile, one of Bob Marsh's woodworker friends had managed to get a bargainon center-cut pieces of walnut, and it was determined that the sides of the Solwould be made of that classy material. The prototype boards were finally finished,only fifteen days after Les Solomon's original deadline. Two weeks later, a daybefore the newly scheduled delivery date in late February 1976 in New York, theywere racing to get all the workings to fit on an Altair-style bus, along with akluged-up power supply, a keyboard, and even some preliminary software. Theoperating system was written by Processor Tech's head of software development,Homebrewer Steve Dompier.Ever frugal, Marsh had booked himself and Lee on a night flight. Finishing just intime, they had to race to a heliport in order to make the plane. They arrived atKennedy around 6 A.M., frazzled, with the Computer of the Common Mandistributed between two paper bags. Nothing was open at the airport, even for

coffee, so Solomon invited them over to his home in Flushing for breakfast. Bythen Les Solomon's home, particularly his basement workshop, was achievinglegendary status as a proving ground for thrilling new breakthroughs. He wouldoften entertain the young hardware hackers who designed these products, and hiswife would always recognize them at a glance. "Because they all had the samething," Solomon would later explain. "That little burning inside the eyeball. Sheused to say there was an inside personality, and though they looked likedisreputable bums, you looked them in the face, you looked in those eyes and youknew who they were. She'd look at them and what would come out was thebrightness, the intense-ness."The brightness dimmed on that cold February morning: Marsh and Felsenstein'sterminal didn't work. After a quick day-trip to New Hampshire to meet the folks atthe new hobbyist magazine Byte, Lee was able to get to a workbench and find theproblem a small wire had come loose. They went back to the offices of PopularElectronics and turned it on. "It looked like a house on fire," Solomon later said.He had immediately grasped that he was looking at a complete computer.The resulting Popular Electronics article spoke of an intelligent computerterminal. But it was clearly a computer, a computer that, when ProcessorTechnology packaged it in its pretty blue case with walnut sides, looked more likea fancy typewriter without a platen. There were new schematics for the revised kit(under one thousand dollars), which of course were provided to anyone whowanted to see how the thing worked. Marsh later estimated that they got thirty toforty thousand requests for schematics. Orders for the kit kept pouring in. Itlooked like the Sol would be the machine that broke the computer out of thehobbyist market and brought hacking into the home.The first public display of the Sol was at a show in Atlantic City called PC '76. Itwas an odd affair, the first time the tradesmen of this hobbyist-computer businessall got together to show their collective wares. The site was the Shelboume Hotel,and in those pre-gambling days the hotel's glory was visibly faded. There wereholes in the walls, some of the doors to the rooms had no knobs, the airconditioningdidn't work. Some indignant elderly retirees living at the hotel almostattacked Steve Dompier in the elevator when they saw his long hair. Still, it was anexhilarating experience. Almost five thousand people attended, many of themtraveling from other parts of the country (SCCS ran a large group excursion whichmany Bay Area people took advantage of). Homebrew-inspired companies likeProcessor Tech and Cromemco finally met similar souls from other parts of thecountry, and everybody stayed up far into the night, swapping technical hints andplotting the future.The Sol got lots of notice. The hackers all seemed to agree that with its low

profile, its typewriter-style built-in keyboard, and its video display, the Sol was thenext step. Not long afterward, Processor Tech managed to get a Sol on televisionon Tom Snyder's "Tomorrow" show. The normally abrasive television personalitycame face to face with the newest manifestation of the hacker dream a Solcomputer running a game program written by Steve Dompier. The game wascalled "Target," and it consisted of a little cannon on the bottom of the screen bywhich the user could shoot down a series of alien spaceships, made ofalphanumeric characters, sailing across the top of the screen. It was a clever littlehack, and Steve Dompier, as he later said, "basically gave it away." After all, thepoint of writing those games was to see people have fun with the machine."Target" was perfect for showing Tom Snyder and a television audience a newway to look at those monsters shrouded in evil, computers. Imagine these grungypost-hippies being able to bring a computer over to a television studio, set it up,and have a total technical illiterate like Tom Snyder do something with it. Tomwent along, and before you could say "commercial break" he was deeply involvednot in the least kidding in shooting down aliens, which would zip across the screenin greater numbers as the game progressed, and even dispatch little parachutistsloaded with grenades. It gave you a challenge you felt compelled to rise to. As youshot down the aliens, Tom Snyder was noticing, there was this feeling of ... power.A feeling that gave you a small taste of what it must be like to use this machine toactually create. What mysteries lay within this typewriter-shaped machine? Evensomething as simple as "Target" could get someone thinking about that. "No one'sgiven it a definition yet," Steve Dompier later said, "but I think there's a piece ofmagic there." In any case, as Dompier later recalled, "they had to drag TomSnyder off the computer to have him finish the show."

12WozSTEVE Wozniak did not sit near the front of the SLAC auditorium along with LeeFelsenstein during Homebrew meetings. His participation in the mapping sessionswere infrequent. He had no great social scheme, did not incubate plans for aCommunity Memory-style assault on the foundations of the batch-processedsociety. Meeting after meeting, Steve Wozniak would be at the back of the room,along with a loose contingent of followers of his digital exploits mostly highschool-age computer nuts drawn by the sheer charisma of his hacking. He lookedlike a bum. His hair fell hap-hazardly on his shoulders, he had the kind of beardgrown more to obviate the time-consuming act of shaving than to enhanceappearance, and his clothes jeans and sports shirts, with little variation neverseemed to fit quite right.Still, it was Steve Wozniak, known to his friends as "Woz," who would bestexemplify the spirit and the synergy of the Homebrew Computer Club. It wasWozniak and the computer he'd design that would take the Hacker Ethic, at least interms of hardware hacking, to its apogee. It would be the legacy of the Homebrew.Stephen Wozniak did not reach his views of hackerism through personal struggleand political rumination as Lee Felsenstein did. He was more like RichardGreenblatt and Stew Nelson: a born hacker. He grew up in Cupertino, California,amidst the curving streets lined with small single-family homes and the one-story,sparsely windowed buildings that sowed the crop of silicon which would be socentral to his existence. Even in grammar school, Wozniak could get so engrossedin mathematical ponderings that his mother had to rap on his head to bring himback to the real world. He won a science contest at thirteen for building acomputer-like machine which could add and subtract. His friend Alan Baum laterremembered him at Homestead High School: "I saw a guy scribbling these neatdiagrams on a piece of paper. I said, 'What's that?' He said, 'I'm designing acomputer.' He had taught himself how to do it."Baum was impressed enough to join this unusual classmate in a quest for computeraccess, and through contacts in the engineering-rich Silicon Valley they managed

to get on various time-sharing computers. Every Wednesday they would leaveschool and have a friend sneak them into a computer room at the Sylvaniacompany. They'd program the machine to do things like printing out all the powersof two and finding the primes. The two followed the computer industry with theserious passion with which fanatic sports fans might follow favorite teams. Everytime they heard of a new minicomputer being released, they would write to themanufacturer, be it Digital or Control Data or whoever, and request the manual, arequest often routinely fulfilled. When the manual came, they would devour it.They would instantly turn to the part which described the computer's instructionset. They would note how many registers the machine had, how it added, how itdid multiplication, division. They could discern from the instruction set thecharacter of the machine, how easy it would be to use. Was this a machine tofantasize about? If it was, Woz later recalled, he would "spend hours in classwriting code without ever being able to test it." Once, after receiving a manual fora Data General Nova computer, he and Baum took it upon themselves to redesignit, even sending their new design to the company, in case Data General wanted toimplement the suggestions of two high school kids."It just seemed neat [to design computers]," Baum later recalled. "It seemed likean important thing to do. The glamour appealed to us. It was fun." As high schoolprogressed, and Wozniak scrounged more time on computers to perfect his skills,Baum would often be astounded at the programming tricks Woz would come upwith. "He seems to have invented all the tricks on his own," Baum later said."Steve looks at things a different way. He says, 'Why don't I try this?' He's drivento use all the problem-solving techniques he can because ordinary design isn'tgood enough. He has to be the best. He'll do things no one's thought of, use everytrick. Sometimes, using every trick, you find better ways to do things."Woz graduated from high school before Baum did, and went off to college. But afew years later, both wound up working at the same company, the Hewlett-Packard computer firm. An extremely high-tech operation, devoted to highperformancecomputers which were like Mercedes cars compared to IBM's clunkyCaddies, this was truly the big leagues, and Woz was very happy there. He wasmarried, but computers still were his number one priority. Besides his work at HPdesigning arithmetic logic for calculator chips, he also did some extra design workfor the Atari game company, where another high school friend, Steve Jobs,worked. This provided side benefits, like the time he went into a bowling alley andencountered a coin-operated videogame with a sign promising a pizza to anyonewho scored over a certain level. After a number of pizzas, his amazed companionasked him how he had beaten the game so easily. "I designed it," said Wozniakbetween spasms of laughter.A prankster with an unsettling, sometimes sophomoric sense of humor, Woz ran a

free "dial-a-joke" service from his home, dispensing a seemingly endless supply ofPolish jokes. That was not the only amusement he derived from the phone. He andJobs became inspired after reading a 1971 article in Esquire about a legendaryfellow known as Captain Crunch who was a devoted builder of blue boxes thesewere devices which allowed one to make long distance calls for free. Jobs andWoz built their own, and not only used them to make free calls but at one pointsold them door-to-door at the Berkeley dorms. Woz once used his box to see if hecould phone the Pope; he pretended he was Henry Kissinger, and almost reachedHis Eminence before someone at the Vatican caught on.It was a freewheeling life Woz lived, centered on hacking for HP, hacking on hisown, and playing games. He loved to play games, especially electronic ones likePong. He also played tennis; like Bill Gosper playing Ping-Pong, Wozniak got akick out of putting spin on the ball. As he later told an interviewer, "The winningisn't as important as the running after the ball." A sentiment which applied tohacking computers as well as tennis.He dreamed, always, of that computer he might design for himself. He had alreadyhomebrewed his own TV Typewriter, a good first step. His goal was, of course, acomputer built to encourage more hacking a Tool to Make Tools, a system tocreate systems. It would be cleverer than any preceding it.It was 1975, and most people, had they heard his dream, would have thought hewas nuts.Then Alan Baum saw the notice for the Homebrew meeting on a bulletin boardand told Woz about it. They both went. Baum, admittedly too lazy to build acomputer when he was surrounded with state-of-the-art machines at HP, wasn'tterribly excited. But Woz was thrilled. Here were thirty people like him peoplequixot-ically fixated on building their own computers. When Marty Spergel passedout data sheets on the 8008 chip, Woz took one home and examined it until herealized that those minicomputers he was thinking of designing big machines likethe ones Digital Equipment made were unnecessary. You could do it withmicrochips, like that Altair he had seen that night. He got hold of all the literaturehe could on microprocessors and wrote for more information, started files on allsorts of i/o devices and chips, and began designing circuits for this eventualcomputer. The second Homebrew Computer Club newsletter printed his report oncurrent activities:Have TVT my own design ... have my own version of Pong, avideogame called breakthrough, a NRZI reader for cassettes verysimple! Working on a 17-chip TV chess display (includes 3 stored

oards); a 30-chip TV display. Skills: digital design, interfacing, I/Odevices, short on time, have schematics.The Homebrew atmosphere was perfect for Steve Wozniak; there was activity andenergy focusing on the experimentation and electronic creativity which were asessential to him as the air he breathed or the junk food he ate. And even a personnot normally taken to socializing could find himself making friends. Woz oftenused his home terminal to access the account that had been set up for Homebrewmembers on the Call Computer service. (Call Computer was a service that allowedpeople with home terminals to access a mainframe computer by phone.) There wasa program on the computer much like the function on the MIT ITS system, wheretwo people could "chat" to each other while on the computer, sharing information.Woz not only used this to communicate electronically with people, but he hackedinto the depths of the system and discovered a way to break in on other people'selectronic conversations. So when Gordon French, for instance, was naming abouthis new trick with the 8008 Chicken Hawk, his home terminal would inexplicablybegin printing out these semi-obscene Polish jokes, and he never did figure outthat somewhere miles away Steve Wozniak was doubled up in laughter.Woz also met Randy Wigginton, an athletic, blond-haired fourteen-year-oldcomputer kid who had managed to get a job at Call Computer. Wigginton livedjust down the street from the cluttered garden apartment Wozniak shared with hiswife, and Woz would drive the youngster to Homebrew meetings. Since beforehigh school, Wigginton had been in love with computers. He came to almostidolize Woz for his profound understanding of computers, and deeply appreciatedthe fact that the twenty-five-year-old Woz "would talk to anybody about anytechnical thing," even to a fourteen-year-old like Wigginton. Though Randy'sparents worried at the fact that computers were taking over their son's life, hisobsession deepened, fueled by Woz's informal tutorials at Denny's restaurant onFoothill Drive on the way back from meetings. They would be driving in Woz'sbeat-up Malibu with its mounds of trash on the back seat dozens of McDonald'sbags and technical journals, all soggy from Woz's strange reluctance to roll up thewindows when it rained and stop for Cokes, fries, and onion rings. "I would askWoz any dumb question just to get him talking 'How does a BASIC interpreterwork?' and just listen to him as long as he talked," Wigginton later recalled.Wozniak soon got to know another Homebrew member who worked at CallComputer John Draper. A semi-employed engineer, John Draper was better knownas "Captain Crunch," the "phone phreak" hero of that Esquire article that excitedWoz in 1971. Draper, whose unmodulated voice could drone like the last whinesof a fire alarm, a scraggly dresser who never seemed to put a comb to his long darkhair, got that moniker after he discovered that when one blew the whistle that came

in the breakfast cereal by that name, the result would be the precise 2,600-cycletone that the phone company used to shuttle long-distance traffic over the phonelines. John Draper, then an airman stationed overseas, used this knowledge to callfriends at home.But Draper's interest went beyond free calls as an engineer with a latent hackertendency toward exploration which would soon prove overwhelming, he becamefascinated with the phone company system. "I do [phreaking] for one reason andone reason only," he told the Esquire reporter who made him famous in 1971."I'm learning about a system. The phone company is a System. A computer is aSystem. Do you understand? If I do what I do, it is only to explore a System.That's my bag. The phone company is nothing but a computer." It was the samefascination shared by the Tech Model Railroad Club hackers, particularly StewNelson (the MIT hacker who had hacked phones since childhood); but, not havingNelson's access to sophisticated tools to explore it, Draper had to devise his ownjerry-rigged means ofaccess. (The one time Nelson did meet Draper, the MIThacker was unimpressed by Draper's technical ability.) Draper was helped bydiscovering a network of phone phreaks with similar interests, many of them blindmen who could easily identify the tones which could whizz one through thesystem. Draper was astonished that there were alternate phone systems from whichyou could get into test boards, verification trunks for breaking into people'sconversations (he once startled a woman he fancied by angrily interrupting herphone chat with another man), and overseas switching units. He soon figured outhow to jump from one circuit to another, and mastered the secrets of "blue boxes,"which like Stew Nelson's adjustment to the PDP-1 a decade earlier, could sendtones over phone lines to get unlimited, free long-distance calls.But John Draper, who sometimes acted so impulsively that he would seem anovergrown infant, wailing for his mother's milk of systems knowledge, did nothave the focused resolve of the MIT hackers he could easily be cajoled intoyielding the information about blue boxes to people who wanted to sell the boxesto people who wanted free calls as Wozniak and Jobs had done door-to-door in theBerkeley dorms.Draper's own phone excursions were more benign. A typical caper would be toseek out and "map" various access codes for foreign countries, and he would usethose codes to leapfrog from one trunk line to another, listening to a series ofedifying clicks as his signal bounced from one communications satellite to thenext. After the Esquire article, though, authorities targeted him, and in 1972 hewas caught in the act of illegally calling a Sydney, Australia, number which gavecallers the names of the top tunes Down Under. For this first offense, he was givena suspended sentence.

He turned to computer programming, and soon was a regular hacker. People wouldlater recall him at People's Computer Company potlucks, filling his plate sky-highand stuffing himself. A virulent anti-smoker, he would also scream almostpainfully when someone lit a cigarette. He was still interested in phone hacking,and among the subjects he'd talk about at the potlucks were things like gettingARPAnet access, something he considered eminently justifiable "I had someintegrations I had to do analytically. The MIT computer [had a program to help medo it]. So I used it," he would later explain.When the potlucks ended, he gravitated to Homebrew. He was a consultant to CallComputer, and had arranged for the Homebrew Club to get its account. He becamea huge fan of Wozniak's hacking, and Wozniak was thrilled to meet the famousphone phreak who had inspired his own blue box escapades. It was not unusual tosee them together at the back of the room, as they were one night in late 1975when Dan Sokol approached them. Sokol was the long-haired, blond guy whowould stand up at Homebrew, check that no one from Intel was around, and barteroff 8080 chips to anyone with good equipment to trade.Sokol at that time was going broke from using his home terminal to access the CallComputer account. Since Sokol lived in Santa Cruz, and Call Computer was inPalo Alto, his phone bill was outrageous; he was accessing the computer for fortyto fifty hours a week. The solution came one day at the back of the SLACauditorium when Sokol was introduced to Wozniak and John Draper.Not Captain Crunch?"Yeah, that's me!" Draper volunteered, and Sokol immediately peppered him withquestions on building a blue box, which would enable him to make the Santa Cruz-Palo Alto phone calls for free. Though Draper's probation specified that he refuseto divulge his phone-hacking secrets, he was unable to resist when people asked;the hacker in his blood just let the information flow. "In the next fifteen minutes,he proceeded to tell me everything I needed to know [to build a blue box]," Sokollater said. But when Sokol put the blue box together it didn't work; he let Draperknow and that next Saturday, Draper, accompanied by Steve Wozniak, came over.They looked over Sokol's box. "Looks OK," said Draper, and began adjusting thetones by ear. This time, when Sokol tried the blue box, it worked. Sokol would usethe box only for connecting to the computer a practice which in the hacker mindjustifies lawbreak-ing and not for personal gain in trivial matters like callingdistant relatives.Wozniak took a look at Sokol's "kluge," the computer he'd gotten from bartering

liberated parts, and they both lamented the high cost of hardware hacking. Wozcomplained that even though he worked for Hewlett-Packard the sales peoplewouldn't part with any chips for him. At the next Homebrew meeting, Dan Sokolpresented Wozniak with a box full of parts that would work with a Motorola 6800microprocessor. Woz got a 6800 manual and began designs for a computer thatwould interface with the TV Typewriter he'd built. When someone brought acomputer to a Homebrew meeting that had video included, he knew that hiscomputer would have to have video built in, too. He liked the idea of a computeryou could play a videogame on. Around that time the Wescon computer show wasbeing held, and Wozniak went by the MOS Technology booth and found that theywere selling early models of their new microprocessor chip, the 6502, for onlytwenty dollars. Since the chip wasn't much different from the Motorola 6800, hebought a handful, and decided that the 6502 would be the heart of his newmachine.Wozniak was not thinking of building a computer to sell. He was building acomputer to have fun with, to show to his friends. He would mention what he wasdoing to his friend Steve Jobs at Atari, who was interested in terminals andthinking about setting up a company that made them. Every two weeks Woz wouldgo to Homebrew and see or hear what was new, never having any problem infollowing up on technical details because everyone was free with information.Some things he would incorporate into the computer; for instance, when he sawthe Dazzler board, he knew he wanted color graphics. He knew, of course, that hewanted a BASIC, and since the only BASIC that ran on the 6502 then was TomPittman's Tiny BASIC, and Woz wanted a "big" BASIC, he wrote his own. Hegave out the code to anyone who wanted it, and would even print some of hissubroutines in Dr. Dobbs Journal.By the time he was finished, he had a computer which was not really a kit or anassembled computer, but one board loaded with chips and circuitry. With just thatboard, you could do nothing, but when you attached a power supply and akeyboard and a video monitor and a cassette tape player to the board, you wouldhave a working computer with video display, mass storage, and input/ output. Youcould then load in Steve Wozniak's "Integer BASIC" and write programs. Therewere several amazing things about his computer, not the least of which was that hehad delivered the power and capabilities of an Altair and several boards on onemuch smaller board. What it took other people two chips to do, Woz did in one.This was not only fiscally prudent, but a sort of technical machismo reminiscent ofthe code-bumming of TMRC days, when Samson, Saunders, and Kotok wouldattempt to whittle a subroutine down to the fewest instructions.Wozniak later explained why the board used so few chips: "I'm into it for estheticpurposes and I like to consider myself clever. That's my puzzle, and I do designs

that use one less chip than the last guy. I would think how could I do this faster orsmaller or more cleverly. If [I work on something] considered a good job using sixinstructions, I try it in five or three, or two if I want to win [big]. I do tricky thingsthat aren't normal. Every problem has a better solution when you start thinking itdifferently than the normal way. And I see them every single day I see severalproblems, I ask if it's a hardware problem, I start looking at a lot of techniques I'vedone before, counters and feedback or chip registers ... a bottom-line approach,looking for little specific end points from a hierarchy ... it creates basically a sortof different mathematics. The discoveries did increase my motivation because Iwould have something to show off and I hoped that other people would see themand say, 'Thank God, that's how I want to do it,' and that's what I got from theHomebrew Club."Wozniak brought the board, along with the hardware to make it work, toHomebrew. He didn't have a cassette recorder, and while the meeting went on hesat outside, frantically typing in the hexadecimal code 3,000 bytes' worth of the 3KBASIC interpreter into the machine. He would run a test on part of the program,and the test might clobber it and he'd start over again. Finally it was running,though it was only a preliminary version which didn't have the full command set,and when people drifted over Wozniak would explain, in his breathless, highspeeddrone, what the thing could do.It was not long before Wozniak addressed the entire Homebrew Computer Club,holding his board in the air and fielding questions from the members, most of themasking how he did this or if he was going to put this feature or that into it. Theywere good ideas, and Wozniak brought his setup every two weeks, sitting in theback of the auditorium where the electrical outlet was, getting suggestions forimprovements and incorporating those improvements.Woz's friend Steve Jobs was very excited about the board; he thought that, likeProcessor Technology and Cromemco, they should make the boards in quantityand sell them. Jobs, at twenty-two, was a couple of years younger than Wozniak,and not much cleaner. He had what was described as a "Fidel Castro beard," oftenwent shoeless, and had a Califomian interest in Oriental phi losophies andvegetarianism. He was a tireless promoter, silver-tongued, a deft persuader. Soonthe pair was known as "the two Steves," and Wozniak's computer was known asthe Apple, a name conceived by Jobs, who once worked in an orchard. Though theofficial address of the as yet unincorporated Apple company was a mail drop, Jobsand Wozniak really worked out of a garage. For capital, Jobs sold his Volkswagenbus and Woz sold his HP programmable calculator. Jobs placed ads in hobbyistpublications and they began selling Apples for the price of $666.66. Anyone inHomebrew could take a look at the schematics for the design, Woz's BASIC wasgiven away free with purchase of a piece of equipment that connected the

computer to a cassette recorder, and Woz published the routines for his 6502"monitor," which enabled you to look into memory and see what instructions werestored, in magazines like Dr. Dobbs. The Apple ad even said, "our philosophy is toprovide software for our machines free or at minimal cost."While the selling was going on, Steve Wozniak began working on an expandeddesign of the board, something that would impress his Homebrew peers evenmore. Steve Jobs had plans to sell many computers based on this new design, andhe started getting financing, support, and professional help for the day the productwould be ready. The new version of Steve Wozniak's computer would be calledthe Apple II, and at the time no one suspected that it would become the mostimportant computer in history.It was the fertile atmosphere of Homebrew that guided Steve Wozniak through theincubation of the Apple II. The exchange of information, the access to esoterictechnical hints, the swirling creative energy, and the chance to blow everybody'smind with a well-hacked design or program ... these were the incentives whichonly increased the intense desire Steve Wozniak already had: to build the kind ofcomputer he wanted to play with. Computing was the boundary of his desires; hewas not haunted by visions of riches and fame, nor was he obsessed by dreams of aworld of end users exposed to computers. He liked his work at HP, and loved theheady atmosphere of being around the gentleman engineers atop the computerindustry. At one point Wozniak asked his bosses at HP if they wanted him todesign the Apple computer for them they thought it was unmarketable, and gavehim a release to sell it on his own. When it looked like HP would be setting up asmall computer division, Wozniak applied for a transfer; but, according to AlanBaum, "the head of the lab wasn't impressed. He had no degree." (Woz had leftBerkeley before graduation.)So he worked on the Apple II, often until 4 A.M. he would soon be one moreHomebrew member divorced by a computer widow. Designing the Apple II wasno picnic. There were hundreds of problems in making a ready-to-program, selfcontainedcomputer-and-terminal combination; Wozniak did not have even themoderate resources and cash flow that Bob Marsh and Lee Felsenstein had whenthey designed the Sol, the first computer-terminal combination and one of manyinspirations for the Apple II. But he had a vision of what he wanted his computerto be, and could draw on help from Homebrew and other experts in the Valley.Finally he had a prototype working. He and Randy Wigginton carried it a loose butfully connected jumble of parts and boards over to a December 1976 Homebrewmeeting in a couple of boxes, along with a klunky Scare color TV.

Years later, the people attending that Homebrew meeting would recall differentversions of the reaction to Stephen Wozniak's presentation of the Apple II.Wozniak, and the other fans of the 6502 chip, came out with the impression thatthe computer had thrilled everyone. Others thought it was simply one moreadvance in the frantic climb toward an ultimate homebrewed computer. As LeeFelsenstein put it, "The people in Homebrew were not sitting around waiting forthe Apple to happen: people were making stuff, talking about stuff, showing stuffoff."One thing that did not excite the members was the fact that the production modelsof the Apple would come only in fully assembled form why buy a computer,hardware hackers thought, if you could not build it yourself? The hard-core oldliners,who respected the solidity and predictability of the Processor Technologyand Cromemco products, thought the Apple interesting, especially in itseconomical circuitry and its color capabilities, but not as good a machine as theSol, which was based on the familiar Altair bus (newly named the S-100 bus by aconsensus of manufacturers, notably Marsh and Garland, who were sick ofreferring to a part of their computers with the name of a competitor who in mostun-hackerish spirit seemed to resent their existence). The Apple had an entirelynew bus and a brand-new operating system, both designed by Woz; plus, there wasthe unfamiliar 6502 chip as its brain. Also, a proven company like ProcessorTechnology seemed more likely to be able to support a machine in the field thandid Apple, which apparently consisted only of two kids in a garage.Basically, though, the disagreement came down to religious issues of design. TheSol reflected Lee Felsenstein's apocalyptic fears, shaped by post-holocaust sciencefiction, that the industrial infrastructure might be snatched away at any time, andpeople should be able to scrounge parts to keep his machine going in the rubble ofthis devastated society; ideally, the machine's design would be clear enough toallow users to figure out where to put those parts. "I've got to design so you canput it together out of garbage cans," Felsenstein once said. "In part because that'swhat I started from, but mostly because I don't trust the industrial structure theymight decide to suppress us weirdos and try to deny us the parts we need." Thisphilosophy was expressed in the VDM and the Sol itself, both of which wereproducts which did their job cleanly, in a not overly flashy manner, and with aproletarian lack of sentimentality.Steve Wozniak's Apple was another story. Growing up in a conventional family inthe sheltered, suburban California world of single homes, science fairs, andMcDonald's burgers, Wozniak had inbred security. He felt comfortable takingchances, letting the design go as far as his imagination could take him. He createdan esthetic wonder by optimizing a limited number of off-the-shelf electronic parts

so that, very ingeniously laid out and wired, they delivered not only the power of aPDP-1, but color, motion, and sound.If Woz had his way, he would add features forever. Just two days before themeeting, he had jimmied up the machine so that it could display special, highresolutioncolor graphics. He did this not by the usual way of adding special chipsto do it, but by figuring out a way to wire the machine so that the centralprocessing unit, the 6502, could do double duty.Woz's genius for optimization sometimes had odd effects. For example, the waythe Apple filled the screen with an image was much different than the Sol'smethod, which filled things in by a proper order; the Apple drew its screen in aseemingly haphazard, crazy-quilt manner. It did this not by chance, but becauseWoz figured out that doing it that way would save an instruction for each line puton the screen. A clever trick, disdained by some who thought it indicative of theApple's unpredictability and "flaki-ness," but much admired by those who couldappreciate the beauty of a maximized design. All in all, the design reflected a tourde force of hacking, and a very savvy engineer could see the clever twists of plot,the optimistic flights of fancy, and the eccentrically cosmic jokes embodied in themachine.One person who thought that the Apple II was just super was Chris Espinosa, ayoung acquaintance of Randy Wigginton. Espi-nosa was a skinny, pale fourteenyear-oldhigh school kid who loved computers and flunked math classes becausehe felt that doing homework was a non-optimal use of time. He was enthralled bythis computer of Steve Wozniak's. From the explanation of the syntax of Woz'sspecial BASIC commands which came out in the talk, and the explanation ofsketches of the machine's innards distributed all around, Espinosa jotted downsome BASIC programs, and during the random access period of the meeting, whenpeople crowded around this new machine, he took over the keyboard andfrantically hammered in some programs which created flashy color displays on thebig old Sears television set Wozniak had dragged along. Wozniak was thrilled: "Ididn't think somebody else could come up and show me 'Look!' and get excitedand show other people and say, 'Look, this is easy, you just put this command inand you do this.'" Here was this high school kid, running programs on this littlecomputer Wozniak had built. Steve Jobs' reaction was more pragmatic he hiredChris Espinosa as one of the company's first employees. Like the other teen-agesoftware specialist, Randy Wigginton, he would earn three dollars an hour.Steve Jobs was concentrating full-time on building up the Apple company to getready to deliver the Apple II the following year and make a big splash in themarketplace. Jobs was a brilliant talker who, according to Alan Baum, "worked histail off ... he told me about the prices he was getting for parts, and they were

favorable to the prices HP was paying." As an engineer, Jobs was mediocre; hisstrength was as a planner, someone with vision to see how computers could extendto a point of usefulness beyond that dreamed of by pure hackers like SteveWozniak. He was also wise enough to realize that as a long-haired twenty-twoyear-oldwhose customary garb was jeans and bare feet, he was not the person tohead a major computer corporation; most of all, he lacked management andmarketing experience. He decided that he would hire top-notch, high-pricedmanagement talent to run Apple Computer.This was no easy conclusion in those days, when engineers like Ed Roberts andBob Marsh thought that building a quality machine was the main ingredient forsuccess, and management might take care of itself. Ed Roberts learned the folly ofthis, the hard way. By mid-1976, Roberts had tired of the "soap opera" (in hiswords) that MITS had become, with frustrated customers, a confusing line ofseveral new and improved versions of the Altair, hundreds of employees, viciousinternal politics, perpetually panicked dealers, hopelessly muddled finances, andnot a decent night's sleep in over a year. He had been designing an exciting newAltair 2 computer a high-powered, compact machine which could fit in a briefcasebut most of his energies were spent in management squabbles. So he decided tocall it, he later said, "a page in my life it was time to move on to the next page,"and he stunned the world of hardware hackers by selling the company to a big firmcalled Pertec. By the end of the year, Roberts, with his million-dollar-plus buy-out,left the business and became a farmer in southern Georgia.The moral of the story was that engineers can't necessarily run companies. Butfinding people who can isn't easy, especially when your company, on the surfaceat least, looks like a small coven of hippies and high school kids. Chris Espinosalater noted that, in early 1977, Jobs looked so slovenly that "they wouldn't let himon to minibuses and airplanes, much less into the corridors of power of thesemiconductor industry," yet he pulled off a major coup by getting Mike Markkulaon the Apple team. Markkula was a former marketing whiz, now in his midthirties,who'd retired from Intel a few years back; he had been spending his timesince then in various pursuits, some business-oriented, some as odd as inventing awheel-chart to show different fingering positions for guitar chords. Jobs asked himto help draw a business plan for the Apple, and Markkula wound up helping to getventure capital for the company and signing up as its first chairman of the board. Itwas through Markkula that Jobs also got a nuts-and-bolts manager from FairchildSemiconductor named Mike Scott to become president of the firm. So, while themost prominent company with a terminal-computer on the market. ProcessorTechnology, was struggling with the inexperienced management of hardwarehackers Bob Marsh and Gary Ingram, Apple was set for growth.This real-world activity hadn't really sunk in as far as Steve Wozniak was

concerned. Chris Espinosa and Randy Wigginton would come over to his housefrom playing with Wigginton's half-built version of the Apple II, and there, on theliving room floor of Woz's small place, they would debug programs and hardware,write tone generation programs, solder boards. It was fun. Meanwhile, in his owngarage. Jobs was running the day-to-day operations. "He would come by everyonce in a while and see what we were doing, make recommendations, but he didn'tdo any designing," Espinosa later said. "He would pass judgment, which is hismajor talent: over the keyboards, the case design, the logo, what parts to buy, howto lay out the PC board to look nice, the arrangement of parts, the dealers we chose... the method of assembly, the distribution method, everything."He was guided in this by the experienced hand of Mike Mark-kula, who wastaking the Apple venture very seriously. One thing he apparently recognized wasthat Steve Wozniak's commitment was to the computer rather than to the company.To Woz, the Apple was a brilliant hack, not an investment. It was his art, not hisbusiness. He got his payment by solving puzzles, saving chips, impressing peopleat Homebrew. This was fine for hacking, but Markkula wanted, at the least,Wozniak's full-time participation in the company. He told Jobs to tell his partnerthat if Woz wanted there to be an Apple Computer company, he must quit HP forall-out work on pre-production of the Apple II.It was a tough decision for Wozniak. "This was different than the year we spentthrowing the Apple I together in the garage," Wozniak later recalled. "This was areal company. I designed a computer because I like to design, to show off at theclub. My motivation was not to have a company and make money. Mike wasgiving me three days to say yes or no, was I going to leave HP. I liked HP. Theywere a good company and I was secure and there was a lot of good work. I didn'twant to leave, and I said no."Steve Jobs heard the decision, and called Wozniak's friends and relatives, beggingthem to persuade Woz to quit HP and work for Apple full-time. Some of them did,and as Woz heard the arguments he reconsidered. Why not work to let the Apple IIgo out into the world? But even as he agreed to quit HP and work with Jobs fulltime,he told himself that what he was doing was no longer pure hacking. The truthwas that starting a company had nothing to do with hacking or creative design. Itwas about making money. It was "stepping over the boundary," as Wozniak laterput it. Not in any kind of rip-off Wozniak believed in his computer and hadconfidence in the team that would produce and sell it but "there's no way I wouldassociate Apple with doing good computer design in my head. It wasn't the reasonfor starting Apple. The reason for starting Apple after the computer design isthere's something else that's to make money."It was a crucial decision that would symbolize the shift taking place in small

computers. Now that hackers like Wozniak were building machines with terminalsand keyboards, machines which might presumably be useful to people other thanhobbyists, the direction of the budding industry was no longer in the hands ofthose hackers. It was almost twenty years after the TMRC hackers had beenintroduced to the TX-0. Now, going into business was The Right Thing.In January of 1977, the half-dozen or so employees of this new firm, which wouldnot incorporate until that March, moved into a cramped space on Stevens CreekBoulevard in Cupertino, within stone-throwing distance of a 7-Eleven and a GoodEarth health food restaurant. Wozniak preferred to walk down the street to go toBob's Big Boy. First thing in the morning, he and Wigginton would go there, ordera cup of coffee, take a sip out of it, and talk about how bad the coffee was, leavingthe almost full cup on the table. It was sort of a ritual. Woz had a fondness fortaking packets of Fizine, a bubbling antacid, and emptying them into the sugarcontainers at Bob's, where he would wait until some unsuspecting customer putwhat he thought was sugar in his coffee. It would erupt like a small volcano, andWoz would get a big kick out of it. But often Woz would just talk, mostlytechnical stuff, and sometimes about Apple. Wigginton and Espinosa, both still inhigh school, had taken some of Jobs' planner-like hyperbole to heart they all had tosome degree and believed that the Homebrew crusade was focused right there onStevens Creek Boulevard. "Everybody was so much into it," Wigginton later said."We were motivated more by a dream of what was going to happen than by whatwas actually happening. That we would be a successful company and were goingto come out with the neatest product that had ever been produced."They would often work around the clock, soldering, designing, and programming.One of Woz's friends hired as a hardware specialist would make bird calls as heworked. Woz would pull pranks, play games, and then do an incredible amount ofwork in a brief burst. Woz and his friends were preparing a different kind ofcomputer than the previous bestsellers, the Altair, Sol, and IMSAI. Steve Jobs andMike Markkula felt that the Apple's market went well beyond hobbyists, and tomake the machine look friendlier, Jobs hired an industrial designer to construct asleek, low-profile plastic case in a warm beige earth color. He made sure thatWoz's layout would be appealing once the lid of the case was lifted. The Applebus, like the S-100 bus, was capable of accepting extra circuit boards to make it dointeresting things, but Woz had taken some advice from his friend Alan Baum andmade it so that the eight "expansion slots" inside the Apple were especially easyfor manufacturers to make compatible circuit boards for. They would be helped, ofcourse, by the "open" architecture of the machine; true to the Hacker Ethic, Wozmade sure the Apple had no secrets to prevent people from creating on it. Everytwist and turn of his design, every coding trick in his BASIC interpreter (whichwould be included inside this machine, hard-wired into a custom circuit chip)would be documented and distributed to anyone who wanted to see.

At certain points, Woz and Jobs relied on their Homebrew connections for help. Agood example was what happened with a potential problem in getting FCCapproval of the computer. Rod Holt, an engineer from Atari who had been helpingdesign the power supply, sadly declared that the machine's connector to atelevision set called the Radio Frequency (RF) Modulator gave off too muchinterference, and would never pass muster with the FCC. So Steve Jobs went toMarty Spergel, the Junk Man.Spergel would often show up at Homebrew meetings, holding some esoteric partand giving it away. "I'd look through my junk box and say, 'Here's a box full of Athrough Z,' and people would run over at six hundred miles an hour and before Icould even let go of the box it was gone." He had a nose for niches in theelectronics market, and had recently made a killing by importing joystickcontrollers from Hong Kong so that people could play games like Steve Dompier's"Target" on Altairs and Sols. At one point, his company, M&R Electronics, evenintroduced a computer kit, but that product never really caught on. One day Martyvisited the one-room Apple headquarters in Cupertino and talked to Woz, Jobs,and Rod Holt about the modulator situation. It was clear that Apple could not shipthe computers with the current modulators, so it was decided that Holt would giveMarty Spergel the specifications for the modulator, and he would build them. "Mypart was keeping the FCC away from Apple Computer," Spergel later said. "Sowhat I did was ship modulators out of my door, Apple shipping Apples out of theirdoor. But when they got to the dealers, the dealers would sell a modulator to theend user, and when the end user [went] home he could plug in the modulator.Consequently, it's now the end user's responsibility [to prevent RF interference]."It was a classic case of Homebrew sharing, with everybody benefiting, to getaround a bureaucratic obstacle. Spergel asked Jobs about how many modulators,which M&R would sell under the name "Sup'r Mod" for about thirty dollars each,would be required. Jobs promised it would be high volume. Perhaps even fiftyunits a month.Several years later, Spergel estimated he had sold four hundred thousand Sup'rMods.In early 1977, Homebrew Computer Club member and editor of Dr. DobbsJournal Jim Warren was hatching a rather large scheme himself. Warren was theshort-haired, wide-faced, bearded fellow who collected "technogossip" as a hobby,and saw Homebrew as an outlet to spew all sorts of rumors about firms in the

"Silicon Gulch," as he called it. Often, his rumors were accurate. In addition to hiseditorial duties and his activities as a silicon yenta, Warren was in a self-described"dissertation mode" at Stanford. But the quantum growth rate of the personalcomputer interested him more than a doctorate. He was a fan, regarding thehomebrew computer movement as a sort of post-Free University, take-yourclothes-off-and-get-dirty,humanistic lovefest.His attendance at the PC '76 computer show in Atlantic City had reinforced thatbelief. He hadn't wanted to go at first, considering that faded resort as "the crotchof the nation," but the show's promoter had called him up and told him about allthe exciting people who'd be there, adding how great it would be for the editor ofDr. Dobbs to be in attendance, and Jim Warren felt somewhat frustrated because,with Bob Albrecht paying him only $350 a month to edit the magazine, he had tobeg for the money for the trip. He figured that the big show should be right there,in California. One night he was talking to Bob Reiling, an engineer at Phiico whohad quietly taken over Fred Moore's duties as editor of the Homebrew newsletter.Warren asked why the hell all that stuff was happening on the wrong coast whenthe undisputed center of the microcomputer world was right here. Reiling agreed,and Warren decided that they should do it, put on a show which would also, inhacker spirit, be an exchange of information, equipment, technical knowledge, andgood vibrations. It could have the idyllic atmosphere of the annual "RenaissanceFaire" in Marin County a genuine "Computer Faire."He was thinking about this show when he got to Atlantic City, which despite thehorrid humidity and the dilapidated facilities was, he later said, "a complete turnon.[You met] all the people you'd talked to on the phone or gotten a letter fromwho were doing things ... [you had] tremendous excitement over meeting thepeople who were doing the deeds." They were a powerful new interfacing feature,these face-to-face meetings, which provided much fresher information than yougot in publications. "Dr. Dobbs had a six-week lead time and it was driving mecrazy. Hell, six months was half a generation of machines. The opportunity to talkto people about what they were doing that week was a radical improvement. So itwas in that kind of environment that I announced that we were going to do aComputer Faire on the West Coast."With Reiling as his partner, Warren set out to organize the event. He was soondaunted by the fact that the ideal location, the Civic Auditorium in San Francisco,charged a considerable rental fee. Thousands of dollars a day! After hearing this,Warren and Reiling drove down to the peninsula, stopping at Pete's Harbor, anopen-air cafe by the bayside marina, a favorite haunt of Albrecht and the PCCcrowd. Warren recalls: "I remember saying, 'Boy, we're really getting in deep. Canwe afford this?' And I pulled a napkin out of a big napkin holder and beganscribbling. How many exhibits to expect. How many attendees. If they drew thirty-

five hundred in Atlantic City, we should double that ... maybe draw as many asseven thousand. How much to charge for exhibitors and attendees? Multiply it out.Add it up..." And Jim Warren was astonished to find out that not only could theyafford it, but they could make a profit out of it. And certainly there was nothingwrong with that.Jim Warren got on the phone and began calling the presidents of the biggestcompanies in the industry, most of whom he knew personally from Homebrew orhis magazine work. "I phoned up Bob Marsh and said, 'Hey, we're going to do aComputer Faire, are you interested?' and he said, 'Hell yeah.' 'Okay, send somemoney and we'll get you exhibit space. Far out.' We phoned up Harry Garlandfrom Cromemco. 'This is Jim Warren, we're doing a Computer Faire. Want in onit?' 'Sure, fine.' 'Yeah, well, we'll get a booth plan to you as soon as we get achance. Send us the money because we need some.' I think it took us four daysbefore we were in the black."Warren turned out to have considerable talents as a promoter. He began a tabloidnewspaper specifically to pump up excitement about the Faire, and, incidentally, tospread his brand of technogossip. It was called Silicon Gulch Gazette, and therewere stories about what the Faire would be like and little profiles of some of thespeakers, and also a profile of "chaircreature" Jim Warren. The paper boasted ofthe Faire's "co-sponsorship" arrangements with nonprofit groups like theHomebrew Computer Club, SCCS, PCC and its offshoot, Community ComputerCenter (CCC), and others. (Joanne Koltnow, who helped out the Faire from her jobat CCC, later said that "everyone was shocked" when they later discovered that theFaire was a tor-profit organization.) With a staff of two secretaries, Warren and hispartners worked almost around the clock as the Faire progressed.Also working frantically before the Faire were the eight employees of AppleComputer. Apple had taken space for two of the $350 ten-foot-square booths andsomehow managed to wangle the prime space near the entrance to the exhibit hall.The idea was to take advantage of that break to officially introduce the Apple II atthe Faire. Though many around the Homebrew Club did not take Apple as aserious entry in the market (Gordon French came by one day and went awayscoffing that the company was still basically two guys in a garage), there was nowserious money behind Apple. One day the new president, Mike Scott, had toldChris Espinosa to copy the demo software that ran a "Breakout" game. It was agame Jobs had done for Atari and Woz had rewritten for Apple BASIC, and at theend of the game, the program rated your score with a comment. Scott said, by theway, could Chris also change the comments, making the screen say "Not Good"instead of "Pure Shit"? The reason was, some Bank of America people werecoming to talk about a line of credit.

So the Apple people were prepared to spend for the show. They hired a decoratorto design the booth, and they prepared professional-looking signs with their spiffynew logo, a rainbow-colored apple with a bite out of it. They worked franticallydown to the last minute before they had to drive the machines up to San Francisco;they had planned to have four Apple IIs running, and those would be the onlyexisting prototypes. On the night of April 15, the cases arrived, fresh from beingmade out of injection molds. As everyone worked to put the innards of thecomputers into those cases, it was clear how different the Apple II was from thecompetition (with the possible exception of the Sol). Everyone else's computerlooked like the kind of thing that a combat radio operator might have strapped tohis back. The Apple had no visible screws or bolts (the ten screws mainly hookedfrom underneath): just a sleek, warm, friendly variation of a typewriter, futuristicin its low slope, but not so harshly angled that it looked menacing. Inside themachine was the evidence of Woz's hackerish tinkering. He had gotten the numberof chips down to an astonishing sixty-two, including the powerful 6502 centralprocessing unit. In fact, when you opened the snap-on lid of the machine, what yousaw was Woz's "motherboard" the chip-loaded green circuit card that was theApple I, souped up a silvery power supply the size of a stack of Ritz crackers, andthe eight expansion slots which indicated the infinite uses to which you mightapply the machine. By the time the screws and rivet holes were inserted in thecase, and the motherboards attached, and the base plates bolted, and everythingwas tested and the lids were snapped on, it was one in the morning of the Apple'sofficial world debut.On time that morning, the Apples were in the booth, near the entrance. Most everyother company relied on the tried and true yellow-curtained backdrop with pastedoncardboard signs spelling out the company name in block letters. But Apple'sbooth gleamed with its six-color Plexiglass logo.Jim Warren was at the site very early that morning, of course, riding on adrenalineafter his nonstop sixteen-hour days of preparation. Just two days before, he andReiling had incorporated the Faire as a for-profit organization. Though heconsidered it a "load of bureaucratic bullshit legalistic crap," Reiling had pointedout that as a partnership they were individually liable for any damages, andWarren had gone along. There was really no doubt as to where Jim Warren washeaded by then as a person who knew the Hacker Ethic well, he also could seewhat was happening in his own Silicon Gulch backyard. The Real World hadarrived, and it was time for a merger between the two cultures, hacker andindustrial, because if there was a clash there would be no question who would lose.The hardware hackers had let the microcomputer cat out of the bag, and themultimillion-dollar yearly grosses at MITS, Processor Technology, and IMSAI in1976 were irrefutable proof that this was a growth industry, worthy of heavymoney and the changes that implied. Jim Warren loved the hacker spirit, but he

was a survivor, too. If he lost money, or suffered some sort of disaster by stickingto his post-hippie, idealistic, antibureaucratic phobias, it would not help hackerismone bit. Whereas his making money would perhaps not be harmful at all to theHacker Ethic. So even though, as he later put it, he "didn't care diddly shit aboutbooths and power and contracts and all that stuff," he went with it.The micro world was changing. He needed no further evidence of this than thescene at the ticket booths outside of the grand, Greek-columned edifice that wasthe San Francisco Civic Center.On that sunny, bright April day in 1977, there were thousands of people standingin five long lines, snaking around both sides of the block-long auditorium andmeeting in the back. A block-long beaded necklace of hackers, would-be hackers,people curious about hackers, or people wanting to know what was going on inthis freaky new world where computers meant something different than a guy in awhite shirt and black tie and fat billfold and dulled-out expression which all addedup to IBM. True, the lines were there in large part because Jim Warren'sinexperience had resulted in a total screw-up in preregistration and ticket sales. Forinstance, instead of one fixed price for day-of-sale entry, there were different rateseight dollars for general public, four dollars for students, five dollars forHomebrew Computer Club members, and so on. And because it cost ten dollars anhour for cashiers, Warren had decided not to hire too many extras. Now, withalmost twice as many people arriving as anticipated, and everyone seeming to havearrived early, it was the kind of situation which could get out of hand.But it did not get out of hand. Everyone was looking around in disbelief that allthese people were into computers, that the secret hacker lust they'd had formachines, often as solipsistic little kids, tiny Greenblatts or Wozniaks, was not soaberrant after all. Loving computers was no longer a forbidden public practice. Soit was no ordeal at all, standing with these people waiting to get into the FirstAnnual West Coast Computer Faire. As Jim Warren later recalled: "We had theselines running all around the fucking building and nobody was irritated. Nobodywas pushy. We didn't know what we were doing and the exhibitors didn't knowwhat they were doing and the attendees didn't know what was going on, buteverybody was excited and congenial and nondemanding and it was a tremendousturn-on. People just stood and talked 'Oh, you've got an Altair? Far out!' 'Yousolved this problem?' And nobody was irritated."When people got inside the hall, it was wall-to-wall techno-freak, the sounds ofvoices mingling with the clatter of printers and the tinny tones of three or fourdifferent strains of computer-generated music. If you wanted to move from oneplace to another, you would have to gauge which part of the constant flow ofpeople was moving in which direction, and you would shoulder your way into the

proper stream and go with it until you reached your destination. Almost every oneof the nearly two hundred exhibitors had packed booths. Particularly ProcessorTechnology, which was running Steve Dompier's "Target" game on Solcomputers. People were also pushing into IMSAI's booth to get biorhythmscharted. And right there at the entrance, the wave of the future, was Apple, runninga kaleidoscopic video graphics program on a huge Advent display monitor. "It wascrazy," Randy Wigginton, who was working in the booth with Woz and ChrisEspinosa and the others, later recalled. "Everybody was coming by and asking fordemonstrations, and it was fun because people were excited about it."It wasn't only the Apple that people were excited about. It was the triumph of thehardware hackers in making their passion into an industry. You could see theexcitement as people looked around disbelievingly at their sheer numbers all thesepeople? and there was a huge roar when Jim Warren got on the public-addresssystem and announced the attendance the weekend's total was almost thirteenthousand. He was immediately followed by Computer Lib author Ted Nelson,feeling no doubt like a once lonesome guru who in one fell swoop was united witha sea of disciples. "This is Captain Kirk," Nelson said. "Prepare for blastoff!"Warren himself was long past lift-off. He shot around the Faire on a pair of rollerskates, marveling at how far the movement had come. For him, as for the people atApple, Processor Technology, and dozens of other places, this success had verywelcome financial implications; soon after the Faire was over, after recoveringfrom a period of what he would later call "ecstatic collapse," Warren would beconsidering whether to sink his profits into a Mercedes SL. He would finallydecide to buy forty acres of land he was coveting in the hills overlookingWoodside, and within a few years he would have built a huge wooden structurewith a redwood deck and hot tub overlooking the Pacific; it would be his home andcomputerized work quarters, from which a staff of over a dozen would prepare asmall empire of publications and computer shows. Jim Warren understood thefuture.The first Computer Faire was to the hardware hackers an event comparable toWoodstock in the movement of the sixties. Like the concert at Max Yasgur's farm,this was both a cultural vindication and a signal that the movement had gotten sobig that it no longer belonged to its progenitors. The latter revelation was slow tosink in. Everyone was flying, moving from booth to booth, seeing all sorts ofground-breaking hardware and mind-blowing software, meeting people you couldswap subroutines and wire-wrapping schemes with, and attending some of thenearly one hundred workshops, which included Lee Felsenstein on the CommunityMemory movement, Tom Pittman on computer languages, Bob Kahn on theLawrence Hall of Science computing program, Marc LeBrun on computer music,and Ted Nelson on the triumphant future.

Nelson was one of the keynote speakers at a banquet held at the nearby St. FrancisHotel. The name of his talk was "Those Unforgettable Next Two Years," andlooking over that mass of people drawn by micros, he opened by saying, "Here weare at the brink of a new world. Small computers are about to remake our society,and you know it." As far as Nelson was concerned, the battle was won the hackershad overthrown the evil Prophet. "IBM will be in disarray," Nelson crowed. It wastruly a wonderful world about to unfold:For now, though, the dinky computers are working magic enough.They will bring about changes in society as radical as those broughtabout by the telephone or the automobile. The little computers arehere, you can buy them on your plastic charge card, and theavailable accessories include disc storage, graphic displays,interactive games, programmable turtles that draw pictures onbutcher paper, and goodness knows what else. Here we have all themakings of a fad, it is fast blossoming into a cult, and soon it willmature into a full-blown consumer market.FAD! CULT! CONSUMER MARKET! The rush will be on. TheAmerican manufacturing publicity machine will go ape. Americansociety will go out of its gourd. And the next two years will beunforgettable.

13SecretsTED Nelson's speech was not the crazed outburst of a planner overdosing on largescaleintegration. The unforgettable next two years were indeed marked byunprecedented growth in the industry that was almost unwittingly started by thehardware hackers. The hackers in Homebrew either went into business, trottedonto one of the new companies forming in the opening stages of thismicrocomputer boom, or kept doing what they had always been doing: hacking.The planners, those who had seen the advent of the small computer as a means ofspreading hacker spirit, generally did not pause to evaluate the situation: thingswere moving too fast for contemplation. Left by the wayside were purists like FredMoore, who once wrote in a treatise entitled "Put Your Trust in People, NotMoney" that money was "obsolete, valueless, anti-life." Money was the means bywhich computer power was beginning to spread, and the hackers who ignored thatfact were destined to work in (perhaps blissful) solipsism, either in tight, ARPAfundedcommunities or in meager collectives where the term "hand-to-mouth" wasa neat analogy for a "chip-to-machine" existence.The West Coast Computer Faire had been the resounding first step of hardwarehackers making their move from Silicon Valley garages into the bedrooms anddens of America. Before the end of 1977, the other shoe dropped. Megamilliondollarcompanies introduced computer-terminal combinations requiring noassembly, computers to be sold like appliances. One of those machines was theCommodore PET, designed by the man who devised the same 6502 chip that wasthe core of the Apple. Another was the Radio Shack TRS-80 computer, a computerstamped in plastic, assembly-lined, and sold en masse in hundreds of Radio Shackstores across the country.No longer was it a struggle, a learning process, to make computers. So the pioneersof Homebrew, many of whom had switched from building computers tomanufacturing computers, had not a common bond, but competition to maintainmarket share. It retarded Homebrew's time-honored practice of sharing alltechniques, of refusing to recognize secrets, and of keeping information going inan unencumbered flow. When it was Bill Gates' Altair BASIC that was under

consideration, it was easy to maintain the Hacker Ethic. Now, as majorshareholders of companies supporting hundreds of employees, the hackers foundthings not so simple. All of a sudden, they had secrets to keep."It was amazing to watch the anarchists put on a different shirt," Dan Sokol laterrecalled. "People stopped coming. Homebrew [still moderated by Lee Felsenstein,who kept the hacker fire burning] was still anarchistic: people would ask you aboutthe company, and you'd have to say, 'I can't tell you that.' I solved that the wayother people did 1 didn't go. I didn't want to go and not tell people things. Therewould be no easy way out where you would feel good about that."Homebrew still drew hundreds to its meetings, and its mailing list was over fifteenhundred but there were many novices there, with problems that weren'tchallenging to old hands who'd built machines when machines were nearlyimpossible to build. It no longer was essential to go to meetings. Many of thepeople involved in companies like Apple, Processor Tech, and Cromemco weretoo damned busy. And the companies themselves provided the communitiesaround which to share information.Apple was a good example. Steve Wozniak and his two young friends, Espinosaand Wigginton, were too busy with the young firm to keep going to Homebrew.Chris Espinosa later explained:"[After the Computer Paire] our attendance at Homebrew started dropping off andended completely by the end of the summer of 1977. We, in effect, created ourown computer club [at Apple] that was more focused, more dedicated to producingthings. When we started getting involved with Apple, we found what we wanted towork on and we wanted to spend all our time perfecting it, expanding it, doingmore for it, and we wanted to go into one subject deeper rather than covering thefield and finding out what everybody was doing. And that's how you make acompany."In some senses, the "computer club" at Apple's Cupertino headquarters reflectedthe same community feeling and sharing of Homebrew. The company's formalgoals were traditional making money, growing, gaining market share and somesecretiveness was required even of Steve Wozniak, who considered openness thecentral principle of the Hacker Ethic he fervently subscribed to. But this meant thatthe people within the company could be even closer. They had to depend on eachother to swap suggestions for floating-point BASIC or parallel printer cards. Andsometimes, the community was loose enough to accept some old Homebrewfriends. For instance, in mid-1977, John Draper appeared.

The former "Captain Crunch" was in a bad way. Apparently certain authorities hadobjected to his willingness to share phone company secrets with anyone whobothered to ask; FBI agents trailed him and, according to his accounts of theincident, planted an informer who talked him into a blue-box escapade whileagents waited to bust him. For this second conviction, he was sentenced to a briefjail term, and incarceration did not agree with the normally contentious Captain, aperson taken to screaming like a six-foot-tall hyena if someone lit a cigarettetwenty feet away from him. After his release, he needed legitimate work badly,and Woz got him hired as a consultant, designing a telephone interface board,something that would plug into one of the Apple's expansion slots to allow you toconnect the phone to your computer.Draper happily worked on the board. The people at Apple were amused by hisprogramming style, which alternated bursts of brilliance with bizarre pedanticdetours. Draper was a "defensive" programmer. Chris Espinosa, who had theunenviable task of trying to keep an eye on the unpredictable Captain, would laterexplain: "Say you're writing a program and you discover you've done somethingwrong, like every time you try to use the program, a button pops up. Mostprogrammers go in, analyze their program, find out what causes the button to popup and cure it so it doesn't do that. Draper would go in and code around the buttonso when the bug occurs, the program knows it's made an error and fixes it, ratherthan avoiding the error in the first place. The joke is, if Draper were writing mathroutines for addition and he came up with the answer 2 + 2 = 5, he would put aclause in the program, if 2 + 2 = 5, then that answer is 4. That's generally the wayhe writes programs."But while the hackers at Apple were amused that the strange style of John Draperwas turning out a featureful product, the people in charge of the business end ofApple got wind of the capabilities of Draper's design. They did not like it. Applewas not a showcase for tricks; this was not Homebrew. And John Draper's boardcould do some considerably neat tricks; not only did it interface with the phone,but it generated official phone company tones it was a computer-driven blue box.What Stew Nelson had done with the PDP-1 over a decade ago could now be donein the home. The hacker instinct would have been to explore the capabilities oi thishardware, which would enable you to explore systems all over the world. Butthough Apple felt it could benefit by the Hacker Ethic in distributing informationabout the innards of the machine, and distributing its computers as completesystems to explore, it was not in the business of promoting pure hackerism. It was,after all, a business, with a line of credit and a truckload of venture capitalprovided by men in three-piece suits who did not relate to concepts like phonehacking. "When Mike Scott discovered what [Draper's board] could do," Espinosalater said, "he axed the project instantly. It was much too dangerous to put out inthe world for anybody to have."

Killing that project was well in keeping with the propriety of the booming AppleComputer Company, which was selling computers like mad, and becomingrespectable at a pace which had the Homebrew alumni dazzled. Randy Wigginton,for instance, realized by late summer in 1977 that this company had far eclipsedyour normal growth story. That was when everyone went to Mike Markku-la's fora party to celebrate shipping a quarter-million dollars' worth of equipment thatmonth. It was only the beginning of a climb that turned Apple into a billion-dollarcompany within five years.During this period when everybody at Apple was celebrating the increasingrevenues piles of money that would make many of them so rich that they would bebeyond millionaires, in the ozone of Croesus Mode, where wealth is counted inunits of tens of millions John Draper was at home, playing with his Apple. He setthe completed board into his Apple II. He connected it to the telephone line. Andhe set it up so that it would "scan" entire telephone exchanges, looking for telltaletones which would inform him that a computer was on the other side of the line. Avirgin computer that a hacker could enter and explore. He had hacked a programby which the computer could dial on its own. "It seemed like an innocent thing todo," he later said. On its own, the computer began making a hundred and fifty callsan hour. Every time it discovered a computer at the other end of the line, theteletype printer attached to the machine would grind out the telephone number.After nine hours, John Draper would have a printout of every computer number inan entire three-digit exchange. "I just collected them," he would later explain. Thesetup could also detect WATS Extenders service numbers, with which one couldmake free long-distance calls. (It was John Draper's system which later would bethe model for a young hacker's computer break-in in the movie WarGames.)Unfortunately, the ever vigilant system that was the phone company haddeveloped some new phone-hacking detection equipment. John Draper'sunprecedented output of over twenty thousand phone calls in under a week notonly signaled that something was awry, but also exhausted the paper supply in thephone company printer which logged such irregularities. John Draper wasconfronted with another visit from the authorities. It was his third conviction, hisfirst using a home computer. An inauspicious beginning for a new era of phonehacking with personal computers.Some thought that the establishment of an industry of low-cost personal computersmeant the war was won. They believed the widespread proliferation of computersand their innate lessons of openness and creative innovation would, in and of itself,spur the Hacker Ethic. But for Lee Felsenstein, the war was just beginning. His

consuming passion was the resurrection of Community Memory. He still stuck tothe dream whose glory he had glimpsed in the experiment at Leopold's Records. Itwas perhaps exquisite irony that the development of the small computer industryhad been aided in part by the introduction of the Pennywhistle modem, the VDMvideo board, and the Sol computer, all pieces of the mythic Tom Swift Terminal, amachine which could reach fruition only in the publicly accessed terminals ofCommunity Memory branches. Irony, because a growing consensus among Lee'speers held that the once bold Community Memory concept and the Tom SwiftTerminal itself had been supplanted by the rapid acceptance of home computers. Itwas fine to desire a public terminal to be the heart of an information center thatwould be an "amalgam of branch libraries, game arcades, coffee houses, cityparks, and post offices." But why would people leave the house to go to a CMterminal when they could use an Apple Computer, along with a telephone interfaceright there at home, to communicate with any data base in the world?The Tom Swift Terminal itself might have been shelved, but Lee still held to hisgoals. The science-fiction novel in which he was protagonist was taking bolderplot twists, confirming that it was a major work indeed. In the two "unforgettableyears" since the triumphant Computer Faire, he had seen a company crumble.Processor Technology had suffered too much growth and too little soundmanagement to survive. Through the whole year of 1977, orders for the Sol camein at a rate beyond the capacity of the company to fulfill them. In that fiscal year,Bob Marsh later estimated, the company did five and a half million dollars' worthof sales, selling perhaps eight thousand machines. It moved into a clean, thirty-sixthousand-square-footheadquarters east of the Bay Area.But even as the future looked bright, with Bob Marsh and Gary Ingram figuringthat if sales got up to fifteen or twenty million they'd sell out and get rich, thecompany was doomed by lack of planning and failure to address the competitionof the new, cheaper, sleeker machines like the Apple, the PET, the TRS-80. Marshlater said that the company was thinking of going into that lower end of themarket, but was intimidated by the power of the competing firms that hadannounced complete computers in the $l,000-and-under range. He figured that PTcould sell the Sol as a more expensive, quality item, like Macintosh amplifiers inthe audio business. But the company missed the chance to extend its equipmenteffectively when its disk drive storage system proved to be unreliable. And it wasunable to deliver software for its machines on time. There would beannouncements of upcoming products in the PT newsletter, a spirited publicationwhich mixed bug reports with cryptic quotations (" 'There are no Jewish midgets'Lenny Bruce"). Months later, the products, either software programs or hardwareperipherals, would still be unavailable. When PT had an offer to sell Sol computersthrough a new chain of computer stores called Computerland, Marsh and Ingramrefused, suspicious because the owners of the chain were the same people who ran

the company (also struggling, soon to be bankrupt) which made the IMSAIcomputer. Instead of Sols being sold as computer-terminals at Computerland,Apples were."It's embarrassing to think how Mickey Mouse we were sometimes," Marshadmitted later. There was no business plan. Things would not get delivered ontime, credit would not be extended to priority customers, and the constant PTerrors in delivery and unprofessionalism with suppliers gave the company areputation for arrogance and greediness."We were just violating some of the basic laws of nature," Marsh later said. Whensales flattened, the money to run the company wasn't there. For the first time theylooked for investors. Adam Osbome, an already established gadfly of the youngindustry, introduced them to people who were willing to invest, but Marsh andGary Ingram did not want to give up a substantial percentage of the company."Greedy," Osbome later said. Some months later, when the company was almostbankrupt, Marsh came back to accept the offer. It was no longer open."We could have been Apple," Bob Marsh said, years later. "A lot of people saythat 1975 was the year of the Altair, '76 was the IMSAI, and 1977 was the Sol. Thedominant machines." But by the end of those "unforgettable two years," theengineer-managed companies that made those machines, machines available in kitform as well as assembled, machines which hardware hackers loved to play with ...were gone. The dominant small computers in the market were Apples, PETs, TRS-80s, in which the act of hardware creation was essentially done for you. Peoplebought these machines to hack software.Lee Felsenstein was perhaps the biggest financial beneficiary in ProcessorTechnology's short history. He had never been an official employee, and hisroyalties on the Sol eventually totaled over one hundred thousand dollars. He wasnever paid the last twelve thousand in royalties. Most of the money went towardthe new incarnation of Community Memory, which had set up a headquarters in alarge, two-level, barn-like loft structure in a West Berkeley industrial area. EfremLipkin and Jude Milhon of the original group were among the dedicated membersof the new CM Collective, all of whom vowed to work for long hours andsubsistence wages to establish permanently the thrilling experiment they'd workedon earlier in the decade. It required extensive work in developing a new system;the collective decided that funding could come, in part, by writing softwareproducts for these small computers.Meanwhile, Lee was broke. "The rational thing for me to do would have been toshut down [my engineering] business and get a job. But I didn't," he later said.Instead, he worked for almost nothing, designing a Swedish version of the Sol. His

energies were divided between that, the hopelessly earnest Community Memorymeetings, and monthly Homebrew meetings, which he still proudly moderated.The club was famous now that microcomputers were being acclaimed as the chiefgrowth industry of the country. And the prime example of this was AppleComputer, which would gross $139 million in 1980, the year it went public,making Jobs and Wozniak worth a combined sum of well over $300 million.Croesus Mode.That was the year that Lee Felsenstein ran into Adam Osbome at the ComputerFaire. Jim Warren's show was now an annual event pulling in fifty thousandpeople in a weekend. Osbome was a trim, Bangkok-born Englishman in his fortieswith a thin brown moustache and an imperious vanity which propelled his columnin trade magazines (entitled "From the Fountainhead") to notoriety. A formerengineer, he made a fortune publishing books on microcomputers when no oneelse was. He would sometimes bring boxes of them to Homebrew meetings and gohome with empty boxes and wads of cash. His books eventually sold hundreds ofthousands, McGraw-Hill bought his publishing house, and now, "with the moneyburning a hole in my pocket," as he said, he was looking to go into themanufacture of computers.Osbome's theory was that all the current products were too much oriented towardhackers. He did not believe that people cared to know about the magic that hackersfound within computers. He had no sympathy for people who wanted to know howthings worked, people who wanted to explore things, people who wanted toimprove the systems they studied and dreamed about. In Adam Osbome's view,there was nothing to be gained by spreading the Hacker Ethic; computers were forsimple applications, like word processing or financial calculation. His idea was toprovide a no-frills computer which would come with all you needed to get goingOsborne thought people were happiest when relieved of anxiety-producingchoices, like which word-processing program to buy. It would be cheap, and smallenough to carry on a plane. A portable Volkscomputer. He asked Lee Felsensteinto design it. Because the machine he wanted need only be "adequate," designing itshould not be too hard a task. "Five thousand people on the peninsula could havedone it," Osbome later said. "I happened to know Lee."So for twenty-five percent of this as yet unformed company, Lee Felsensteindesigned the machine. He chose to interpret Osborne's requirement that themachine be "adequate" to mean he could do his usual job of junkyard engineering,making sure that the design was solid enough to support well-tested components inan architecture that eschewed tricks and detours. "To be able to make a design thatis good and adequate, works well, and is buildable and cheap and contains nothingfancy is an artistic problem," he later said. "I had to be crazy enough and brokeenough [to try it]." But Lee knew that he could fulfill the requirements. As usual,

there was fear in the equation: Lee had an admittedly irrational fear of AdamOsbome; he guessed he identified Adam with the authority figures of hischildhood. There was no way that these two could communicate deeply. Once Leetried to explain Community Memory to him his real career and Osborne "didn't getit," lamented Lee. "He may be one of the last people to get what CommunityMemory is about when he sees it, uses it." Yet Lee worked hard for AdamOsbome, working in a space in the Community Memory headquarters, and in sixmonths he was done. He had fulfilled, he thought, the technical requirements aswell as the artistic ones in building the machine which was known as the Osborne1. Critics would later say that the plastic-cased machine had an uncomfortablysmall five-inch screen, and note other small problems, but when the computer firstcame out praise was plentiful and the Osborne Computer was soon a multimilliondollarcompany. And, out of nowhere, Lee Felsenstein was worth over twentymillion dollars. On paper.He did not radically change his life-style. He still lived in the Spartan second-floorapartment renting for under two hundred a month. He still washed his clothes indimly lit Laundromats near Osbome's offices in Hayward. The only concessionwas his driving a company car, a new BMW. But perhaps due to age, sometherapy sessions, and maturity, as well as his tangible success, he had grown inother ways. In his late thirties, he described himself as "still catching up,undergoing experiences you typically undergo in your early twenties." He had asteady girlfriend, a woman who worked at Osbome.Of the Osbome stock that Lee sold, almost all went to Community Memory.Which, in the middle of the microcomputer boom, was going through some roughtimes.Much of the collective's energies were going toward developing software to sell tomake money for the establishment of the nonprofit Community Memory system.But a debate was raging within the group as to the propriety of selling the softwareto anyone who cared to use it, or restricting it so that it would not benefit anymilitary efforts. It was not clear that the military were clamoring to buy thissoftware, which included a data base and communications applications moreuseful for small businesses than weapon-bearers. But these were hardenedBerkeley radicals, and discussions like these were to be expected. The personworrying most about the military was Efrem Lipkin, the hacker blessed withcomputing wizardry and cursed with a loathing for the uses to which computerswere put.Lee and Efrem were not getting along. Efrem was not charmed with the personalcomputer industry, which he considered "luxury toys for the middle class." Heconsidered the Osbome computer "disgusting." He resented Lee's working for

Osbome while he and the others were working for slave stipends at CM. The factthat much of the money for CM came from Lee's work on that machine botheredLipkin like a bug in a program, a fatal error which could not be coded away.Lipkin was a hacker purist; while he and Lee agreed on the spirit of CommunityMemory using computers to bring people together he could not accept certainthings. Efrem Lipkin told the group that one thing he could not accept was anysales of the software he'd written to the military.The problem ran deeper than that. Personal computers like the Apple and theOsbome, along with modems in the style of Lee's Pennywhistle, had engenderedother examples of the kind of thing Community Memory was attempting. Peoplewere using computers for communication. And the original mythos of CommunityMemory, the ideal of machines of loving grace in a field watching over us, hadbeen largely fulfilled in less than ten years, computers had been demystified. Theywere no longer evil black boxes to be feared. They were even hip in due time,computer technology would not only be commonplace around Leopold's Records,but would probably be sold there, in software that replaced records in some of theracks. Jude Milhon, close friend to both Lee and Efrem, a person who'd given asubstantial portion of her life to Community Memory, could hardly get the wordsout when she discussed it, but she knew: they'd blown it. The Revolt in 2100 wasover, and it wasn't even 1984 yet. Computers were accepted as convivial tools, andthe power of computers was accessible at thousands of retail stores, for those whocould pay.Racked with frustration, Efrem Lipkin blew up during a meeting. He laid downwhat he considered the failure of the group. "Basically I thought the thing wasfalling apart," he later said. He was particularly hard on the topic of Lee's moneyfinancing the group. Lee told him that this tainted money was paying Efrem'ssalary. "Not anymore," said Efrem. And the hacker was gone. Less than a yearlater, there was no more Osbome Computer. Management bungling worse than atProcessor Technology had made the firm the first of many major financialdisasters in what would be called "The Great Computer Shakeout." Lee's papermillions would be gone.But he would still have his dreams. One great battle had been won. Now, perhapstwo thirds into the epic science-fiction novel, it was time to gather forces for afinal spin into greatness. Sometime before Osborne Computer went bankrupt, Leehad been lamenting the opaque nature of the most recent computers, the lack ofnecessity that would lead people to actually go inside the chips and circuit boardsand wire them. Hardware construction, he was saying, is an objectified way ofthinking. It would be a shame if that went by the wayside, were limited only to thefew. He did not think it would be gone. "[The magic] will always be in there to acertain extent. You talk about deus ex machina, well, we're talking about deus in

machina. You start by thinking there's a god in the box. And then you find thereisn't anything in the box. You put the god in the box."Lee Felsenstein and the hardware hackers had helped make the transition from theworld of the MIT hacker, where the Hacker Ethic could flourish only within thelimited, monastic communities around the machine, to a world where the machineswere everywhere. Now, millions of computers were being made, each one aninvitation to program, to explore, to mythologize in machine language, to changethe world. Computers were rolling off assembly lines as blank slates; a newgeneration of hackers would be seduced by the power to fill the slates; and thesoftware they created would be presented to a world which saw computers in quitea different way than it had a decade before.

Part ThreeGame HackersThe Sierras:The Eighties14The Wizard and the PrincessDRIVING northeast out of Fresno on Route 41 toward the South Gate of Yosemite, you climbedslowly at first, through low fields dotted with huge, pitted boulders. About forty miles out was thetown ofCoarsegold; soon after, the road rose steeply, topping a mountain called Deadwood. Onlyafter beginning the descent from Deadwood did one see how Route 41 formed the center strip ofOakhurst. Population under six thousand. A modem poly-mart named Raley's (everything fromhealth foods to electric blankets). A few fast-food joints, several clusters of specialty stores, twomotels, and a real estate office with a faded brown fiberglass statue of a bear outside it. After a mileor so of Oakhurst, the road continued its climb to Yosemite, thirty miles away.The bear could talk. Push a button on its base, and you got a low, growling welcome to Oakhurst, apitch on the price of land. The bear did not mention the transformation of the town by the personalcomputer. Oakhurst had seen hard times, but in 1982 it boasted one major success story. A companybuilt, in a sense, by the hacker dream, and made possible only by the wizardry of Steve Wozniakand his Apple Computer. A company that symbolized how the products of hacking computerprograms which are works of art had been recognized as such in significant sectors of the RealWorld. The hackers who played Spacewar at MIT did not envision it, but the offspring of that PDP-1 program, now that the hardware hackers had liberated the computer and made it personal, hadspawned a new industry.Not far from Talking Bear was an inconspicuous two-story building constructed for offices andshops. Except for a small beauty parlor, a lawyer's office, and the tiny local office of Pacific Gasand Electric, the entire building was occupied by the Sierra On-Line company. Its main product wascode, lines of assembly-language computer code written on floppy disks which, when inserted intopersonal computers like the Apple, magically turned into fantastic games. A specialty of the

company was "Adventure" games, like that perfected by Don Woods at the Stanford AI lab; thiscompany had figured out how to add pictures to the game. It sold tens of thousands of these disks.As of this August day in 1982, On-Line had around seventy employees. Things changed so quicklythat on any given day it was difficult to give an exact figure, but this was over triple the employeesit had a year ago. A year before that, there were only the two founders, Ken and Roberta Williams,who were, respectively, twenty-five and twenty-six when they started the company in 1980.Ken Williams was sitting in his office. Outside was his red Porsche 928. It was another day to makesome history and have some fun. Ken's office today was relatively neat; the piles of papers on thedesk were only several inches high, the sofa and chairs facing the desk were clear of floppy disksand magazines. On the wall was a lithograph, an homage to Rodin's Thinker: instead of that noblehuman frozen in cerebration was a depiction of a robot contemplating a rainbow-colored Apple.Ken Williams, meanwhile, was characteristically sloppy. He was a burly, big-gutted man, withswollen features that overwhelmed his friendly blue eyes. There was a hole in his red T-shirt and ahole in his jeans. His shoulder-length, dark-blond hair covered his head in an uncombed matting. Hesat draped over his tall, brown executive armchair like some post-counterculture King Cole. In apleasant California cadence punctuated by self-effacing comments that wistfully tripped off histongue, he was explaining his life to a reporter. He had covered the tremendous growth of hiscompany, his pleasure in spreading the gospel of computers to the world through the software hiscompany sold, and now was discussing the changes that had come when the company became big,something much more than an operation of hackers in the hills. He was in touch with Real Worldpower now."The things I do on a daily basis blow my mind," he said. He talked about eventually going public.In 1982, a lot of people who owned companies spawned by the revolution that the hardware hackershad started were talking about this. Computers had become the jewel of the economy, the only areaof real growth in a recessionary period. More and more people were seeing the magic first glimpsedin batch-processed monasteries by the Hands-On visionaries; in the power harnessed by the PDP-1artists; in the accessible mastery of information provided by Ed Roberts and proselytized by LeeFelsenstein. As a result, companies like Sierra On-Line, started on shoestrings, were now bigenough to contemplate public share offerings. Ken Williams' talk was reminiscent of that heardseveral years before, when, using the same self-con-sciously nonchalant cadences, people wouldspeak of one day getting rolfed: in both circumstances, an act once approached with evangelisticgravity was now regarded as somewhat of a delicious inevitability. Going public was something younaturally considered, at least when you had gone from being an ambitious computer programmer toan owner of a $10-million-a-year computer game company in a little over two years.It was a crucial time for Ken Williams' company. It was also a crucial time for the computer gamesindustry, a crucial time for the computer industry as a whole, and a crucial time for America. Theelements had conspired to put Ken Williams, a self-described former hacker, into the driver's seat ofmore than a Porsche 928.Ken Williams left his office and went to a large room two doors down in the same building. Therewere two rows of cubicles in this plaster-walled, industrially carpeted room. In each cubicle was asmall computer and a monitor. This was the programming office, and this was where a younghacker had come to show his game off to Ken Williams. The hacker was a cocky-looking kid; hewas short, had a smile of bravado on a pug-nosed face, and his chest jutted out, bantam-like, under a

faded blue T-shirt. He had driven up from L.A. this morning, so high that he could have filled upthe tank with his excess adrenaline.On the monitor was a prototype of a game called "Wall Wars," written in the past few months inintense bursts between midnight and eight in the morning. While the hacker had worked in a smallapartment, his stereo had blared out music by Haircut 100. Wall Wars involved a stream of colorful,brick-like pieces forming a kinetic wall in the middle of the screen. On the top and the bottom of thescreen were equally dazzling robot-like creatures. A player would control one of the robots, shootthrough the wall by knocking out enough bricks to form a moving gap, and destroy the other robot,who of course would be trying to accomplish the same task, with the player as the victim.The hacker had promised himself that if Ken Williams bought his game concept, he'd quit his job asa programmer for Mattel and go independent, joining the ranks of an elite group who were alreadybeing referred to as Software Superstars. They were the apogee of a Third Generation of hackerswho had learned their programming artistry on small computers, who had never bootstrappedthemselves up by way of a community. Who dreamed not only of the ultimate hack, but of fame,and big royalty checks.Ken Williams ambled into the room and leaned an elbow on the edge of the cubicle. The younghacker, masking his nervousness, began to explain something about the game, but Ken didn't seemto be listening."This is all so far?" Ken said.The hacker nodded and started to explain how the game would eventually play. Ken interruptedhim."How long will it take you to finish?""I'm going to quit my job," said the hacker. "I can do it in a month.""We'll figure two months," said Ken. "Programmers always lie." He spun around and startedwalking away. "Drop into my office and we'll have you sign a contract."It was reminiscent of an old-time entertainment mogul giving the nod to an auditioning starlet. Itwas indicative of the massive change in the way people thought of computers, used computers, andinteracted with computers. The story of the MIT hackers and the Homebrew Club had led to this:Sierra On-Line and aspiring software stars.The Hacker Ethic had met the marketplace.Ken Williams was never a pure hacker. He certainly did not take the appellation as a badge of pride;the idea of an aristocracy of computer excellence never occurred to him. He'd stumbled intocomputing. Only incidentally did he develop a relationship with the machine, and it was not until hethought himself its master that he even began to appreciate what kinds of changes the computercould make in the world.

At first, the computer had him totally stymied. It was at California Polytechnic, Pomona Campus,which Ken Williams was attending because (a) it cost only twenty-four dollars a quarter plus booksand (b) he was only sixteen, and it was close to home. His major was physics; he had trouble withclasses. Though Ken had always slid by academically on high aptitude, things like trigonometry andcalculus weren't as easily mastered as the subjects in high school were. Now there was thiscomputer course, geared to programming in FORTRAN.Ken Williams was intimidated by computers, and that intimidation triggered an odd reaction in him.He had always resisted preset curricula while refusing to do his homework in junior high, he wouldalmost compulsively read, everything from the Hardy Boys to what became his favorite genre, therags-to-riches stories of Harold Robbins. He identified with the underdog. Williams' father was atelevision repairman for Sears, a rugged man who had moved to California from CumberlandCounty, Kentucky; his co-workers nicknamed him "Country." Ken grew up in a fairly toughneighborhood in Pomona, at times sharing a bedroom with his two brothers. He avoided fightsassiduously, later cheerfully admitting he was "a coward." "I wouldn't hit back" he once explained,as if the rites of dominance and macho posturing were alien to him.But when he read about those struggles in big, melodramatic novels, he was enraptured. He lovedthe idea of some poor kid making a bundle and getting all the girls. He was susceptible to thehyperbolic charms of a life like that of Jonas Cord, the young, ruthless, Howard Hughes-like figurein The Carpetbaggers who built his inheritance into an aviation and filmmaking empire. "That'swhere I got my role model," Williams later explained. Maybe it was some of Jonas Cord's kind ofambition that led Ken Williams to become more active in high school, where he joined the band,had a girlfriend, learned how to play the game of good grades, and worked up schemes to makemoney. (He would later boast that he won so many sales contests on his paper route that he was on afirst-name basis with the ticket-takers at Disneyland.) Ken's inclination toward self-deprecation andhis seemingly casual independence masked a fierce determination that showed up even as he wasbacked into a corner by an ornery Control Data computer in FORTRAN class.For weeks he struggled, lagging behind his classmates. He had set a problem for himself: tosimulate a little mouse running through a maze, following a wall, and getting out of the maze. (Itcalled for a program similar to the old "Mouse in the Maze" program on the TX-0, where the littlemouse tries to find the martini glasses.) With six weeks gone in the nine-week course. Ken washeaded toward an P. And there was nothing that Ken Williams, even then, liked about failure. So hekept at it until one day he came to a sudden realization. The computer really wasn't so smart at all. Itwas just some dumb beast, following orders, doing what you told it to in exactly the order youdetermined. You could control it. You could be God.Power, power, power! Up here where the world was like a toy beneath me. Where Iheld the stick like my cock in my hands and there was no one ... to say me no!Jonas Cord, in Harold Robbins' CarpetbaggersThe mouse got through the maze. Ken Williams got through the course. It was as if a light had goneon in his head, and everyone in the class could see it from the ease with which he turned out code.Ken Williams had something going with the Dumb Beast.

A more important relationship to Ken at the time was his romance with a girl named Roberta Heuer.He had met her in high school, when she was dating a friend of his. Out of the blue, two monthsafter a double date, Ken called her, nervously reminded her who he was and asked her out. Roberta,a demure, passive girl, later said that she hadn't been that impressed with Ken at first. "He was cute,but I thought he acted kind of dumb. He was shy but [to compensate for it] he would go overboard,acting too aggressive. He carried cigarettes in his pocket, but didn't smoke. He asked me to gosteady the first week [we went out]."Roberta had been seeing a boy who lived upstate; Ken tried to force her into choosing betweenthem. Roberta might well have decided against this insecure, pushy boy, but one day Ken opened upto her. "He was talking about physics," Roberta later recalled. "I figured he really was a bright guy.All the boyfriends I'd had before were rather dumb. Ken was talking about real things,responsibility." She stopped seeing the other boy, and almost instantly Ken pushed for a permanentcommitment. "I didn't want to be alone," he later reflected.Roberta talked to her mother about it: "He's going to go someplace," she said. "To really make it. Besomething."Finally Ken told her, "We're getting married, and that's it." She didn't fight it. She was nineteen; hewas a year younger.Within a year, Roberta was pregnant, and Ken was pulling D's and worrying about supporting afamily. He knew from reading the want ads that there were a lot more jobs in computerprogramming than there were in physics, so he figured, just like it said on the matchbook covers,that he would find a career for himself in electronic data processing. Roberta's dad co-signed astudent loan for $1,500, tuition for a trade school called Control Data Institute.The world Ken Williams was entering was nothing like the holy preserve of the MIT AI lab. Hiswould-be colleagues in the business computing field had little of the hands-on hunger that drove theclass of Altair graduates who hacked hardware. In the early 1970s the business computer field thatKen was entering was considered the creepiest in America. It was a joke, an occupation where meeklittle moles did things who knows what those things were? to the punch cards and whirring wheelsof Hulking Giant computers. As far as the public was concerned, there wasn't even much differencebetween the drones who mechanically punched the cards and hammered at the keyboards, and theskilled technicians who programmed the machines to put the cards in their places. They were allseen as the white-shirted. Coke-bottle-glasses moles in the computer room. Creatures of thedisembodied age.If Ken and Roberta had been part of a wide circle of friends, they might have had to confront thatstereotype, which Ken did not resemble in the least. But Ken and Roberta did not bother to putdown roots or establish close friendships. As a computer programmer. Ken was less a RichardGreenblatt or a Lee Felsen-stein than he was Jonas Cord. Later, he would jauntily say, "I guessgreed would summarize me better than anything. I always want more."Ken Williams was far from a dazzling programmer when he finished Control Data Institute, but hewas certainly prepared to do anything required of him. And more. As much work as possible, tohelp him go as high as he could. Then take on another, more demanding job, whether or not he wasqualified. Instead of cleanly breaking with the previous employer, Ken tried to keep on the payroll,in consultant mode.

He would claim to know computer languages and operating systems he knew nothing about, readinga book about the subject hours before a job interview and bullshitting his way into the position."Well, we're looking for a programmer in BAL," they would tell him, referring to an esotericcomputer language, and he would laugh almost derisively."BAL? I've been programming in BAL for three years!"Then he would immediately rush out to get hold of some books, since he had never even heard ofBAL. But by the time the job started he would have procured documentation, uniformly buried indense, cheaply printed looseleaf manuals, to fake expertise in the "BAL environment," or at leastbuy time until he could get into the machine and divine the secrets of BAL.No matter where he worked, in any number of nameless service companies in the yawning valleyabove Los Angeles, Ken Williams did not meet one person who deserved an iota of his respect. Hewould observe people who'd been programming computers for years and he would say to himself,"Give me a book and in two hours I'll be doing what they're doing." And sure enough, stackloads ofmanuals and a few fourteen-hour days later, he would at least appear to be one hotshot programmer.He'd come into the heavily air-conditioned computer sanctums at weird hours of the night to fix abug, or get the computer back up when one of his programs accidentally fed on itself and tripped themillions of calculations up in such a fury of misunderstanding that nothing the regular crew couldthink of could revive the machine. But Ken, confident that the stupidity of his colleagues wasdwarfed only by the astounding compliance of the Dumb Beast whom he could feed and befriendwith his programming skills, would work three days straight, forgetting to even stop for a meal,until the Dumb Beast was back on the job. Ken Williams, hero of the day, tamer of the Dumb Beast,would go home, sleep for a day and a half, then return to work, ready for another marathon.Employers noticed, and rewarded him.Ken was rising at quantum speed Roberta figured they moved to various locations in the L.A. areaabout twelve times in that go-go decade, always making sure that they turned a profit on the house.They had no time for making friends. They felt like loners and misfits, usually the only white-collarfamily in a blue-collar neighborhood. The consolation was money. "Wouldn't it be nice to makeanother two hundred dollars a week?" Roberta would ask, and Ken would get a new job or take onmore consulting work ... but even before Ken had settled into this new job, he and Roberta would besitting in the tiny living room of whatever house they happened to be living in, and saying,"Wouldn't it be nice to earn two hundred dollars more?" The pressure never stopped, especiallysince Ken Williams had idle dreams of fantastic sums of money, money enough to goof off with forthe rest of his life not only all the cash that he and Roberta could spend but all that his kids couldspend, too (Roberta was pregnant by then with the second Williams son, Chris). Wouldn't it be nice,he thought, to retire at thirty?By then something else was changing: his relationship with the Dumb Beast. When Ken had time,he would often pull out some of those dense, cheaply printed looseleaf manuals, trying to figure outwhat made the big Burroughs or IBM or Control Data machine really tick. As he gained proficiencyin his profession, he began to respect it more, see how it could approach art. There were layers ofexpertise that were way beyond what Williams had previously come to assume. A programmingpantheon did exist, almost like some sort of old-time philosophical brotherhood.

Ken had gotten a taste of this more exotic realm when he fast-talked his way into a job as systemsprogrammer for Bekins Moving and Storage. Bekins was switching then from a Burroughscomputer to a bigger and slightly more interactive IBM machine. Ken baldly fabricated a careerhistory of IBM wizardry for himself, and landed the job.At Bekins, Ken Williams became hooked on pure programming. His task was installing a heavydutytelecommunications system on the IBM that would allow one computer to support eight ornine hundred users in the field across the country, and the problems and complications were beyondanything he'd confronted so far. He would experiment with three or four languages that had nothingto do with his job, fascinated with the techniques and mind-frames required with each language.There was a whole world inside this computer ... a way of thinking. And maybe for the first timeKen Williams was being drawn to the process of computing more than to the goal of completing atask. In other words, hacking.As a consequence of his sustained interest, Ken remained at Bekins longer than at most of his otheremployers: a year and a half. It was time well spent, since his next job presented him with an evengreater challenge, as well as contacts and ideas which would soon enable him to act out his wildestfantasies.The company was called Informatics. It was one of a number of firms that sprang up in the midsixtiesto take advantage of a gap in the mainframe computer software field. More and more bigcompanies and government agencies were getting computers, and almost none of the software thatthe behemoth computer companies supplied could artfully execute the tasks the computers weresupposed to perform. So each company had to hire its own programming staff, or rely on highlypaid consultants who invariably would disappear just when the system crashed and valuable datacame out looking like Russian. A new team of programmers or consultants would then come out tountangle the mess, and the process would repeat itself: starting from scratch, the new team wouldhave to reinvent the wheel.Informatics and companies like it were set up to sell software that made the Hulking Giants a littlemore comprehensible. The idea was to invent the wheel once and for all, slam a patent on it, andsell it like crazy. Their programmers would toil away at the assembly level and finally come up witha system which would allow low-level programmers, or even in some cases nonprogram-mers, toperform simple computer tasks. After all, these commercial systems all did pretty much the samething you had something coming in from a clerk or a branch office on paper which got keypunchedand entered into a system which modified some preexisting file. Informatics came up with a preprogrammedsystem called Mark 4. Sometime in the seventies it became the largest-sellingmainframe computer software product of all time, approaching at one point $100 million in yearlyrevenue.In the late seventies, one of the managers in charge of Informatics' new products was DickSunderland, a former FORTRAN programmer who was climbing the corporate ladder afterreluctantly foregoing a late-in-life stab at law school. In place of the law, Sunderland haddetermined to pursue a romance with a bright and holy concept of management. To be a leader ofmen, a deft builder of competent, well-meshed employee teams, a persuasive promoter, and aconstructive manipulator ... this was what Dick Sunderland aspired toward.

A small, chalk-complexioned man with hooded eyes and a contemplative drawl, Sunderlandconsidered himself a natural manager. He had always been interested in the advertising, selling,promoting of things. Psychology fascinated him. And he was especially enamored of the idea ofchoosing the right people to work together so that their joint output dwarfed the measly sum of theirindividual inputs.Dick was trying to do that at Informatics with his new product team. He already had one genuinewizard on the staff, a lean, quiet man in his forties named Jay Sullivan. Jay was a former jazzpianist who had come to Informatics from a more mundane job in his native Chicago. He laterexplained why: "Systems software [at Informatics] was much more interesting. You didn't have toworry about mundane things like applications or payrolls. It was much more real programming tome; you dealt more in the essence of what programming was about. The actual techniques ofprogramming are more important than the specifics of the job at a specific time." In other words, hecould hack there.In his programming, Sullivan worked like a vacationer who, having planned his trip carefully,educating himself on the subtle characteristics of the local scenery, followed the itinerary withenhanced consciousness. Yet he still retained the curiosity to stray from the plan if circumstancesseemed to call for it, and derived pleasure from the careful exploration that such a fork in his pathwould involve, not to mention the sense of accomplishment when the detour proved successful.As with many hackers, Sullivan's immersion in programming had taken its social toll. Sullivan laterexplained that with computers "you can create your own universe, and you can do whatever youwant within that. You don't have to deal with people." So while he was a master in his work,Sullivan had the infuriating kind of programmer personality that led him to get on splendidly withcomputers but not pay much attention to the niceties of human interaction. He would casually insultDick, and nonchalantly go about his business, doing brilliant things with the operating system, butoften would see his innovations die because he was not adept at politicking, a process necessary atthe large company. Dick Sunderland had forced himself to be patient with Sullivan, and eventuallythey had arrived at a seller-inventor relationship which produced two lucrative improvements to theMark 4 line.Dick was looking for more master programmers, calling recruiters and making it quite clear that hewas looking for cream-of-the-crop people, nothing less. One recruiter mentioned Ken Williams tohim. "This kid's a genius type," the recruiter said.Sunderland called in Ken for an interview and made sure that his true genius, Jay Sullivan, wouldbe there to test the mettle of this Williams person. Dick never before had seen anyone stand toe-totoewith Jay Sullivan, and was curious to see what might come of the interview.Dick and Jay were talking about a problem in implementing a new, user-friendly language thatInformatics was working on when Ken showed up, wearing slacks and a sport shirt which fit sobadly that it was obvious T-shirts were his norm. The discussion had been fairly technical, focusingon the problem that to make a language a nonprogrammer would understand a language like Englishone would have to avoid any kind of ambiguous words or acronyms.Suddenly Jay Sullivan turned to Ken and said, "What do you think of the word 'any'?"Without hesitation, Ken correctly asserted that it was a very valuable word, but an ambiguous word

nonetheless ... and then extemporaneously tossed off ideas about how that word might be handled.It seemed to Dick that he was witnessing a classic battle the cheeky Pomona Kid versus venerableChicago Slim. While Ken had a charismatic quality to him, and obviously knew computers, Dickstill had his money on Jay. Jay did not let him down. After Ken stopped, Jay, speaking quietly andmethodically, "sliced Ken up with a razor blade," Dick later recalled, enumerating the errors andincompleteness of Ken's thoughts. Yet it was impressive to Dick and even to Jay that this collegedropout could even think such thoughts. What's more, rather than being dissuaded by Jay'sbroadside, Ken came right back. Dick watched the two pick up threads of each other's ideas andweave them into more refined concepts. This was synergy, the manager's holy grail. Dick decided tohire Ken Williams.Dick put Ken under Jay's supervision, and the two of them would chatter about programming arcanafor hours. For Ken it was an education: he was learning the psychology of computerdom in a wayhe never had. Of course, one part of the job that Ken Williams did not like was having a boss; Kenin this regard was a typical anti-bureaucratic hacker. So he came to dislike Dick, with all hisschedules and fixation on managerial details obstacles to the free flow of information.Ken and Jay would be talking about the intricacies of some aspect of programming language liketrying to figure out, when somebody says "List by customer," what that really means. Does it mean"SORT by customer," or perhaps "List ALL customers"? Or maybe "List ANY customers"? (Thatword again.) The computer had to be programmed so it wouldn't screw up on any of thoseinterpretations. At the very least it should know when to ask users to clarify their meaning. Thistook a language of considerable flexibility and elegance, and though Ken and his new guru Jaymight not have said it out loud, a task of that sort goes a bit beyond technology and into primallinguistics. After all, once you get waist-deep into a discussion about the meaning of the word"any," it's only a short step to thinking philosophically about existence itself.Somewhere in the midst of one of these conversations Dick would come in, eager to witness somesynergy among his troops. "We'd try to supersubset it so that a two-year-old would understand, askDick's opinion, he'd give it, and we'd chase him out of the room," Ken later recalled. "Dick neverunderstood what we were putting up. He was obviously out of his league."At those times Ken might have felt superior to Dick, but in retrospect he had to admit that Dick wassmart enough to recognize talent. Ken realized that he was one of the weaker members of asuperteam of programmers who were doing great stuff for Informatics. Sometimes Ken figured thatDick must have gotten lucky, accidentally corralling five of the most creative people around for hisnew products team. Either that or he was the best manager in the world, or at least the best talentevaluator.Ken, always needing more money, began moonlighting. Sunder-land was refusing his constantrequests for raises, and when Ken suggested that he might like to head a programming group, Dick,a little astounded perhaps at the chutzpah of this brilliant but scattershot kid, flatly denied therequest. "You have no talent for management," said Dick, and Ken Williams never forgot that. Kenwas regularly going home to Roberta and complaining about Dick how mean he was, how strict,how he had no understanding of people and their problems but it was less a dissatisfaction with hisboss than his desire for more money, money for a bigger house, a faster car, a CB radio, amotorcycle, a hot tub, more electronic gadgets, that led him to double and even triple up on work,often phasing into a no-sleep mode. Eventually the outside work got to be more than the inside

work, and he left Informatics in 1979, becoming an independent consultant.First there was a guy with a scheme to do tax returns for big companies like General Motors andShell, and then there was some work with Warner Brothers, programming a system for the recordcompany to keep artists' royalties straight. There was a bookkeeping system he constructed forSecurity Pacific Banks, something about foreign tax plans. Ken was becoming a finance guru; thethirty thousand a year he was pulling down looked to be only the beginning, if Ken kept hustling.He and Roberta began weaving a little fantasy. At night the nights Ken wasn't out consulting forsomeone they would sit in the hot tub and talk about splitting the Simi Valley suburban trap andmoving to the woods. Where they would go water skiing, snow skiing... Just goof off. Of coursethere weren't nearly as many hours in a day to make money to turn that kind of trick, no matter howmany companies Ken set up tax programs for. So the fantasy was just that, a fantasy.Until Ken's little brother Larry got an Apple Computer.Larry brought it over to Ken's office one day. To Ken, who had been dealing withtelecommunications networks that handled two thousand people all at once, who had invented entirecomputer languages with mainframe wizards the likes of Jay Sullivan, the idea of this sleek, beigemachine being a computer seemed in one sense ludicrous. "It was a toy compared to the computersI'd been using," he later explained. "A piece of junk, a primeval machine."On the other hand, there were plenty of things that the Apple offered that Ken's Hulking Giants didnot provide. Up till the time he worked at Informatics, his computers had been batch-processed,loading dread punch cards. The Apple at least was interactive. And when you got down to it, it wasfairly powerful, especially compared to the big machines of less than a decade ago. (MIT's MarvinMinsky once estimated that an Apple II had the virtual power of the PDP-1.) And it ran pretty fast,almost comparable to a big machine, because on a time-sharing mainframe you're fighting for CPUtime with eight hundred people all trying to grind their code through at once, with the Dumb Beastsweating silicon trying to parcel out nanoseconds to each user. You shared your Apple with no one.In the middle of the night, it was just sitting there in the house, waiting for you and you alone. KenWilliams decided he had to have one.So in January 1980 he scraped together "every cent I had," as he later told it, and bought an AppleII. But it took a while to understand how significant a machine it was. Ken figured that everybodywith an Apple was like him, a technician or engineer. It seemed logical that what these people reallywanted was a powerful language to run on their computer. No one had yet done FORTRAN for theApple. Hardly anyone had done anything on the Apple at that point, but Ken was thinking like ahacker, unable to envision anything neater than something to use the computer with. The Tools-to-Make-Tools syndrome. (Richard Greenblatt's first big project on the PDP-1 was a FORTRANimplementation, for much the same reason.) At that point Ken was unable to conceive that theApple and small machines like it had opened the field of recreational computing to others besideshackers.The irony of it was that, even as Ken planned to write a FORTRAN for the Apple, this moresignificant revolution in computing was happening right there in his own house.

For most of her life Roberta Williams had been timid. There was a dreamy quality about her, andher doll-like brown eyes, long brown hair, and frilly, feminine wardrobe bell sleeves, suede boots,Peter Pan collars indicated that this was a woman who'd had a childhood rich in fantasy. In fact,Roberta Williams' early daydreaming had taken on almost supernatural proportions. She had alwayspictured herself in strange situations. At night she would lie in bed and construct what she referredto as "my movies." One night pirates would kidnap her and she would devise elaborate escapeplans, often involving some dashing savior. Another night she would be in ancient Greece. Alwaysdreaming of things happening to her.Daughter of a frugal agricultural inspector in Southern California, she was painfully shy, and therelative isolation of her rural home reinforced that. "I never really liked myself," she would laterreflect. "I always wanted to be someone else." She felt her parents doted on her younger brother,who suffered from epilepsy. Her form of entertainment was telling stories that would enthrall herelders, and enrapture her brother, who took the stories literally. But as she got older, and coped withdating and the grown-up world, "all that got thrown out the window," as she says now. When sheand Ken married, she passively expected him to make a living; as for herself, she was so shy she"could hardly make a phone call." The storytelling remained buried.Then one night Ken, who had brought a computer terminal home, called Roberta over to show herthis program that someone had put on the IBM mainframe computer he was connected to. "Comeon over here, Roberta," he urged, sitting on the green-carpeted floor of the spare bedroom wherehe'd put the terminal. "See this it's a really fun game."Roberta didn't want anything to do with it. First of all, she didn't like games too much. Second, itwas on a computer. Though much of Ken's life was spent communicating with computers, theywere still unfriendly ciphers to Roberta. But Ken was persistent, and finally cajoled her to sit at theterminal to see what this thing was about. This is what she saw:YOU ARE STANDING AT THE END OF A ROAD BEFORE A SMALL BRICKBUILDING.AROUND YOU IS A FOREST. A SMALL STREAM FLOWS OUT OF THE BUILDINGAND DOWN A GULLY.It was "Adventure," the game written at the Stanford AI lab by hacker Don Woods, theTolkienesque game which lured hackers and users into immersing themselves in a magical dungeonworld. And from the moment Roberta Williams tentatively poked GO EAST she was totally andirrevocably hooked. "I just couldn't stop. It was compulsive. I started playing it and kept playing it. Ihad a baby at the time, Chris was eight months old; I totally ignored him. I didn't want to bebothered. I didn't want to stop and make dinner." She didn't want to do anything except figure outhow to get to Witt's End or get around the snake. She would be up until four in the morning, tryingto figure out how to get around the damn snake to get to the giant clams. And then she would sit upin bed thinking, What didn 't I do? What else could I have done? Why couldn't I open that stupidclam? What's in it?At first Ken participated, but he soon lost interest. Roberta thought this was because Ken neverliked it when Adventure got sarcastic. You would say KILL DRAGON and it would come back andsay WHAT, WITH YOUR BARE HANDS? You couldn't get mad, you had to ignore it And youcertainly couldn't be sarcastic back, just say, "Yes." And it said WITH YOUR BARE HANDSYOU KILL THE DRAGON AND HE'S LYING DEAD AT YOUR FEET. You killed the dragon!

You could go on. Roberta approached the game with methodical intensity, drawing elaborate mapsand anticipating what was around every turn. Ken thought it was amazing that one day Robertacouldn't stand computers and the next day he couldn't get her away from the terminal. Finally, aftera month of ratiocination about trolls, axes, misty caverns, and vast halls, Roberta solved Adventure.She was desperate to find more games like it.By then, Ken had bought the Apple. Despite her newfound interest in computers, Roberta was lessthan thrilled at the two-thousand-dollar purchase. If Ken wanted it so badly, she told him, he shouldtry to make money from it. This coincided perfectly with Ken's desires at the time, which were towrite a FORTRAN compiler for the Apple and sell it for bundles of money to the engineers andtechnicians who wanted Tools to Make Took. He hired five part-time programmers to help himimplement the compiler. Ken's house, a typical Simi Valley four-bedroom, two-thousand-squarefoottract home, became headquarters for the FORTRAN project.Meanwhile Roberta had heard that there were some Adventure-style games available for the Apple.Roberta bought some at a computer store in nearby Northridge in the San Fernando Valley, but shefound them too easy. She wanted her newly awakened imagination to be as taxed and teased as itwas before. She began sketching out an adventure game of her own.She started by writing out a story about a "mystery house," and things that happened in it. The storyhad much to do with Agatha Christie's Ten Little Indians another inspiration was the board game"Clue." Instead of just finding treasures as in Adventure, this game would have you do somedetective work. Roberta mapped out the story just as she mapped out an adventure game when sheplayed it. Along the way, she devised puzzles, character traits, events, and landmarks. After acouple of weeks she had a stack of papers with maps and dilemmas and plot turns and twists andshe flopped it down in front of Ken and said, "Look what I did!"Ken told Roberta that her little stack of papers was very nice and she should run along and finish it.No one really wanted to use a personal computer as a game machine they were for engineers whowanted to figure out how to design circuits or solve triple-x exponential equations.Not long after, Ken and Roberta were at the Plank House in the Valley, a redwood-walled steakhouse where they often dined, and there he finally listened to his delicate wife describing how hergame put you in an old Victorian house in which your friends were being killed off one by one. Shedescribed a few of the dilemmas, and told of a secret passageway. It began to sound good to Ken.Ken Williams could usually smell some money to be made, and he thought that there might beenough bread in this for a trip to Tahiti or some new furniture."This sounds great," he told her, "but to really sell you need more. An angle. Something different."As it happened, Roberta had been thinking lately how great it would be if an adventure game wereaccompanied by pictures on the computer screen. You could see where you were instead of justreading it. She had no idea if this was possible on an Apple or any kind of computer. How wouldyou even get a picture into a computer?Ken guessed they could try.As it happened, a device called a VersaWriter had just been released. It was a tablet that you drewon and it registered the shapes into an Apple computer. But it didn't draw very accurately, and it

was hard to control the writing mechanism, which was like the clunky base of a desk lamp. Worstof all, it cost two hundred dollars. Ken and Roberta decided to shoot the dice and spring for it. Kenthen reprogrammed the whole thing so Roberta could do something with it. Eventually she made afew dozen black-and-white pictures of rooms inside the Mystery House, with people drawn onlyslightly better than stick figures. Then Ken coded the game logic, after figuring out how to packseventy pictures onto one floppy disk, a task which any programmer in the least familiar with theApple would have guessed was impossible. The secret was not storing data for entire pictures, butusing assembly-language commands which stored coordinates of the individual lines in eachpicture; as each new picture was due to appear, the computer would follow the commands to drawthe picture. It was a dazzling program bum that characterized Ken's facility for top-level hacking.The whole thing took a month.Ken scrapped the FORTRAN project and took the game to a software distributing company calledProgramma. It was the biggest distributor of Apple software in the world. In early 1980, that wasnot saying too much. It sold a range of programs with names like "Biorhythm," "Nude Lady,""Vegas Style Keno," "State Capitals," and "Apple Flyswatter." Most of the games were written inBASIC (as opposed to the much faster-running assembly language) and could entertain only atoddler or a person in love with the idea of playing with a computer. There were enough of the latterto jack Programma's gross up to $150,000 a month.The Programma people loved Mystery House. Here was an assembly-language Adventure gamethat was well planned, challenging and had pictures. The fact that the pictures were in black andwhite and looked like something young D. J. Williams (age six) might have drawn was irrelevant.No one else had done anything like it. They offered Ken a 25 percent royalty on the $12 wholesaleprice, and assured him they could sell five hundred copies a month for six months, which at $3 acopy would be $9,000. This was almost twice the amount that Ken had been promised for theFORTRAN compiler before splitting it with his five programmers. All for Roberta's silly game.Ken Williams also considered selling the game directly to Apple Computer. He sent a sample, butwaited over a month and got no reply. (A year later, Apple now a large company with a slowmovingbureaucracy, wrote back and said, yes, maybe we might like to consider buying this. Thissaid a lot more about what Apple Computer had become than it did about Mystery House.) Ken andRoberta did not take Programma's offer. Ken and Roberta wanted all the money. Why not try to sellit independently? If it doesn't work, then take it to Programma.So the Williamses started taking Mystery House around to the few computer stores in the area. Thepeople at the stores would be skeptical at first after all, excited new computer fanatics, intoxicatedwith the power lent them by their new Apples and Radio Shack TRS-SOs and PET computers, werealways trying to sell strange programs. But then Roberta's game would boot with a picture of an oldhouse drawn on the computer's high-resolution (hi-res) screen rather than the computer's clunky,block-oriented lo-res one. The people at the stores would ask how Ken did that. After a fewexperiences like that. Ken and Roberta figured they might be able to make as much as one or twothousand dollars a month from this software-selling thing.The next step was advertising the product in a magazine. But as long as they were doing that, theyfigured, why not offer a couple more games, and look like a real company? They already had aname: On-Line Systems a holdover from Ken's vision of selling the respectable kind of business

software for the Apple that he did in his consulting for on-line computer firms. Ken went to a friendand asked him to be On-Line's first outside programmer. In return for eventual royalties, the frienddid a simple black-and-white shoot-one-dot-with-another-dot game called "Skeet Shoot." Theyprinted up some advertising fliers and documentation sheets unwilling to pay the one-hundreddollartypesetting fee, Roberta cut the individual letters out of magazines and got that "master"printed by a local copy shop. It came back with little lines that betrayed its cut-and-paste origin, butthey had already spent five hundred dollars. Anyway, that form of packaging was state of the art atthat time. This was the computer world, where the packaging didn't matter. What mattered was themagic that happened when all those binary connections were made. Marketing was second tosubstance.Mystery House, or "Hi-Res Adventure #l," was priced at $24.95. Ken and Roberta, in a fit ofoptimism, had bought a box of one hundred blank disks at the nearby Rainbow Computing store,and once the fliers were sent to computer stores and the ad placed for a reluctantly paid twohundred-dollarfee in the May 1980 issue of a small magazine called MICRO, they waited. Thephone rang, on that first day in May, and then there was a break and then it rang again. And fromthen on, it would be a long time before Ken and Roberta could count on their phone not ringing.Ken and Roberta made eleven thousand dollars that May. In June, they made twenty thousanddollars. July was thirty thousand. Their Simi Valley house was becoming a money machine. Kenwould go off to work at Financial Decisions, where he was now programming for around forty-twothousand a year, and Roberta would copy disks and put the disks, along with the fliers and inserts,into a Ziploc bag. She would also take care of the kids and put the programs in boxes and keep thehouse clean and send programs out by U.P.S. At night Roberta was designing a longer and betteradventure game based on the world of fairy tales.Every few minutes the phone would ring and it would most likely be someone ready to absolutelydie unless they got a hint to unstick them from a seemingly hopeless situation in Mystery House.People who called the number shown on the flier included in the Ziploc bag with the floppy diskwere under the impression that On-Line was some big conglomerate, and they couldn't believe theirluck in somehow connecting with the actual author of the program. "I'm talking to the person whowrote the game?" Yeah, in her kitchen. Roberta would give them a hint never a straight answer: partof the fun was working it out for yourself and chat with them a while. The energy level wascontagious. People were going looney over playing with computers.Ken Williams was carrying a full work load at Financial Decisions, developing a complicatedfinance system and heading the data processing department. At night, he would work on the Apple,hacking a new machine-language system for Roberta's new adventure game. On weekends. Kenwould make the rounds of the computer stores. It was clear that the software business required hisfull time.Roberta thought that as long as Ken was thinking of quitting, they might as well live out theirlongtime dream of moving to the woods. Her parents lived near Yosemite, above the town ofOakhurst, and it was even more rural and quiet than the place Roberta grew up in and stillremembered fondly. It would be perfect for the kids. So they did it. "I'm going to move to the mountains," he told an astounded Dick Sunderland at a party in mid-1980. Dick and Ken were in a rooma bit away from the party noise, and Ken said, "Here I am, twenty-five years old, and the AppleComputer has enabled me to fulfill my dream: living in the woods and living in a log cabin andwriting software."

Ken and Roberta bought the first country house they looked at, a three-bedroom, rustic, wooden A-frame cabin on Mudge Ranch Road just outside Coarsegold, California.By then, they had finished Roberta's fairy-tale game, "Wizard and the Princess." It was twice aslong as Mystery House, and ran faster thanks to Ken's improvements on the program logic. Ken haddeveloped a whole new assembly-language interpreter for writing adventure games; he called itADL, or Adventure Development Language. Also, this "Hi-Res Adventure #2" had over onehundred and fifty pictures. Ken had devised subroutines that allowed Roberta to enter the picturesinto the computer as easily as if she were drawing on a regular tablet. This time the pictures were incolor; Ken used a technique called "dithering" to blend the six colors of the Apple, mixing dot bydot, to get twenty-one colors. He was performing stunts on the Apple that Steve Wozniak neverdreamed of. Magic stuff.The game's only problem was the first puzzle, where the adventurer, on his way to rescue PrincessPriscilla of Serenia from Wizard Harlin, had to get past a snake. The answer was rather obscure:you had to pick up a rock and use it to kill the snake, but unless you chose a rock in one specificlocation (they all looked alike) you got bit by a scorpion and died. Most people started banging theirheads against the wall at the third or fourth scorpion bite. Eventually, after countless frustratedadventurers made calls to Roberta's kitchen in Coarsegold (East Coast people sometimes would callat 6 A.M. California time), On-Line began supplying a hint to that dilemma in every package.Snake or not. Wizard and the Princess eventually sold over sixty thousand copies at $32.95. Kenand Roberta would sit in the hot tub they'd installed and shake their heads, saying, "Do you believethis?"On December 1 of that first year, after the business had already changed their lives, got them a newhouse, and made them the rising stars of the Apple world, they finally moved the business out of thehouse to a space on the second floor of a two-story building in Oakhurst, seven miles up Route 41.Their neighbor was a religious promoter who was unsuccessfully trying to book Little Richard on anational preaching tour. You could hear him shouting through the thin walls.Early in 1981, less than a year after the company began with a few floppy disks and a $150 ad in alittle magazine, Roberta described the situation in a letter to another small magazine: "We openedan office December 1, 1980, and hired our first employee to help us with the shipping and thephones. Two weeks later, we hired somebody to help her, one week after that we hired somebody tohelp them. We just hired a full-time programmer this week, and we need at least anotherprogrammer. Our business is growing by leaps and bounds, and there's no end in sight."

15The BrotherhoodTHE Hacker Ethic was changing, even as it spread throughout the country. Itsemissaries were the small, low-cost computers sold by Apple, Radio Shack,Commodore (the PET), and Atari. Each was a real computer; the sheerproliferation created a demand for more innovative programs that previousdistribution methods could not address. A hacker could no longer distribute cleverprograms by leaving them in a drawer, as he had at MIT, nor could he rely on aHomebrew Computer Club system of swapping programs at club meetings. Manypeople who bought these new computers never bothered to join clubs. Instead theyrelied on computer stores, where they happily paid for programs. When you weredesperate for something to fulfill the promise of this thrilling new machine,spending twenty-five dollars for Mystery House seemed almost a privilege. Thesepioneering computer owners in the early eighties might learn enough about theirmachines to appreciate the beauty of an unencumbered flow of information, butthe Hacker Ethic, microcomputer-style, no longer necessarily implied thatinformation was free.As companies like On-Line wrote and sold more programs, people who had nodesire to become programmers, let alone hackers, began to buy computers,intending only to run packaged software on them. In a way, this represented afulfillment of the hacker dream computers for the masses, computers like recordplayers: you'd go to the software store, choose the latest releases, and spin away.But did you really benefit from your computer if you did not program it?Still, in the early eighties, everyone with a computer had to delve into the hackermentality to some degree. Doing the simplest things on your machine required alearning process, a search for gurus who could tell you how to copy a disk or findthe proper connecting cables to hook up the printer. Even the process of buyingready-to-run software had a funky, hacker feel to it. The programs were packagedin Ziploc bags, the graphics on the so-called documentation were mostly on thelevel of Roberta Williams' stick-figure primitives, and more often than not thelabels on the disk would be typewritten and stuck on by hand ... there was an auraof the illegitimate about the product, only slightly more respectable than hard-core

porno books.An excursion to the local computer store was a journey to the unknown. Thesalesman, more often than not some kid working at minimum wage, would takeyour measure, as if you were a potential obstacle in an Adventure game, testingyou by tossing off the jargon of Ks, bytes, nibbles, and RAM cards. You would tryto get him to explain, say, why this accounting package ran better than that one,and he would come back with some gibberish about protocols and macros. Finallyyou'd ask him the question that almost every Apple owner asked in 1980 or 1981:"What's the hot new game?" Games were the programs which took greatestadvantage of the machine's power put the user in control of the machine, madehim the god of the bits and bytes inside the box (even if he wasn't sure of thedifference between a bit and a byte). The kid would sigh, nod, reach under thecounter for the current Ziploc-bag phenomenon, and, if you were lucky, boot it onthe screen and race through a few rounds, so you could see what you were buying.Then you would plunk down your twenty or twenty-five or even thirty-five dollarsand go home for what was the essential interface with the Apple. Playing games.In early 1980, the Hot New Game would most likely be written in deadly-slowBASIC. Most of the Apples at that time used cassette recorders; the difficulty ofusing an assembler with a cassette recorder made it nearly impossible to go downinto the deepest recess of the machine, the 6502 chip, to speak in the Apple'sassembly language.This was changing: Steve Wozniak had recently hacked a brilliant design for adisk-drive interface for the Apple, and the company was able to offer low-costfloppy-disk drives which accessed thousands of bytes a second, makingassembling easy for those few who knew how to program on that difficult level.Those infected with the Hands-On Imperative, of course, would soon join that elitein learning the system at its most primal level. Programmers, would-beprogrammers, and even users buying Apples would invariably purchase diskdrives along with them. Since Steve Wozniak's Apple adhered to the Hacker Ethicin that it was a totally "open" machine, with an easily available reference guidethat told you where everything was on the chip and the motherboard, the Applewas an open invitation to roll your sleeves up and get down to the hexadecimalcode of machine level. To hack away.So Ken Williams was not the only one catching the glory train by hacking Applemachine language in the spring of 1980. Technological pioneers all over thecountry were sensing what hackers had known all along: computers could changeyour life. In Sacramento, a Vietnam vet named Jerry Jewell, who had sandy hair, amatching moustache, and a perpetually addled, slightly pissed-off look about him,had bought an Apple to see if he could switch from the insurance business to

something more lucrative. Two weeks after he got the machine, he enrolled in anassembly-language class at Lawrence Hall of Science taught by Andy Herzfeld,one of Apple's top programmers. Jewell had no disk drive and could not run thesample programs that were distributed each week. For eight weeks, he didn't havethe slightest idea what Herzfeld was talking about, and not even brief tutorialsfrom the assistant instructor John Draper, alias Captain Crunch could crack thecode. Eventually, after Jewell got a disk drive and listened to the tapes he'd madeof the class, he caught on.Jewell got a job managing a local computer store. All kinds of people came intocomputer stores those days. It was almost like a statement in BASIC: IF you own acomputer THEN you're probably a little crazy. Because even then, four years afterthe Altair, you still couldn't do many useful tasks with a personal computer. Therewas a simple word-processing program called "Easy Writer" written by JohnDraper (Jewell bought one of the first copies at the 1980 Computer Faire), andsome accounting stuff. But mostly people hacked Tools to Make Tools. Or games.And they would come into computer stores to show off their hacks.So it was not surprising when an Arabic-looking college student named NasirGebelli strode up to Jewell in the store and booted a slide-show program he'dwritten. Jewell liked it, and worked with Gebelli to make a spin-off, a graphicsdrawingprogram they called "E-Z-Draw." Jewell began making the rounds ofcomputer stores in L.A. and the Bay Area to sell it.Then Nasir, a computer science major who was doing poorly in his classes, beganto write games. Nasir's use of color and a technique called "Page Flipping" madethe current crop of games look sick. Page Flipping used a duplicate screen("page") for everything that was displayed on the Apple; using machine-languageinstructions, you were flipping between the two pages thousands of times eachsecond, in order to eliminate the flickering that made microcomputer graphics lookso unappealing. Nasir was also unafraid to enlist everything and anything as"invader" in his games, which almost always used one basic scenario: you've gotto shoot lots of stuff before some of it shoots back at you. It re-created theaddictive, pyrotechnic state of siege that was hugely popular in coin-operatedgames, which had special microchips to create spectacular graphic effects, andonly when Nasir showed them did people realize that some of these effects couldbe achieved on the Apple.Nasir wrote twelve games that year. Jewell and the owner of the computer storeformed a company called Sinus Software to sell the games. Jewell would look atNasir's preliminary version of a game and suggest outlandish changes. One gamethat Nasir wrote was quite similar to "Space Invaders," a popular coin-operatedarcade game where aliens irrevocably inch down the screen in waves to attack the

player's little tank. Jewell suggested that weapons fired by the invaders should notbe shells, but eggs and the invaders should be, in turn, monsters, space wolves,giant-bomb-throwing lips, and the most dangerous of all, killer fuzz balls. Killerfuzz balls that bounce and shake and move toward you with frantic inevitability."Space Eggs" was a runaway bestseller for Sinus Software.Another company breaking into the market then was the brainchild of a formercorporate lawyer from Wisconsin. Doug Carlston had been unhappy working for abig law firm on the eighty-second floor of the Sears Building in Chicago; hemissed his college hacking days, when he and his friends would stuff chewinggum in the lock of the computer room door so the staff couldn't keep them out; atnight fifteen of them would sneak in and hack. Even after he'd set up a small lawpractice in rural Maine, his heart remained in computing. Then the soft-spoken,contemplative Carlston heard that Radio Shack was selling a computer for undertwo thousand dollars. He bought one on a Friday and didn't come up for air, heremembers, until that Sunday night. Eventually he began writing a giganticstrategy game on the TRS-80, one which involved an entire imaginary universe.Your mission was to protect the interstellar good guys: the Br0derbund. (This wasScandinavian for "Brotherhood.")It was early 1980, and Carlston, like Williams and Jewell, saw his life in software.He enlisted his brother Gary, who had been working in a job so desirable thatgrown men gasped when he mentioned it coach of a Scandinavian women'sbasketball team. Together they set up Br0derbund Software to sell Galactic Saga.The idea was to translate the Saga from TRS-80 to the Apple.The Saga did not fare too well at first. The seven thousand dollars that Doug andGary began with was down to around thirty-two dollars at one point. They wereliving on Gary's VISA card. It wasn't until Doug drove across the country,stopping at every computer store he found and showing them the game, lettingthem soak in some of the program's fine points, and calling in seventeen thousanddollars' worth of business in his nightly calls back to Gary that things picked up.But the really big break came at the 1980 Computer Faire, where the Carlstons hadscraped the money together to show the Saga in a low-cost "microbooth," aninnovation of Jim Warren's to allow small, often nonprofit companies to displaywithout shelling out the spiraling exhibitor's fees on the main floor. A conservativeJapanese businessman took a liking to these clean-living, religious Carlstons, andallowed them to distribute the work of some Japanese programmers he handled.The games were faithful copies of current coin-operated arcade games. And the

very first Apple program he gave them, a brilliant rip-off of the arcade game"Galax-ian" they named it, unapologetically, "Apple Galaxian" became a top hit,selling tens of thousands of disks. And though Br0derbund began to recruitprogrammers in the United States to write games, for months the Japanese productaccounted for most of its business.On-Line, Br0derbund, and Sinus were the fastest risers of dozens of companiesspringing up to cater to new computer users, particularly those in what came to beknown as the Apple World. The formerly dominant Programma had overextendeditself and eventually was folded into a bigger company, which was not as much ofa market force. But newer firms with names like Continental and Stoneware andSouthwestern Data were out of the gate like wild quarter horses, too. Thedistinguishing characteristic of these companies was that, like the hardware firmsforming out of the Homebrew Computer Club, the impetus seemed to be as muchto get software out there as it was to cash in on a budding trend. Hitting themarketplace seemed to be the best way to show off one's hacks.Significantly, a new magazine which became closely identified with the brash newwave of Apple World software companies, was started by people who were notterribly experienced in publishing, but were fanatic proselytizers of the Applecomputer.Margot Tommervik, a Los Angeles free-lance textbook editor with brown hairworn long and straight in true sixties-refugee style, had loved games long beforeshe touched her first computer. In early 1980, she appeared on the television gameshow "Password," and despite being paired with a couple of soap operapersonalities who, she later recalled, "had no idea that Virginia was south and NewHampshire was north," she came out of a deftly played "lightning round" withfifteen thousand dollars. She and her husband Al, a copy editor at Variety, made alist of things to do with the money, and it turned out they needed twice as much asthat to make a dent in the list. So they said to hell with it and went out to buy acomputer.The best-known home computer those days was the TRS-80. But while Margotand Al were waiting for a salesman in the local Radio Shack, a store employee akid who was standing near Al said, "What's that smell?" Al was a stumpy,redheaded, long-bearded man who resembled a toll-taker at a bridge in MiddleEarth, and it was unimaginable to picture him without his briar pipe. The kid,perhaps with an MIT-style smoke aversion in his hacker blood, said to AlTommervik, "Mister, you shouldn't smoke that pipe, it's making me sick." TheTommerviks walked out of Radio Shack, and a week later bought an Apple.

Margot and Al, in her words, "became addicted" to the Apple. She enjoyed thegames it played, but her satisfaction went deeper. Without any technicalbackground, Margot Tommervik was able to extract the Hacker Ethic from thissleek piece of machinery in her home. She believed that her Apple had its ownpersonality, life-loving and kind of daffy, in a positive way. She later explained:"The very idea of naming it Apple it's wonderful. It's much betterthan [giving it a name like] 72497 or 9R. It says, 'Hey, this is morethan just a piece of machinery. You can get more out of it.' Even thelittle beep it emits when you turn it on shows a special enthusiasm."Margot Tommervik learned the story of how Apple Computer began, and shemarveled at how the machine conveyed Steve Wozniak's "life-loving spirit into thecomputer. He had that ability to bite all the big pieces of life and chew it up andsavor every bit. He put the spirit into it as he built. He made the machine do asmany things as he could think of it to do ..." Margot believed that if you spentenough time with your Apple, you would realize that you could also do anythingyou could think of. To her, the Apple embodied the essence of pioneering, ofdoing something brand new, having the courage and the willingness to take risks,doing what's not been done before, trying the impossible and pulling it off withjoy. The joy of making things work. In short, the joy of hackerism, for the firsttime transparent to those not born with the Hands-On Imperative.Margot saw it in everyone who used the Apple. They just fell in love with it. Herplumber, for example, got an Apple, and as Margot watched the plumber's wifeplaying a game on it, Margot swore she was actually seeing a mind expanding.You could get some of this excitement even just setting up an Apple, when yougot your first disk to boot, and the disk drive came on, whirring happily, with thelittle red "in use" light glowing. By God, you did it! You caused something tohappen. You caused the disk drive to run, you caused this to happen, and then asyou started to set real tasks for your Apple and construct your tiny universes, youstarted to solve things. You saw your power tremendously increased. All thepeople she talked to in the Apple world, and certainly Margot herself, showed thatjoy. She believed it was no less than the joy in one's own humanity.Margot Tommervik loved the new kinds of software coming out, and though sheand Al did some BASIC programming, the machine was mostly used to play thesenew games she would buy. One day she dropped by Rainbow Computing and sawa notice that a new Adventure-style program was coming out, and would be put onsale at ten o'clock on a certain Friday; the first one who solved it would win aprize. Margot was there with $32.95 that Friday, and by noon Saturday she wasback at the store with the solution. The game was Mystery House.

Sometime later Margot stumbled across a publishing house which had started amagazine about software, and was looking for a partner. Margot and Al said they'dput up some money and do the magazine if they were promised full control. So theremains of the "Password" money went into this new incarnation of the magazine,a magazine devoted to the world of the Apple computer. It would be calledSoftalk.When Margot started drumming up advertisers she called up On-Line and toldRoberta, who was still handling corporate business from her Simi Valley kitchen,about wanting a completely professional magazine that would reflect the spirit ofthe Apple computer. Margot's enthusiasm was obvious. And when Margotmentioned that it was she who had won that contest to solve Mystery House,Roberta howled, "You're the one! We thought it would take months to do it."Roberta talked to Ken, and On-Line decided to take out four quarter-page ads inthe first issue. They called up other companies and urged them to take out ads, too.Softalk came out in September 1980 at thirty-two pages, including the covers.Eventually the people in the cottage industry of supplying products for the Applebegan to realize the value of a magazine whose readers were their direct targetaudience. By the end of 1981, there were well over a hundred advertising pages inan issue.These pioneering Apple World companies were bound by an unspoken spiritualbond. They all loved the Apple computer, and the idea of mass computing ingeneral. Somehow, they all believed that the world would be better when peoplegot their hands on computers, learned the lessons that computers had to teach, andespecially got software that would help expedite this process.In pursuit of this common goal, On-Line, Sirius, and Br0derbund became almost aBrotherhood of their own. Jewell and the Williamses and the Carlstons got toknow each other very well, not only at computer shows and trade events, but ateach other's parties, where the three staffs gathered, along with people from otherApple-oriented firms in California.This was in high contrast to some not-so-old but already moribund companies.Particularly Atari, the company which started as the first purveyor of the computergame and sold millions of dollars of software for the Atari "VCS" game machine(which could not be programmed like a computer) and its own competitor to theApple, the Atari Home Computer. Since its acquisition by the huge WamerCommunications conglomerate. Atari had shorn itself of the hacker-like openness

of its founders. You almost had to be a KGB agent to find out the name of one ofits programmers, so terrified was Atari that someone would raid its ranks. And thethought of programmers getting together and comparing notes was even morefrightening. What if one of its programmers realized that he could do bettersomewhere else? No such secrets for the Brotherhood, who in 1981 most oftenpaid their programmers on a 30 percent royalty basis, a rate well known to allthree companies and all the programmers working in the field.The cooperation went deeper than partying. Almost as if they had unconsciouslypledged to adhere to at least part of the Hacker Ethic, there were no secretsbetween them. Almost every day. Ken, Doug, and Jerry would talk on the phone,sharing information about this distributor or that floppy disk manufacturer. If someretailer didn't pay off one of the companies, the others would know immediately,and not deliver to that retailer. "We had this unwritten code," Jerry Jewell laterrecalled. "We would let each other know what we were working on so we wouldn'tdo the same projects. If I was working on a racing car game, we would tell them,so they wouldn't start one."Some might look at this interaction and call it restraint of trade, but that would bean Old Age interpretation. This Brotherhood was no cartel banding together to thedetriment of the user and the technology. The user benefited by getting a widerrange of games. And if a programmer from one of the companies couldn't figureout some assembly-language trick with zero page graphics, the fact that he couldget in touch with a programmer at another company was only the application ofthe Hacker Ethic to commerce. Why hide helpful information? If neat tricks werewidely disseminated, the quality of all the software would rise, and people wouldget more out of computers, and it would be good for all the companies in the longrun.Maybe it was time to scrap the divisive practices of corporate business and adopt amore hacker-like approach, one which might, by its successes in the software field,spread through all of America and revitalize the entire country, long spinning in aDarwinian, litigious, MBA-dominated maelstrom. Substance might then prevailover cloudy "corporate image," in a world free of the insane, anti-productivepractice of owning concepts and trade secrets which could be distributed far andwide. A world without all that destructive, cutthroat seriousness. The attitude inthe Apple World seemed to be "If it's not fun, if it's not creative or new, it's notworth it." That's what you would hear from Ken and Roberta Williams, from Dougand Gary Carlston, from Jerry Jewell.This spirit reached its peak during the summer of 1981 in a scene imbued with allthe gusto of a cola commercial: a white-water raft trip down the Stanislaus River.It was Ken Williams' idea, a joint vacation trip for the whole industry. Ken joked

that he did it only to put leaks into his competitors' boats; but the very absurdity ofthat statement underlined the difference between this industry and others. Insteadof sabotaging competitors. Ken Williams would forge his way through fiercewaters alongside them.The river was idyllic, but one participant later explained to a reporter that evenmore idyllic than the isolated pine-treed and high-canyon-walled setting was thefeeling among the adventurers, who of course swapped all sorts of product,technological, and financial information: "We all sort of feel like we beat thesystem: we got to microcomputers before IBM did. We're all competitors but welike to cooperate."Even the boatmen had to tell the participants, which included the heads of over sixsoftware firms, like Ken and Roberta, or the Carlstons, or Steve Dompier (theHomebrew member who was independently writing software now that ProcessorTech was out of business) to stop talking shop. Sometimes they did stop. Theystopped at the end of the ride as they approached the last rapid. Not for the firsttime, Ken Williams rammed his raft into someone else's. Some people on that rafttumbled onto another one, and people from all ten rafts used their paddles andbuckets to splash one another, and the Brotherhood exploded in a mist of whitewater, laughter, and thrilling camaraderie.

16The Third GenerationTHERE were still the born hackers, those blessed with the unrelenting curiosity,the Hands-On Imperative. The last chosen in basketball, and the first in arithmeticclass to divine the mysteries of fractions. The fifth-graders who would mumble,when adults pressed them for explanation, that they "like numbers." The cowlickedkids in the back of the junior high classroom who got so far ahead of theclass that the math teachers gave up on them, let them skip to future chapters in thetext, and finally allowed them to leave the room and wander downstairs todiscover, with much the same wonder as Peter Samson stumbling upon the EAMroom at MIT, a terminal connected to a time-sharing computer at some university.A gray teletype terminal in the basement of a suburban school, a terminal whichheld, wonder of wonders, games. You could play the games, but if you werehacker-bom, that would not be enough. You would ask, "Why can't the game dothis?" "Why can't it have that feature?" And since this was a computer, for the firsttime in your life you would have the power to change this into that. Someonewould show you some BASIC, and the system would be at your command.It happened exactly like that with John Harris. Though he was tall and notunattractive, a towheaded blond with a goofily appealing smile and the breathlessverbal delivery of someone whose enthusiasm runs too high to acknowledge cyclewastinggrammatical interrupts, he was a social outcast. He would later admitcheerfully that he had been "the worst English student in school and the worst inP.E." His roots were in the upper middle class of San Diego. His father was a bankofficer. His siblings, a younger brother and two older twin sisters, wereuninterested in technical matters. "I was completely, a hundred percent technical,"John later said with endearing redundancy. It seemed he had no more intimateconfidant than the remote computer he did not even know its location connected tohis school's time-sharing terminal-John Harris was not one of those methodical,plodding geniuses who dazzled folks in science fairs. Impressing adults was nothis forte. John Harris' art hinged on impressing people who shared his passions,which were few and well defined: Science fiction (films and comics not books,because John was not much of a reader). Games. And hacking.

At one time, the apex of existence for a person like John Harris might have been tofind his way into a computer center like the MIT AI lab, where he would haveloitered and learned until he got his chances at a terminal. It might have felt likedelivery into heaven, as it had felt to fourteen-year-old David Silver when he wasinitiated by the ninth-floor hackers and allowed to take the sacrament of the PDP-6. But Harris came of high school age after the revolution that began with theAltair. John Harris' generation was the first that did not have to beg, borrow, orsteal computer time from a distant mainframe attached to teletype terminals. In thelush suburbs around San Diego, it was not uncommon for a high school kid in1980 to cajole his parents, or even earn enough money from a part-time job, for alarge purchase. Most kids wanted cars. But as the early computer store ownersknew well, other kids were asking for computers.When John Harris was in eleventh grade, a senior he knew let him use hisCommodore PET computer. John later recalled: "I started playing games on hissystem and started programming on his system, a Star Trek game. And a couple ofother things in BASIC that I had learned and that were a lot more fun than any ofthe time-sharing stuff was. It was quicker, was much more interactive, hadgraphics and sound effects... Teletypes were OK, but I hadn't known anything elseexisted, and I went, 'Wow, this is great...'"For John Harris' Third Generation, which followed the pioneering generation ofmainframe hackers and the second generation of hardware hackers who liberatedcomputers from the institutions, access to computers was easy. You could ownone, or use a friend's. The computers were not as powerful as those in institutionsand there were no communities of wizards, no Greenblatts or Gospers to urge youto abandon loserdom and engage in The Right Thing until you could be called awinner. But those facts of life did not bother this Third Generation. They could gethands on computers now. In their bedrooms. And whatever they learned abouthacking, and whatever elements of the Hacker Ethic they picked up, would bedetermined by a learning process that grew from the hacking itself.John Harris was fascinated with the PET. You could do things so much moreeasily with a personal computer. John was particularly impressed with the fullscreenediting capability, a great improvement on the teletype-style edit-one-lineat-a-timeprocess he'd been stuck at before. But the best part of the PET and otherpersonal computers were the games."I'm obsessed with all forms of games," John Harris later said. "It's just me, Iguess!" It was only natural that a junior high school electronics junkie would bedazzled by the batch of space warfare arcade games appearing in the lateseventies: Harris did not know that their inspiration was Slug Russell's Spacewarhack. For a time after that, John fell in love with a game called "Crazy Climber,"

where you try to get a guy to the top of a building, avoiding dropped flowerpots,people who close windows on your hand, and a giant gorilla who tries to swat youoff. What impressed him about Crazy Climber was its groundbreaking creation ofa unique and artful scenario. It did something that no one had ever done before.John Harris strove for that level of originality. His attitude toward games wassimilar to his attitude toward computer languages, or his preference for a certaincomputer over another: an intense personal identification, and a tendency to takeoffense at an inefficient, sub-optimal way of doing things. John came to feel thatgames should have a certain degree of innovation, a certain degree of graphicrazzle-dazzle, and a certain degree of challenge. His standards of "playability"were rigid. He took personal offense at cases where a programmer could havemade the game better in some obvious (to John Harris) way, but did not, whetherbecause of technical ignorance, a lapse in perception, or worst of all laziness.Details made a game really great, and John adopted the firm belief that a gameauthor should include every possible frill to make the game more enjoyable. Notneglecting, of course, to perfeet the basic structure of the game so that it wasessentially bug-free.To fulfill his own exacting standards, John needed his own computer. He begansaving money. He even cut down on playing arcade games. John was out of highschool by then, enrolled in a local college in electrical engineering, and working ata bank's data processing center. One of his friends owned the hottest hacker homecomputer around, the Apple, but John did not like the machine's editingcapabilities or its quirky graphics.With money in hand he went computer shopping, for a PET. The salesmen sneeredat him. "The only person who buys a PET is a person down to his last penny," theytold him. "A person who can't afford an Apple II." But John Harris did not wantWozniak's creation. He had seen more of his friend's Apple and was convincedmore than ever that the Apple was severely brain-damaged. His contempt for theApple grew beyond all bounds. "Even the sight of that computer drives me up thewall," he would later say. At the very mention of the machine, Harris would recoiland make the sign of the cross, as if warding off a vampire. He could explain atlength just why he felt this way no full-screen editor, the necessity of loading themachine up with more hardware before it really cooked, the limited keyboard ...but this loathing went beyond reason. Somehow Harris felt the Apple stopped youfrom doing what you wanted to do. Whereas other hackers considered the Apple'slimitations as challenging hurdles to leap over or as a seductive whisper saying,"Take me further," Harris deemed them ridiculous. So he asked the salesman atone of the stores about this other machine, the Atari computer.Atari had just come out with its 800 (and its lower-powered companion, the 400),

its competitor to the Apple. On first sight, it appeared to be some sort of jazzed-upgame machine with a keyboard. In fact, it had a slot to put cartridges inside, amark that the machine was geared at least in part for novices too befuddled tohandle even a tape cassette, let alone a floppy disk. There wasn't even a decentmanual. John Harris played with an 800 in the store, and discovered that, like thePET and unlike the Apple, it had full-screen editing. But he wanted to know whatwas inside it, so he went to another store, where a salesman slipped him a piece ofpaper with some commands for this new computer. Like some secret code for useby the French Resistance. No code-breaker devoured a message as avidly as JohnHarris did these papers. He discovered that the Atari had a set of keystroke graphicsymbols, a high-resolution mode, and a separate chip for sound effects. In short,exciting new features, every feature Harris liked on the PET, and even the thingshe grudgingly considered worthwhile on the Apple. He bought an 800.He began programming in BASIC, but very soon realized that he would have tolearn assembly language to do the games he wanted to do. He quit working at thebank and got a job at a company called Gamma Scientific, which had needed aprogrammer to do assembly-language work on its system, and was willing to trainsomeone.Transferring his new assembly-language skills to the Atari was difficult. The Atariwas a "closed" machine. This meant that Atari sequestered the informationconcerning the specific results you got by using microprocessor assemblylanguagecommands. It was as if Atari did not want you to be able to write on it. Itwas the antithesis to the Hacker Ethic. John would write Atari's people and evencall them on the telephone with questions; the voices on the phone would be cold,bearing no help. John figured Atari was acting that way to suppress anycompetition to its own software division. This was not a good reason at all to closeyour machine. (Say what you would about Apple, the machine was "open," itssecrets available to all and sundry.) So John was left to ponder the Atari'smysteries, wondering why Atari technicians told him that the 800 gave you onlyfour colors in the graphics mode, while on the software they released for it, gameslike "Basketball" and "Super Breakout," there were clearly more than eight colors.He became determined to discover its secrets, the mysteries of its system, thebetter to extend it and control it.For the quest, John enlisted a friend who knew assembly language. They got holdof a cassette-tape disassembler written in BASIC, something which broke downprograms into their object code, and disassembled the software sold by Atari lineby line. Then they would take these weird instructions, which accessed all sorts ofoddball memory locations on the 6502 chip inside the Atari, and poke them intothe machine to see what happened. They discovered things like "display listinterrupts," which enabled you to use a greater number of colors on the display

screen; "user definable characters"; and, best of all, something that they wouldlater know as "player-missile graphics," which was no less than an assemblylanguagemethod of accessing a special Atari chip called "Antic" that handledgraphics on its own, letting you run the rest of the program on the main chip. Sinceone of the more difficult aspects of programming games was parceling out theactivities of the main chip between sound, graphics, and game logic, playermissilegraphics gave you a huge advantage. How could a company that didsomething so neat in its machine be so Scrooge-like in letting you know it existed?Harris and his friend had cracked the secrets of the Atari. They wanted to use theirknowledge to liberate the machine, distribute the technical data, break the Atarimarketplace wide open. But around that time some bootleg hardware manualsappeared. It seemed that some pirates inside Atari had procured copies of itsinternal hardware and reference manual, and were distributing them for high pricesto interested parties. The manual, however, was written in such a way that onlypeople who were already the equivalent of Atari design engineers could divine it.As Harris later put it, "It was written in Atari, not in English." So the bootlegmanual wasn't much help except to those people who had integrated the workingsof the Atari 800 into their own mental cosmology. People like John Harris.Eighteen-year-old John Harris used this knowledge to write games. He wrotegames that he would like to play, and his desire to make the games flashy enoughand exciting enough to please him as a player incited him to leam more about theAtari system. As a science-fiction fan who often attended the "Cons" the conclavesof sci-fi nuts, where people lost in technological fantasy were considered normalhe naturally gravitated to space warfare games. He would create spaceships, spacestations, asteroids, and other extraterrestrial phenomena. From his imagination hewould make these shapes appear on his display screen, and then he would controlthem. Putting them up on the screen and controlling them was much moreimportant than the eventual fate of the game itself:John Harris could be careless, and he often lost entire programs by saving files onthe wrong side of the cassette tape, or expanding the code so the program wouldcrash finding out only then that he had failed to make a backup tape. He wouldfeel bad about it, but keep hacking.Hacking was the best thing in his life. He had started working full-time at GammaScientific to support himself. The pay was less than ten thousand dollars a year.He liked the job insofar as it allowed him to work on the computer. At home, hehad his 800, now equipped with a disk drive for fancy assembly-languageprogramming. But without a tightly knit community like the one the MIT hackershad, he found that hacking was not enough. He yearned for more social contact.His relationship to his family was shaky. He later claimed he was "kicked out" of

his home because his father had expectations John could not quite match. Hedescribes his father as less than enthusiastic about his mania for programminggames on an Atari 800 computer. So Harris moved into a house with a few fellowsci-fi fans. He would attend the Cons with them, wild affairs where they could stayup for days at a stretch, prowling the hotel halls with plastic dartguns. But it oftenseemed to John that his friends were planning some neat excursion withoutinviting him. John Harris was a friendly, loping, puppy-dog youngster, and verysensitive to these apparent rejections.He wanted a girlfriend. The isolated times when he'd been out with members ofthis desirable yet elusive gender always seemed to end in some kind ofdisappointment. His housemates were often involved in romantic intrigue theyjokingly called the house "Peyton Place of Outer Space" but John was rarelyinvolved. There was one girl he saw for a couple of weeks, and had even made aNew Year's Eve date with. But she'd called him just before New Year's. "I don'tknow how to tell you this," she said, "but I met a guy and I'm going to marry him."That was typical.So he kept hacking games. Just like the MIT hackers, or the Homebrewers, hisreward was the satisfaction of doing it. He joined a local Atari users' group andborrowed programs from their library to make them run faster and do neat things.He took, for instance, a version of the arcade game "Missile Command" and spedit up, jazzed up the explosions when one of your ICBMs stopped the enemy nukefrom destroying your city. He'd show his work to others and they'd get a kick outof it. All his hacking automatically reverted to the public domain; ownership was aconcept he never dealt with. When someone in the users' group told John Harristhat he had a little company that sold computer games and he'd like to market agame of John's, Harris' reaction was Sure, why not? It was like giving a gameaway and getting money for it, too.He gave the man a game called "Battle Warp," which was remarkably like the oldMIT Spacewar, a two-player game where ships "fly around and shoot at eachother," as John was later to describe it. Harris made around two hundred dollarsfrom Battle Warp, but it was enough to get him thinking about having his stuffdistributed more widely than through the users' group network.In March of 1981, Harris went to the Computer Faire in San Francisco, primarilyto attend a seminar on programming the Atari, given by one of Atari's bestprogrammers, Chris Crawford. John was extremely impressed with Crawford, amousy fellow who bounced around when he talked and was skillful at explainingthings. John Harris was on a high after that, wandering around the densely packedaisles of Brooks Hall, looking at all the hot new machines, and checking out the

dozens of new software companies that had taken booths that year.John had gotten the courage by then to ask a few companies whether they neededany programs on the Atari. They generally said no. Then he reached the boothrented by On-Line Systems. Someone introduced him to Ken Williams, whoseemed nice, and John told Ken that he was an assembly-language businessprogrammer, but he was kind of fed up with it.Ken Williams at that time had been discovering that people who could write goodassembly-language games were rare finds. He wanted to lure these assemblylanguageprogrammers to Coarse-gold, California. On-Line Systems had seenexplosive growth at the last Computer Faire, Ken had been testing the waters forMystery House, and one year later he was an established game publisher, in needof products. He had placed an ad in So/talk headlined "Authors Wanted,"promising "highest royalties in the industry... No need to ever work anyone else'shours again." The ad mentioned another benefit: a chance to work with Apple guruKen Williams, who would "be personally available at any time for technicaldiscussions, helping to debug, brainstonning..." Ken was smart enough to realizethat the programmers to create these products were not necessarily veterancomputer workers. They might well be awkward teen-agers. Like John Harris."Well," Ken said to John Harris, not missing a beat, "how would you like toprogram amongst the trees?"As appealing as that sounded, it meant working for On-Line Systems, which JohnHarris knew a little about. He knew they sold mostly Apple software. "I don'tknow the Apple system," he said, tactfully omitting that as far as he did know theApple system he wanted to flush it down a toilet.Ken said the magic words. "We want to expand to the Atari system. We justhaven't found anyone who can program it."John was almost speechless."Can you program it?" Ken asked.Within a month. Ken Williams had bought John Harris a plane ticket to Fresno,where he was picked up at the airport and driven up Route 41 to Oakhurst. Kenpromised Harris a place to live, and then they started talking salary. John had justgotten a raise at Gamma, so the one thousand dollars a month Ken offered himwould actually have been a pay cut. John found the courage to say that he wasgetting more than that now. Did Ken think he could pay twelve hundred a month,

and throw in the free place to live? Ken looked over at Roberta (at that time anyemployee in the tiny On-Line office could at any time look over at anyone elseworking there) and she said she didn't think they could afford that.Williams said, "I tell you what. How about if I put you on a 30 percent royaltybasis and you won't have to work with the company? You work out of your houseand I'll give you seven hundred dollars a month to live off of until you finish yourfirst game, in two or three months. If you don't have a game finished by that time,you won't make it in this business anyway."John thought that sounded great. When he got home, though, his father told him hewas being taken advantage of. Why not get a bigger salary and a lower percentageof royalties? What security did John have? John, who had been intimidated by theblustery Ken, did not want to jeopardize his chance to live in an atmosphere builtaround hacking games. He really wanted to get out of San Diego, hack games, andbe happy. Even though it might mean less money, he'd hold on to the 30 percentroyalty.It was the most lucrative decision he ever made.Ken Williams had purchased several houses around Oakhurst for the benefit of hisprogrammers. John Harris moved into the one called Hexagon House, named afterthe shape of the upper floor, which was the only part visible from the road: itjutted above the rest of the house like a large solid gazebo. From the front door,the living room and kitchen were visible; the bedrooms were downstairs. Livingthere with John was Ken's twenty-year-old brother, John Williams, who ran On-Line's advertising and marketing division. Though John Williams liked Harris, heconsidered him a nerd.The first project that John Harris had mentioned to Ken was inspired by the arcadegame Pac-Man. This was the hottest coin-operated game in 1981, and would soonbe known as the most popular coin-op of all time. John Harris saw nothing wrongwith going to the arcade, learning the game in and out, and writing his own versionto mn on the Atari 800. To a hacker, translating a useful, or fun, program from onemachine to another was inherently good. The idea that someone could own Pac-Man, that clever little game where ghosts chase the dot-munching yellow Pac-Man, apparently was not a relevant consideration for John Harris. What wasrelevant was that the Pac-Man game seemed a natural fit to the Atari's features. Soeven though he personally preferred games with space scenarios and lots ofshooting, John suggested to Ken that he do an Atari 800 Pac-Man.

Ken had. already been marketing a Pac-Man look-alike for the Apple under thename of "Gobbler." The program had been written by a professional scientificprogrammer named Olaf Lubeck, who had sent Williams the game, unsolicited,after seeing the "Authors Wanted" ad. The program was selling around eighthundred copies a month, and Ken had arranged with Lubeck to duplicate it for theAtari home computer.John Harris, though, was appalled at the Apple game. "It didn't look spectacular,no animation," he later explained. "The collision detection is very unforgiving."Harris did not want Olaf to compound the error on his beloved Atari by translatingthe Apple game bit by bit on the 6502 chip, which the Apple and Atari shared.This would mean that none of what John considered the superior Atari features,most of which were housed on separate chips, would be utilized. The thought washorrifying.John insisted that he could do a better-looking game within a month, and KenWilliams took Lubeck off the project. John Harris embarked on a period of intensehacking, often wrapping around till morning. John's style was freewheeling. Heimprovised. "Whatever my mind is doing, I just let it flow with it ... things comeout pretty creative," he later explained. Sometimes John could be sensitive aboutthis, particularly at times when a more traditional programmer, armed withflowcharts and ideas about standard structure and clear documentation, examinedhis code. When John left Gamma Scientific to move to Coarsegold, for example,he worried that his replacement would be someone like that, who would throwaway all his clever code, replacing it with something structured, concise ... andworse. As it turned out, Gamma considered six programmers, five of whom "haddegrees coming out of their ears," John later said. The sixth was a hacker with nodegrees; John begged his bosses to hire the hacker."But he wants as much money as the people who have degrees," the boss toldJohn.John said, "He's worth more." His boss listened. When John broke this newemployee in and explained his system, the new hacker became very emotionalover John's code. "You program like I do!" he said. "I didn't think there wasanyone in the world that does this!"Working with large conceptual blocks and keeping focused, John had a Pac-Manstylegame running on the Atari in a month. He was able to use some of thesubroutines he had developed in earlier efforts. This was a fairly good example ofthe kind of growth that creative copying could encourage: a sort of subroutinereincarnation in which a programmer developed tools that far transcended

derivative functions. One day, John's subroutines would be modified and used ineven more spectacular form. This was a natural, healthy outgrowth of theapplication of hacker principles. It was only too bad that this third generation ofhackers had to write their own software tool kits, supplementing them only byhaphazard additions from users' groups and friends.The Pac-Man game looked remarkably like the arcade version. It might well havebeen one of the best assembly-language programs written so far for the AtariHome Computer. But when Harris took his work to Ken Williams, there was aproblem. Lately, some companies were insisting that the copyrights they owned oncoin-operated games made unauthorized home computer translations illegal. Oneof the biggest owners of copyrights was Atari, and it had sent the following letterto small publishers like Broderbund, Sirius, and On-Line:ATARI SOFTWAREPIRACYTHIS GAME IS OVERAtari is a leader in the development of games such as Asteroidsand MISSILE COMMAND... We appreciate the response wehave received from videophiles of the world who have made ourgames so popular. Unfortunately, however, there are companies andindividuals who have copied ATARI'S games in an attempt to reapundeserved profits from games they did not develop. ATARI mustprotect our investment so that we can continue to invest in thedevelopment of new and better games. Accordingly, ATARI giveswarning to both the intentional pirates and to the individuals simplyunaware of the copyright laws that ATARI registers the audiovisualworks associated with its games with the Library of Congress andconsiders its games proprietary. ATARI will protect its rights byvigorously enforcing these copyrights and taking the appropriateaction against unauthorized entities who reproduce or adaptsubstantial copies of ATARI games regardless of what computer orother apparatus is used in their performance...Ken Williams knew that Atari had spent millions of dollars for the rights to Pac-Man. After looking at John Harris' brightly colored, fast-moving, non-flickeringduplication of the arcade game, he realized it was such a faithful copy that it wasunmarketable. "It looks too much like Pac-Man," he said. "You've wasted yourtime, John Harris." He suggested that John alter the game. Harris took the game

home and reprogrammed the graphics. This new version was virtually the same;the difference was that the ghosts, those goofy little shapes that chased the Pac-Man, were wearing tiny moustaches and sunglasses. Incognito ghosts! Perfectironic commentary on the stupidity of the situation.It wasn't exactly what Ken Williams had in mind. For the next two weeks, Johnand Ken consulted with lawyers. How could they keep the essence of Pac-Manand still keep Atari at bay? The lawyers said that the only thing Atari really ownedwas the image of the character, what the game looked like.So a new scenario was developed, with the unlikely theme of preventive dentistry.Ken's brother John Williams suggested the ghosts be replaced with "happy faces."They would spin and flip around. John Harris replaced the yellow Pac-Man with aset of clicking false teeth. Instead of dots, John drew "lifesavers," and programmeda routine that would occur when the player cleared the dots a toothbrush wouldappear and brush the teeth. None of this was difficult to program. John Harrissimply drew the new images on shape tables and wrote them into his existingmachine. One of the wonderful things about the computer was that you couldchange the world on impulse.The lawyers assured Ken that this new "Jawbreaker" scenario presented noproblem with Atari. They did not know Atari. It was a company owned by theWarner Entertainment Conglomerate; it was ruled by a former textile executivewho saw little distinction between computer software and any other consumeritem. Since engineers no longer ran Atari, the company had been characterized bya bureaucracy which stifled hacker impulses. Programmers at Atari were paid farless than the astronomical sales figures of their games would seem to call for, andconvincing the marketing "experts" to release an innovative game was aformidable task. Atari would not include the name of the game programmer on thepackage; it even refused to give this artist credit when the press requested anauthor's name. When some of the company's top programmers complained, thetextile alumnus who ran Atari reportedly called the hackers "towel designers."Those hackers were among many who quit to form companies which woulddecimate Atari's market share of game cartridges.Atari did not seem to address this loss outright, but instead focused its creativeefforts on litigation and high-rolling licensing of seemingly failure-proofproperties from other media, from coin-operated games to movies. A prominentexample was Pac-Man, for which Atari spent millions. The idea was to firstconvert the game to the VCS game machine, then to the Atari home computers,the 400 and 800. The two divisions were separate and competitive, but both sharedthe problem of disappearing programmers. So imagine the joy of the executives in

Atari's Home Computer Division when one day, out of the blue, some randomperson sent Atari a copy of a program that had been circulating around the users'groups that summer of 1981. It was a brilliant version of Pac-Man which ranbeautifully on the Atari 800.It was the result of a classic John Harris Real World goof-up. When John had beenworking on the "Jawbreaker" revision, some people at a computer store in Fresnoheard rumors of a brilliant Pac-Man hacked by the skinny, nervous kid who wouldoften drop by and check out peripherals and software. They asked John Harris toshow them the game. Without a thought to such non-hacker restrictions ascorporate secrecy, John Harris drove down and proudly watched them play theversion in progress, and saw nothing unusual about their request to borrow a copyof the disk. He left a copy there, went back to the Hexagon House, and continuedwriting his revision.Copies of the game began circulating through users' groups across America. Whenit reached Atari, people there called all the software companies they could think ofto find its author. Eventually, they spoke to Ken Williams, who later recalled anAtari executive telling him that he was in possession of a Pac-Man game ofobviously superior quality and was looking for its creator."Tell me about the game," said Ken, and the Atari man described it as havinghappy faces. "That's John Harris!" said Ken. The Atari man said he wanted to buythe program from John Harris. Ken had John Harris return the call to Atari's headof acquisitions, Fred Thorlin from Ken's office. According to Ken, Thorlin waswild about John Harris' game. He promised Harris a large royalty, mentioned acontest Atari was running for best software program, with a twenty-five-thousanddollarprize, and said none of the entries so far had come close to Harris' game.But John Harris remembered how mean Atari had been when he had been trying tolearn assembly language. He knew that it had been Atari's letter to On-Line thatwas forcing him to do all this revision in the first place. Atari had acted, John latersaid, like "a bunch of babies," holding on to information like a selfish kidprotecting a toy from his playmates. John Harris told Ken that he would notconsider having his name on anything published by Atari (not that Atari hadmentioned putting his name on the program), and that he would finish Jawbreakerfor Ken.Jawbreaker was an instant bestseller. Almost everyone who saw it considered it alandmark for the Atari Home Computer. Except Atari. The men who ran Atarithought John's program infringed on their right, as owners of Pac-Man, to make asmuch money as they could from the game, by marketing it in any way they saw fit.

If Ken Williams released a game that gave a player the feeling he was playing Pac-Man, especially if John Harris' version was better than the one Atari's programmermight come up with, that player would not be likely to buy Atari's version of Pac-Man. And Atari felt that its purchase of the Pac-Man license entitled it to everypenny to be earned from home computer games that played like Pac-Man.It was a challenge to the Hacker Ethic. Why shouldn't Atari be happy with aroyalty paid by people who wanted to hack Pac-Man code and eventually improvethe game? Did the public benefit from one company "owning" a piece of softwareand preventing others from making it more useful?Atari did not see merit in that argument. This was the Real World. So afterJawbreaker's release, Atari began pressuring On-Line Systems. On one hand, itwanted Ken Williams to stop marketing the game. On the other hand, it wanted tobuy John Harris' program.Ken had no desire to fight Atari. He was not an unconditional supporter of theHacker Ethic, so he had no political problem, as John Harris did, with selling theprogram to Atari. When Atari's Fred Thorlin invited Ken and John Harris to comeup to Sunny-vale, Ken agreed.John Harris, who seemed only rarely to handle the simple mechanics of living asmasterfully as he evoked magic from the guts of the Atari 800, missed his flight,and got to Atari's complex of low-lying glass-and-concrete buildings in Sunnyvaleafter the meeting ended. He had been lucky.Ken later recounted the experience under oath. Fred Thorlin had ushered him intoan office where some of Atari's in-house lawyers were waiting. Atari's associategeneral counselor, Ken Nussbacher (who was not at the meeting), later describedhis company's approach to publishers like On-Line as "carrot-and-stick," and thismight have been a classic example. According to Ken Williams, one attorney toldthem that he would like to see On-Line agree to produce a Pac-Man game for Atariso that they could quietly resolve the problem of infringement which Jawbreakerhad created (the carrot). Ken said he would be happy to deal with Atari and hehoped to hear a proposal.A second attorney delivered the stick. According to Ken, this attorney beganshouting and cursing. Ken recalled him saying "he had been hired by Atari to findcompanies infringing on Atari's copyrights and put them out of business ... he said[Atari] would be able to afford much, much more legal support than I would and

that if I did not play ball with them, they were going to put me out of business."Ken was so scared he was shaking. But he told the attorneys that a judge might bebetter qualified to see if Jawbreaker was a copyright infringement.About that time, Fred Thorlin asked the attorney to calm down and consider theprospect of the two companies working together (the carrot). They discussed howlong it would take John Harris, the nineteen-year-old hacker who loved Ataricomputers but despised Atari and was lost somewhere between Coarsegold andSunnyvale, to finish a new Pac-Man game for Atari. But Thorlin's offer of a 5percent royalty was insultingly low. After Thorlin told him "You have no choice,"Ken's fear began to turn to anger. He decided he would rather let Atari sue himthan give in to blackmail. To signify his distaste, he threw the specifications forconverting Pac-Man on Thorlin's desk, and returned to Coarsegold without a deal.For a while it looked like Atari would close down On-Line. Ken's brother Johnlater recalled that one day someone let him know that Atari had gotten aninjunction to confiscate any machinery that might copy disks of Jawbreaker everycomputer and disk drive in the company. The marshal from Fresno was on theway. John Williams, twenty years old and running the company that day, could notget hold of Ken and Roberta, so he ordered everyone to carry out the computersbefore the marshal arrived. Otherwise, the company couldn't have run for anotherday.Al Tommervik, who drove a wheezing Toyota all night to get to court to be byKen during the injunction hearing, suggested that Roberta mail down all themasters to him for safekeeping. He said he'd find a place for On-Line if Atariclosed down its offices. It never came to that, but there were some very tense timesin the fall of 1981.John Harris was particularly shaken. He had been getting enough in royalties tobuy himself a house outside of Oakhurst, a big, orange-colored wood structure. Healso bought himself a four-wheel-drive pickup. He was working on a new gamefor On-Line, another maze game called "Mouskattack." Despite this upswing inhis fortunes, it was a very nervous John Harris who appeared for deposition inearly December.It made an odd picture. John Harris, a nineteen-year-old hacker in jeans and T-shirt, facing the best pin-striped legal talent of one of the biggest entertainmentconglomerates in America. On-Line's legal team was headed by one VieSepulveda, a nip-talking Fresno lawyer with short gray hair, large, aviator-styleblack glasses, and a laid-back confidence. His previous experience in copyright

law was in a case in which some printers had insisted that the text to the homily"Desiderata" was in the public domain.During the deposition, John Harris was so nervous he could not keep still. Atari'slawyer began by asking him about his early programming efforts, his job in SanDiego, how he met Ken, how he wrote Jawbreaker ... all questions John couldeasily answer, but because of his tenseness he kept getting entangled andcorrecting himself at one point cutting himself off and saying, "Oh God, thatsounded awkward." John was usually a person who liked to talk about his work,but this was different. He was aware that this lawyer's goal was to make him saysomething he didn't mean, to trip him up. Supposedly a deposition is a search fortruth, where the most effective questions are asked to get the most accurateresponses. It should work like a smooth program in assembly language, where youhave given the fewest instructions to access the 6502 chip, direct information inand out of memory, keep the proper flags on the registers, and, out of thousands ofoperations taking place each second, get your result on the screen. In the RealWorld it did not work that way. The truth that you found in a computer wasworthless here. It was as if the lawyer were feeding John Harris bogus data inhopes of a system crash.While the hacker in John Harris was appalled at the adversarial nature of the legalsystem, the legal system had its difficulties adjusting to him. The rules of evidencewere somewhat more rigorous than John's own archival standards. Ken Williams,in his own deposition, had warned Atari's lawyers of this when they had asked himabout the status of Harris' source code for the program and he had replied: "I knowJohn Harris and I'm positive there's nothing written down. He doesn't work likethat."Doesn't work like that? Impossible! A programmer at Atari, like any"professional" programmer, probably had to submit code regularly, allow forproper supervision. What Atari's lawyers did not realize was that Ed Roberts,Steve Wozniak, and even the designers of their own Atari 800 had wrought aThird Generation of hackers, idiot savants of the microprocessor, kids who didn'tknow a flowchart from Shinola, yet could use a keyboard like a palette and hacktheir way to Picasso-esque peaks.Atari lawyer (to Ken):Isn't it a fact that typically the programmer who's designing these games atleast produces a flow chart and then writes out the source code manuallyprior to punching it in?Ken Williams:

No.Atari lawyer:Do they simply sit down at the keyboard and punch in the program?Ken Williams:My programmers are typically too lazy to make up any sort of a flow chart.In most cases they don't even know where they're going when they start aprogram. They try to get a routine working to put in a background, andfrom that move toward some game.It couldn't have been too much of a surprise to Atari's lawyers, on the second dayof John Harris' deposition, that he was unable to find the copy of the pre-Jawbreaker Pac-Man game he'd written. On-Line's Atari machines were in usecopying Wizard and The Princess, and John's equipment was broken, so hecouldn't even find the disk it was on. "It's not labeled on the front," Johnexplained, saying, "As far as I know it should be somewhere in my library."So Atari's lawyers continued with John Harris, probing the difference between theversions of his game. And as the examination continued, the line between creativefreedom and plagiarism got fuzzier and fuzzier. Yes, John Harris consciouslycopied from Pac-Man in programming his game. But some of the routines he usedwere written before he'd ever seen Pac-Man. Since the Atari 800 was radicallydifferent from the Pac-Man arcade machine, using different chips and requiringdifferent programming techniques, John Harris' code bore no resemblance at all tothe Atari code. It was completely original.Still, his first game had looked like Pac-Man, using the characters protected bycopyright. But Ken had refused to market that version, and John had changed thecharacters. Atari insisted that this change was insufficient. Atari had its marketingchief come in to explain "the magic of Pac-Man" to the judge, calling it "a gamewith a little guy, a little Pac-Man" who gobbles dots and power pills, which enablehim to "turn the tables" and go after the goblins who have been devouring him.The marketing man went on to say that the "magic of Atari" rested in itscommitment to buying the rights to popular arcade games.Vie Sepulveda insisted that John Harris had simply taken the idea of Pac-Manfrom Atari, and cited law which stated that ideas are not copyrightable. Vic's brieflisted side by side the differences between Pac-Man and Jawbreaker. Atari's replywas that despite the differences the game was Pac-Man. Of all the mazes JohnHarris could have chosen, Atari's lawyers noted, he chose the Pac-Man maze. ByOn-Line's own admission, they had simply performed cosmetic surgery on a

virtual copy of Pac-Man!But the judge refused to grant Atari a preliminary injunction to force On-Line tostop marketing Jawbreaker. He looked at the two games, figured he could tell thedifference, and ruled that, pending a full trial, On-Line should be allowed to keepmarketing Jaw-breaker. Atari's lawyers seemed stunned.David had temporarily smitten Goliath. Still, Ken Williams was not as thrilledwith the decision as one might have expected. Because On-Line had its owngames, and its own copyrights. It was becoming clear to Ken Williams that in thebottom of his heart he identified with Atari's point of view much more than hecared about the Hacker Ethic. "If this opens the door to other programmers rippingoff my software," he told Al Tommervik immediately after the decision, "whathappened here was a bad thing." He would settle the lawsuit before it came to trial.

17Summer CampKEN Williams came to rely on people like John Harris, Third Generation hackersinfluenced not so much by Robert Heinlein or Doc Smith as by Galaxian,Dungeons and Dragons, and Star Wars. A whole subculture of creative, gamedesigninghacker-programmers was blooming, beyond the reach of executiveheadhunters. They were mostly still in high school.To lure young programmers to Coarsegold, Williams took out ads in the LosAngeles Times tempting programmers to "Boot into Yosemite." Typical of thereplies was a man who told Ken, "My son's a great Apple programmer and wouldlike working with you." "Why don't you let me talk to your son?" Ken asked. Theman told him that his son didn't come across well on the phone. At the jobinterview at Oakhurst, the man insisted on answering all the questions for his son, asmall, round-eyed, sixteen-year-old blond who had peach-fuzz on his cheeks andseemed intimidated by the entire situation. None of this mattered when Kendiscovered the kid was capable of grasping the intricacies of Apple assemblylanguage. Ken hired him for three dollars an hour.Slowly, Ken Williams began to fill up the house he bought in the Sierra Sky Rancharea, just beyond Oakhurst where Route 41 starts climbing to elevations of overfive thousand feet. Besides free rent, there were Ken's impromptu graphicstutorials. Ken was now known as a certified Apple wizard. He could turn on hishacker inquisitiveness almost on whim. He refused to accept what othersconsidered generic limitations on the Apple. He would use page-flipping, exclusiveor-ing,masking technique ... anything to get something up on the screen. Whenlooking at someone else's program, he could smell a problem, circle around it, getto the heart of the matter, and come up with a solution.On-Line's corporate headquarters in 1981 was the second floor of a dark brownwood-frame structure on Route 41 whose ground floor housed a stationery storeand a little print shop. You entered the office after climbing a flight of stairs on theoutside of the building; you had to go outside past the staircase to go to thebathroom. Inside the office were a group of desks, fewer desks than there were

employees. People played a continuous game of musical chairs to claim desk spaceand use of one of the several Apples. Boxes of disks, discarded computer monitors,and stacks of correspondence were piled on the floor. The disarray was mindboggling.The noise level, routinely intolerable. The dress code, nonexistent. It wasproductive anarchy, reminiscent of the nonstructured atmosphere of the AI lab orthe Homebrew Club. But since it was also a prosperous business, and theparticipants so young, the On-Line office resembled a weird combination of AnimalHouse and The Millionaire.It was indicative of Ken Williams' priorities. He was involved in a new type ofbusiness in a brand-new industry, and was not about to establish the same hateful,claustrophobic, secretive, bureaucratic environment that he despised so much atalmost every company he had worked for. He was the boss, but he would not be thekind of boss Dick Sunderland at Informatics was, obsessed with detail. He was incontrol of the bigger picture. Besides getting rich, something that seemed to befalling neatly into place as his programs regularly placed in the top ten or fifteen ofthe "Top 30 Bestsellers" list published by Softalk each month, Ken felt that he hada dual mission to fulfill at On-Line.The first was to have fun, an element he felt had been lamentably lacking in thedecorum-bound establishments of the Old Age. Ken Williams became, in efiect, thehead counselor in a high-tech Summer Camp. There was Summer Camp fun androwdiness and drinking and dope-smoking. Stoned or not, everyone was on a high,working in a field that felt good, politically and morally. The extended party wasfueled regularly by an influx of envelopes of money.Packages would also arrive containing new games whether games from friendlycompetitors like Sirius or Br0derbund, games from would-be software superstarslooking to get published, or games from one of On-Line's outside authors workingunder Ken's supervision. No matter. Everything stopped for new games. Someonewould run off copies and everyone would take to the Apples, playing the game,making fun of its bugs, admiring its features, and seeing who could get the highestscore. As long as the money kept coming in, and it certainly did, who cared about alittle disorganization, or an excessive tendency to shift into party mode?Outsiders would visit the office and not believe what they saw. Jeff Stephenson, forinstance. At thirty, he was an experienced programmer who had recently workedfor Software Arts, the Cambridge, Massachusetts, company that had written thebestselling Apple program of all time, the financial "spreadsheet" VisiCalc. Thatcompany was also headed by programmers Jeff could recall the two presidents, oneof them a former MIT hacker and the other a meticulous young Orthodox Jew,arguing for half an hour about where a comma should go on some report. Jeff, aquiet, unassuming vegetarian who held a black belt in Korean sword-fighting, had

moved to the mountains with his wife recently, and called On-Line to see if theclosest company to his new home needed a programmer. He put on cord jeans anda sport shirt for the interview; his wife suggested he dress up more. "This is themountains," Jeff reminded her, and drove down Deadwood Mountain to On-LineSystems. When he arrived, Ken told him, "I don't know if you're going to fit in hereyou look kind of conservative." He hired Jeff anyway, for eighteen thousand dollarsa year eleven thousand less than he'd been making at Software Arts.At the time, the most ambitious project On-Line had ever attempted was boggeddown in an organizational disaster. "Time Zone," the adventure game Roberta hadbeen working on for almost a year, was a program out of control, gripped by aliterary equivalent to the Creeping Feature Creature. Almost drunk with the giddyambition of creating on the computer, Roberta was hatching a scenario which notonly would re-create scenes from all over the world but would take in the breadthof recorded history, from the dawn of man to the year 4081. When Roberta playeda good adventure game she always wished it would never end this game, shedecided, would have so many plots and rooms that it would take even anexperienced adventurer a year to solve. You would see the fall of Caesar, suffer theNapoleonic wars, fight Samurai warriors, rap with prehistoric Australianaborigines, sail with Columbus, visit hundreds of places, and witness the entirepanorama of the human experience, eventually winding up on the planet Neburon,where the evil leader Ramadu is planning to destroy Earth. A microcomputer epic,conceived by a housewife in central California.Programming this monster was grinding the business of On-Line to a halt. Onestaff programmer was working on a routine to triple the speed with which theprogram would fill in colors for the hi-res pictures. The young programmer whosefather had arranged his employment tried to cope with the game logic, while aformer alcoholic who had bootstrapped his way to the title of programmer keyed inthe Adventure Development Language messages. A local teen-ager waspainstakingly drawing the fourteen hundred pictures, first on graph paper, thenretracing on an Apple graphics tablet.Jeff Stephenson was asked to somehow tie the program together. He was dismayedat the disorganization, and appalled at the deadline: autumn, so the game would beon sale for Christmas. (He was later to conclude that any deadline Ken gave wasusually overop-timistic by a factor of three.)Despite the project being so far behind schedule, the company was still run likeSummer Camp. Tuesday night was "Men's Night," with Ken out on a drinkingexcursion. Every Wednesday, most of the staff would take the day off to go skiingat Badger Pass in Yosemite. On Fridays at noon, On-Line would enact a ritualentitled "Breaking Out the Steel." "Steel" was the clear but potent Steel's

peppermint schnapps which was On-Line Systems' beverage of choice. In thecompany vernacular, a lot of steel would get you "sledged." Once they broke outthe steel on Fridays, it could be reasonably assumed that work on Time Zone wouldbe halted while the staff, Ken leading the way, would explore the hazy, timelesszone of sledgedom.Christmas came and went, and Time Zone did not ship until February. Twelvetimes the size of Wizard and the Princess, filling both sides of six floppy disks, itretailed for one hundred dollars. The first person to solve it, a jovial, adventuregamefanatic named Roe Adams (who was also the chief reviewer for Softalk),went virtually without sleep for a week until he vanquished Ramadu and declaredRoberta's creation one of the greatest gaming feats in history.Time Zone, though, did not earn nearly the notoriety of another On-Line adventurewhich was well in keeping with the spirit of the company. The game was called"Softpom." In the Spring of 1981, Ken had met a programmer who had beentalking to publishers about an adventure game he had written and was trying, withlittle success, to market himself. This game was not your usual adventure whereyou quest for jewels, or try to solve a murder, or try to overthrow some evilEmperor Nyquill from the Planet Yvonne. In this game, you were a bachelor whosequest was to find and seduce three women. The programmer had written theprogram as a training exercise to help teach himself about data bases, using thesexual theme to make it interesting. It was the kind of thing that hackers, at leastthe ones who were aware that a thing called sex existed, had been doing for years,and it was rare to find a computer center without its own particular sexual specialty,be it an obscene-joke generator or a program to print out a display of a nakedwoman. The difference was that in 1981, all sorts of things that hackers had beendoing as cosmic technical goofs had a sudden market value in home computertranslations.The program in question was a cleaned-up variation of the original. It would getvile only if you used obscenity in your command. Still, in order to win the gameyou needed to have sex with a prostitute, buy a condom to avoid venereal disease,and engage in sadomasochism with a blonde who insisted on marrying you beforeyou could bed her. If you wanted to do well in this adventure, the replies you typedinto the computer had to be imaginatively seductive. But there were perils: if youcame across the "voluptuous blonde" and typed in EAT BLONDE, the computerwould type out a passage intimating that the blonde was leaning over andperforming oral sex on you. But then she'd flash her gleaming choppers and bite itoff!To those with a sense of humor about that sort of thing, Softporn was a uniquelydesirable Apple game. Most software publishers wanted nothing to do with the

game; they considered themselves "family" businesses. But Ken Williams thoughtthe game was a riot: he had a great time solving the adventure in three or fourhours. He thought the controversy would be fun. He agreed to market Softporn.One day not long afterward. Ken walked into the office and said, "Who wants tocome over my house and take pictures in the hot tub naked?"The idea was to get three women to pose topless in Ken's hot tub for the Softpornadvertisement. Somewhere in the picture would be an Apple computer, and in thetub with the three naked women would be a male waiter serving them drinks. Theyborrowed a waiter from The Broken Bit, a Coarsegold steak house which was aboutthe only decent place to eat in town. The three women, all On-Liners, who tooktheir blouses off were the company bookkeeper, the wife of Ken's assistant, andRoberta Williams.The full-color ad, with the women holding wineglasses (the water in the hot tubtactfully covering their nipples), the fully clothed male waiter holding a tray ofmore wineglasses, and an Apple computer standing rather forlomly in thebackground, caused a sensation. On-Line got its share of hate mail, some of it fullof Bible scripture and prophecy of the damnation ahead. The story of the game andthe ad caught the imagination of the news services, and the picture ran in Time andover the UPI wire.Ken Williams loved the free publicity. Softpom became one of On-Line's biggestsellers. Computer stores that wanted it would be reluctant to order just that oneprogram. So, like the teenager who goes to the drugstore and says, "I'd like a comb,toothpaste, aspirin, suntan oil, stationery, and, oh, while I'm here I might as wellpick up this Playboy, " the store owners would order a whole sampling of On-Lineproducts ... and some Softporn too. Ken guessed that Softpom and its ripple effectjust about doubled his revenue.Having fun, getting rich, becoming famous, and hosting a never-ending party wereonly part of Ken's mission; there was a more serious component as well. He wasdeveloping a philosophy about the personal computer and its ability to transformpeople's lives. The Apple, and the group of computers like it, were amazing notonly for what they did, but also for their accessibility. Ken had seen people totallyignorant about computers work with them and gain in confidence, so that theirwhole outlook in life had changed. By manipulating a world inside a computer,people realized that they were capable of making things happen by their owncreativity. Once you had that power, you could do anything.Ken Williams realized that he was able to expose people to that sort oftransformation, and he set about using the company he and Roberta had founded as

a sort of rehabilitation project on some of the underutilized people around Oakhurstand Coarsegold.The area had been suffering from the recession, especially in the industrial-miningrealm which once supported it. There hadn't been any boom since the Gold Rush.On-Line Systems quickly became the largest employer around. Despite Ken'sunorthodox management style, the appearance of a high-tech firm in town was agodsend they were, like it or not, part of a community. Ken enjoyed his role asnouveau riche town father, dispatching his civic responsibilities with his usual bentfor excess huge donations to the local fire department, for example. But the closefriends Ken and Roberta would make did not seem to come from the upper reachesof Oakhurst society. They were, instead, the people Ken lifted from obscurity bythe power of the computer.Rick Davidson's job was sanding boats, and his wife Sharon was working as amotel maid. Ken hired them both; Rick eventually became vice-president in chargeof product development, and Sharon headed the accounting department. Larry Bainwas an unemployed plumber who became Ken's head of product acquisition.A particularly dramatic transformation occurred in the person of Bob Davis. Hewas the prime specimen in Ken's On-Line Systems human laboratory, a missionaryventure using computers to transmogrify life's has-beens and never-weres intomasters of technology. At twenty-seven, Davis was a former musician and shortordercook with long red hair and an unkempt beard. In 1981, he was working in aliquor store. He was delighted at the chance to reform his life by computers, andKen was even more delighted at the transformation. Also, the wild streak in BobDavis seemed to match a similar kink in Ken's personality.Whenever Ken Williams went into the liquor store to buy his booze, Bob Daviswould beg him for a job. Davis had heard of this new kind of company and wascurious about computers. Ken finally gave him work copying disks at night. Davisbegan coming in during the day to leam programming. Though he was a highschool dropout, he seemed to have an affinity for BASIC and he sought extra helpfrom Ken's crew of young hackers. Street-smart Davis saw that a hell of a lot ofmoney was coming in to On-Line from those games, and vowed to write onehimself.Bob and his wife began hanging out with the Williamses. On-Line Systems was aloose enough company to accommodate an arrangement that flouted traditionaltaboos between owners and employees. They went on trips together, to places likeLake Tahoe. Bob's status at the company rose. He got appointed to programmer,and was project director of the Time Zone venture. Mostly, he typed in ADL code,not knowing much about assembly language. It bothered a few people even amiable

Jeff Stephenson, who liked Bob a lot that Bob Davis was going around callinghimself a programmer, when a real programmer, anyone with hacker credentials,should have been able to perform a lot more concentrated wizardry than Davis had.Once Davis learned Ken's ADL tools, though, he had the key to writing aprofessional-level Adventure game. He'd always been interested in mythology, andhe read up on some Greek classics, particularly those dealing with Jason, andworked the ancient tales into an adventure game. He programmed the game, heclaimed, in his spare time (though some at On-Line thought that he neglected hisTime Zone duties for his own project) and with some help from Ken, he finished it.Less than a year after being rescued from clerkdom in a liquor store he was asoftware star. On-Line's lawyer guessed there might be a problem in calling thegame "Jason and the Golden Fleece" because that was a movie title which might becopyrighted, so On-Line released the game as "Ulysses and the Golden Fleece."It was an instant hit, placing comfortably in Softalk's Top Thirty. VideogameIllustrated magazine called it "one of the most important and challengingvideogames ever created," though it really did not represent any significant advanceover previous hi-res adventures except that it was longer and its graphics lookedconsiderably more artful than the Mystery House pictures with their stick-figurelook. The magazine also interviewed Davis, who sounded quite the pundit, talkingabout what gaming consumers might expect in the next five years ("computershooked up to every phone and every television ... voice synthesis ... voicerecognition ... special effects generated by videodisks..."). A Utopian scenario, andwhy not? Look what computers had done for Bob Davis.The changes that personal computers were making in people's lives were by nomeans limited to California. All over the country, the computer was opening upnew areas of creativity. Part of the hacker dream was that people who hadunfulfilled creative tendencies would be liberated by the computer. They mighteven ascend to a level of wizardry where they might earn the appellation of hacker.Ken Williams now could see this happening. Almost as if predestined, some of hisprogrammers, once immersed in communion with the machine, had confidentlyblossomed. No transformation was more dramatic than that of Warren Schwader.Perhaps the most significant event in Wan-en Schwader's life occurred in 1977,when Warren was eighteen: his brother purchased one of the first Apple IIcomputers. His brother had been paralyzed in a car accident, and wanted the Appleto relieve his boredom. It was up to tall, blond, thick-featured and slow-talkingWarren to help his brother key commands into the Apple. And it was Warren whobecame the hacker.

At that time Warren was working at the Parker Pen Company in his hometown inrural Wisconsin. Though Warren had a talent for math, he stopped his schoolingafter high school. His job at Parker was running an injection molding machine,which consisted of a big mold and a tube where plastic was heated. The hot plasticwould be injected into the mold, and after twenty seconds of cooling Warren wouldopen the door and take out the newly formed pen parts. Then he would shut thedoor again. Warren Schwader considered the job a challenge. He wanted the penparts to be perfect. He would constantly be adjusting the loader, or twisting the key,or tightening the nuts and bolts on the molder. He loved that machine. Years afterleaving Parker, he said with pride that the pen parts from his molder were indeedperfect.He approached programming with the same meticulous compul-siveness. Everyday he would try a different graphics demo. In the morning he would decide whathe wanted to try. During the twenty-second intervals that his molding machineallowed him, he would use pencil and paper to flowchart a program for the demo.At night, he would sit down at the Apple and debug the program until his intendedeffect filled the screen. He was particularly fond of kaleidoscopic, multicoloreddisplays.One of the graphics demos Warren tried appealed to him so much that he decidedto try to expand it into a game. Ever since he first played Pong in arcades. Warrenhad been a videogame fan. He tried to copy a game he'd seen in an arcade: it had apaddle on the bottom of the screen and little bricks at the top of the screen. Youwould hit a blip with the paddle and it would bounce like a pinball machine. Thattook Warren a month of twenty-second intervals and nighttime debugging, andthough it was written in lo-res graphics, which weren't as sharp as the things youcould do in assembly language and hi-res, the game he turned out was good, too.Up until this time Warren had been working on the Apple solely to discover whathe could do on it. He had been absorbed in pure process. But seeing these games onthe screen, games he had created from thin air, games which might have been themost creative things that he had ever accomplished, Warren Schwader began torealize that his computing could actually yield a tangible result. Like a game thatothers might enjoy.This epiphany drove Warren deeper into the machine. He resolved to do anassembly-language game, even if it took him months. There were no books on thesubject, and certainly no one Warren knew in Wisconsin could tell him anythingabout it. Also, the only assembler Warren had was the simple and slowminiassembler that was built into the Apple. None of this stopped WarrenSchwader, who in personality and outlook is much like the fabled turtle who

eventually outraces the rabbit.Warren did an assembly-language game called "Smash-Up," in which the player,controlling a little car, tries to avoid head-on collisions with other cars. Heconsidered it good enough to sell. Warren didn't have enough money for amagazine ad, so he just made as many copies as he could on cassette tapes, and sentthem to computer stores. This was 1980, when the newly minted Apple gamemarket was switching from cassette to the faster and more versatile floppy disks.Warren sold only about two thousand dollars' worth of Smash-Up games, spendingout almost twice that in expenses.Parker Pen company closed down the factory, so Warren had a lot more time towork on his next game. "I had just learned [the card game] Cribbage and I reallyloved it," Schwader would later recall. "There was nobody that knew how to play it[with me] so I said, 'Why don't I write a program that plays Cribbage?' " He workedperhaps a total of eight hundred hours on it, often wrapping around until theWisconsin dawn. He was attempting graphics tricks he didn't quite understand,things he would later know as indirect addressing, and zero-page graphics. Heworked so hard at the game that "the whole time I felt that I was inside thecomputer. People would talk to me, but I couldn't interact," he later said. His nativetongue was no longer English, but the hexadecimal hieroglyphics of LDX #$0,LDA STRING,X, JSR $FDFO, BYT $0, BNE LOOP.The finished program was superb. Wan-en had developed some inspired algorithmsthat allowed the computer to evaluate its hand by twelve major rules. Heconsidered the program flawless in its choosing of cards to throw in the crib. It wasonly because Warren was familiar with the program's traits he knew it like an oldtimecard partner that he could beat it around 60 percent of the time.Warren Schwader sent the game to Ken Williams, who was impressed with thelogic and with the graphics, which gave a clear, sharp picture of each card dealt.What was even more amazing was that Schwader had done this on the limitedApple mini-assembler.It was as if someone had sent Ken a beautifully crafted rocking chair, and then hadtold him that the craftsman had used no saw, lathe, or other conventional tools, buthad built the chair with a penknife. Ken asked Warren if he wanted to work for On-Line. Live in the woods. Boot into Yosemite. Join the wild, crazy Summer Camp ofa new-age company.Warren had been subsisting on the couple-hundred dollars a month he receivedfrom the state for taking care of his brother. Warren was worried about leaving himto day nurses, but his brother told Warren that this On-Line thing was a big

opportunity and he should take it. And it appealed to Warren, this idea of going offand making money programming games and living in the woods. So he decided todo it. But there was one part of the package that did not appeal to him. TheSummer Camp fun and rowdi-ness and drinking and dope-smoking that werecommon practices at On-Line Systems. Warren was a Jehovah's Witness.Around the time Warren was working on Cribbage, his mother had died. Warrengot to thinking about where he was headed, and what his purpose was in life. Hefound that computers were the main thing he was living for. He felt there had to bemore, and turned to his late mother's religion. He began intense study of the Bible.And he vowed that his new life in California would be characterized by adherenceto the precepts of Jehovah.At first this did not interfere much with his life at On-Line. Warren Schwader didnot criticize la doice vita at On-Line Systems. But because of the godless habits ofhis colleagues, he generally limited his transactions with them to business ortechnical discussions. He preferred to stick with people of his faith so he would beprotected from temptation.He was living alone, free of charge, in one of Ken's houses, a small two-bedroom.His social life was confined to a hall of the Kingdom of Jehovah's Witnesses inAhwahnee, five miles west of Oakhurst. The very first time he went to a servicethere, he felt he had made more friends than he ever had before. They approved ofcomputers, telling him that they could do much good for man, though one mustbeware that much can be done through computers to do harm. Warren becameaware that the love he had for hacking was a threat to his devotion to God, andthough he still loved programming he tried to moderate his hacking sessions so thathe was not diverted from his true purpose. So while he kept programming at night,he would also maintain his Bible studies, and during afternoons and weekends hewould travel through the area, knocking on doors and going into people's houses,bearing copies of Awake! and The Watchtower, and preaching the faith of Jehovah.Meanwhile, he was working on a game based on some of Ken's fastest, mostspectacular assembly-language subroutines yet. It was a game like Space Invaders,where you had a rocketship and had to fight off waves of invaders. But the waveswere full of weird shapes, and moved in all kinds of directions, and if the playertried to send a constant stream of bullets off to fight them, his "laser gun" wouldoverheat and he would face almost certain death. It was the kind of game designedto spur cardiac arrest in the feeble-hearted, so fierce were the attackers and soviolent were the explosions. It was not exactly a landmark in Apple gaming, sinceit was so derivative of the Space Invaders school ofshoot-'em-ups, but it didrepresent an escalation in graphic pyrotechnics and game-playing intensity. Thename of this computer program was "Threshold," and it made Warren Schwader

almost one hundred thousand dollars in royalties, a significant percentage of whichwas tithed to the Kingdom Hall in Ahwahnee.But as Warren drew closer to the community of the Kingdom, he began to questiondeeply the kinds of things he had been doing for On-Line. He wondered if his veryjoy in programming wasn't some kind of sin. The act of programming the game hadbeen carnal Warren had worked through the night with his stereo blaring LedZeppelin (Satan's rock band). Worse, the shooting nature of the game left no doubtthat it glorified war. Warren's study of scripture convinced him one should notlearn war any more. He felt ashamed that a war game he had programmed would beplayed by kids.So he was not surprised to see an Awake! article about vide-ogames whichcompared them to drugs, and said that the warlike games "promote aggressionwithout mercy." Warren decided to stop programming violent games, and hevowed that if Watchtower were to come out strongly against all games, he wouldhave to stop programming and find something else to do with his life.He began work on a nonviolent game with a circus theme. The work went slowlybecause he tried not to lose himself in programming to the point that he would be azombie who had lost contact with God. He got rid of all his hard rock albums andplayed music like Cat Stevens, Toto, and the Beatles. He even began to like musiche once would have considered sappy, like Olivia Newton-John (though when heplayed her record he always had to remember to lift the needle when the sinful song"Physical" played).Still, when Warren talked about his new game, how he was using dual-pageanimation with twelve different patterns to control the rolling barrels that thecharacter must leap over, or how it would have zero-flicker and be "100 percentplayable," it was clear that despite his asetic efforts he took a sensual pride in thehack. Programming meant a lot to him. It had changed his life, giving him power,made him someone.As much as John Harris loved living away from San Diego in the Sierra foothills,as much as he appreciated the footloose Summer Camp atmosphere, and as happyas he was that his programs were recognized as colorful, creative efforts, onecrucial part of his life was totally unsatisfactory. It was a common disease of ThirdGeneration hackers, to whom hacking was important, but not everything, as it wasto the MIT hackers. John Harris hungered for a girlfriend.

Ken Williams took the concerns of his young programmers seriously. A happyJohn Harris would be a John Harris writing hit games. Roberta Williams also feltaffection for the ingenuous twenty-year-old, and was touched by what she believedwas a secret crush he harbored for her. "He would look at me with those puppy-dogeyes," she later recalled. The Williamses resolved to clear up John's problem, andfor a considerable length of time an unofficial corporate goal of On-Line Systemswas Getting John Harris Laid. It was not so easy. Though John Harris couldconceivably be called "cute" by women his age, though he could be verbally cleverand was certainly making enough money to please all but the most exacting of golddiggers, women did not seem to react to him sexually.Around Oakhurst, of course, even finding women was a problem. John Harris hadtaken a part-time job in the local arcade, figuring that any girl who liked gameswould have something in common with him; he made it a point to stay aroundalmost all the hours the arcade was open. But the girls who spent time at the arcadewere still in high school. Any local girl with much in the way of brains would goaway to college; the ones that stayed were into motorcycle types, and didn't relateto gentle guys who were nervous around women, as John Harris was. John asked alot of girls out, and they usually said no, probably making him feel as he did whenpeople would choose sides for basketball games and he'd be standing thereunchosen.Ken vowed to change all that. "I'm going to get you laid, John Harris," he wouldalways say, and though John was embarrassed and urged Ken to stop saying thosethings, he secretly hoped that Ken would keep his promise. But the mishapscontinued.Every time John went out, there were calamities. First the teenage girl he met in afast-food restaurant who accompanied him for pizza and would not go out with himagain. Then a woman who packaged disks for On-Line, a date arranged by Ken.John embarrassed himself by locking his keys in his new four-wheel-drive, hadtrouble getting into the saloon where they all went, and was mortified when Ken, infront of the woman, began making crude remarks about how homy John was "Thatreally embarrassed me," John Harris later said. When everybody went back to theWilliamses' house to get in the hot tub, John's four-wheel-drive got stuck in thesnow; and finally, the girl met up with her old boyfriend and left with him. Thatwas the end of a typical John Harris date.Ken Williams did not give up that easily. The Williamses took John Harris to theClub Med in Haiti. How can a guy not get laid at Club Med? When a womanwearing no bikini top vow could see her breasts right there in front of you askedJohn if he'd like to go snorkeling, Ken just laughed. Pay dirt! The woman wasaround ten years older, but perhaps an experienced woman was what John Harris

needed. The snorkeling trip was lots of fun, and on the way back all the girls werefooling around, putting their tops on the guys. Roberta grabbed John's arm andwhispered, "If you don't do something with this girl, I'll never talk to you again!"John Harris suppressed his shyness at that point. "I finally put my arm around thegirl," he later recalled. "She said 'Can I talk to you?' We sat down and she broughtup our age difference." It was clear that there was no romance in the offing. "I'dplanned to take her sailing, but I was too embarrassed after that," John later said.Ken got even bolder after Haiti. "He did quite a few things [to find me a woman],"John Harris later said. At one point, Williams asked a waitress at Lake Tahoe,"How would you like to sleep with a rich twenty-year-old?"Probably the worst of all happened at a bachelor party they threw for an On-Lineemployee. Ken had hired two strippers. The party was held at the office, and it wasindicative of the freewheeling, anything-goes spirit in Ken's company. Peopleimbibed heavily; somebody started a game where you would try to look the otherway and throw beer bottles into a far cubicle. The office became covered withbroken glass, and the next day almost everyone at the party woke up with cuts andbruises.John liked the looks of one of the strippers. "She was unbelievably gorgeous," herecalled. She seemed shy to John, and confessed to him that until a couple of weeksback she'd been a secretary, and was doing this because the money was so good.She danced right around John Harris, at one point taking her bra off and draping itaround his head."I want to talk to you," Ken said, taking John aside. "I'm being perfectly honest.This is what she said 'He's really cute.'"John just listened."I told her you make three hundred thousand dollars a year. She asked if you weremarried."Ken was not being totally forthright. He had made a deal with the woman to havesex with John Harris. Ken arranged it all, telling John she would be at the ChezParee in Fresno, and John got all dressed up to see her. Ken went along. John andthe woman retreated to a rear table. Ken told John he'd buy them drinks, but all shewanted was Seven-Up. Ken bought the couple a bottle of Seven-Up. "The bottleswere expensive," John later recalled. "Twenty dollars a bottle." It was the first ofmany bottles of twenty-dollar Seven-Ups. "I was totally entranced by this girl. She

was really easy to talk to. We talked about things she did before, why she decidedto be a stripper. She didn't seem like the stripper type." By then Ken was gone andJohn was buying the twenty-dollar bottles of Seven-Up. The place was closingdown. It was the moment of truth. The girl was acting like it was natural for her togo her way, and John to go his. So John went home. When Ken called later andasked if he'd "scored," John later recalled, "I didn't have much to say in mydefense."It looked like a permanent plight. Success on the Atari, but no luck with women.Despite John Harris' female troubles, he was a new role model for a new age: thehacker superstar. He would sit for magazine interviews and gab about the virtues ofthe Atari 800. The articles would often mention his six-figure income from his 30percent royalty deal. It was an enviable, suddenly hip position. All over America,young, self-described hackers were working on their masterpieces: it was the newageequivalent to all those young men in the forties trying to write the GreatAmerican Novel. The chances that a bestselling game might come in over On-Line's transom, while not great, were somewhat better than those of an unsolicitedbestselling novel.Ken realized that he was in competition with other companies of the Brotherhoodfor these programmers. As more people learned the Apple and Atari assemblylanguagewizardry that was unique when Ken Williams started out, the homecomputer consumer was becoming more discerning about what he or she bought.Companies besides On-Line were now publishing graphic adventures, havingfigured out their own tricks to put dozens of pictures with text on Apple disks.Also, a new company in Cambridge called In-focom, using text only, haddeveloped an advanced interpreter that would accept large vocabularies of words incomplete sentences. The company was begun by MIT hackers. Their firstmicrocomputer game, lifted straight from the game they'd written for fun on one ofthe Tech Square computers, was "Zork," a supercharged elaboration on the originalAdventure dungeon tale written by Crowther and Woods at Stanford. It was sellinglike crazy.It was indicative of how fast the computer game market was moving. What wasbrilliant one year looked dated the next. The Apple and Atari hackers had taken themachines far beyond their limits. It had only been a few months, for example, sinceits introduction that On-Line's "Skeet Shoot" program looked so crude it wasembarrassing, and Ken dropped it from the product line. Threshold, for instance,blew that previous standard away. And a hacker named Bill Budge wrote aprogram that simulated a pinball machine, "Raster Blaster," that blew away almost

anything On-Line had to offer on the Apple.Ken Williams knew On-Line had to present itself as a desirable place to work. Heand his staff put together a printed package full of promises and dreams toprospective software superstars. Oddly, the enticements that On-Line offered hadlittle to do with the Hacker Ethic. The package did not emphasize the happySummer Camp community around On-Line. Instead, it seemed almost a paean toMammon.One part of the package was titled "Questions and Answers."QUESTION:Why Should I Publish With On-Line (and not someone else)?ANSWER:One very good reason is money. ON-LINE pays the highest andmost regularroyalties in the business... Our job is to make your life easier!QUESTION:Why Not Publish Myself?ANSWER:With ON-LINE your product will receive support from a highly trainedtechnical staff. This frees you for more important things like CaribbeanCruises, skiing at Aspen, and all of life's other "rough" activities. To put itsimply, we do all the work... The only thing we do ask of you is to remainavailable to us in case any bugs occur. Other than that, just sit back andwatch the money roll in!Also in the package was a letter from Ken Williams ("Chairman of the Board")explaining why On-Line Systems was the most professional and effectivemarketing operation around. He cited the ace programming staff of Schwader,Davis, and Stephenson, and trumpeted his own technical expertise. There was alsoa letter from On-Line's sales manager: "We are the best and want only the best tobe on our team. If you fit this simple description, come breathe the rarified air withus at the top. Success is heady. Can you stand it?" A note from the SoftwareAcquisitions Department summed up the message to prospective programmers:"We're interested in you because you are the life blood of our business.Programming has become a premium commodity."It was quite a transformation from the days when a hacker would be more thansatisfied to see someone appreciate the artistry in his software. Now that there wasa marketplace, the Real World had changed hackerism. It was perhaps a necessarytrade-off for the benefits of widespread computer availability. Look at all thewonderful transformations computers had made in the lives of the people in the On-

Line community.Ken was hugely proud of these transformations. They seemed to bear out thebrilliant promise of the hacker dream. Not only was he prospering, but he and theother companies in the Brotherhood were doing it in an unselfish, new-age mindframe... they were the pioneers of the New America! And what was more, as themonths rolled by it became clearer and clearer that computers were a boomindustry the likes of which no one had seen since the auto industry. Everybodywanted a piece of it. Apple Computer, which seemed like some questionableventure when Ken first saw the Apple II, was on its way to becoming a Fortune 500company, more quickly than any company in history had ever done. Venturecapitalists were focusing on the computer field, and seemed to identify softwarethings to make these computers work as the hottest speculative investment in theland. Since games were, by sheer volume of floppy disks sold, the bestsellingcomputer applications, and the Brotherhood companies between them had a sizablepercentage of the computer game market, offers for investment and buy-outs camein as often as packages of new games. Though Ken loved to talk to these wealthysuitors, whose names often appeared in The Wall Street Journal, he held on to hiscompany. The phones of the Brotherhood would often ring with the last report of abuy-out offer "He said he would pay ten million!" "Well, I just got offered ten forAo//the company!" "Oh, and I turned down so-and-so for that much!" Ken wouldmeet these suitors at airport breakfast meetings, but the respective executiveswould jet off to their final destinations without buy-out agreements. Ken Williamswas having too much fun changing people's lives and driving to work in his new,fire-engine-red Porsche 928 to consider giving it up.

18FroggerAS 1982 progressed and the second anniversary of his company rolled around.Ken Williams was beginning to lose patience with John Harris, and with younghackers in general. He no longer had the time, nor the inclination, to give hours oftechnical assistance to his hackers. He began to regard the questions hisprogrammers would ask him (How can I put this on the screen without flicker?How can I scroll objects horizontally? How do I get rid of this bug?) asdistractions from what was becoming his main activity: hacking On-Line Systemsas it grew in logarithmic leaps and bounds. Until now, when a programmer wouldcall Ken and frantically howl that he was stuck in some subroutine, Ken would goover, cry with him, and fiddle with the program, doing whatever it took to makehis hacker happy. Those days were ending.Ken did not see the shift in attitude as making his company any less idealistic. Hestill believed that On-Line was changing lives through the computer, both the livesof its workers and the lives of its customers. It was the beginning of a computermillennium. But Ken Williams was not sure that the hacker would be the centralfigure in this golden age. Especially a hacker like John Harris.The split between Ken Williams and John Harris symbolized something occurringall over the home computer software industry. At first, the artistic goals of thehacker coincided neatly with the marketplace, because the marketplace had noexpectations, and the hackers could blithely create the games they wanted to play,and adorn business programs with the nifty features that displayed their artistry.But as more nontechnical people bought computers, the things that impressedhackers were not as essential. While the programs themselves had to maintain acertain standard of quality, it was quite possible that the most exacting standardsthose applied by a hacker who wanted to add one more feature, or wouldn't let goof a project until it was demonstrably faster than anything else around wereprobably counterproductive. What seemed more important was marketing. Therewere plenty of brilliant programs which no one knew about. Sometimes hackerswould write programs and put them in the public domain, give them away as

easily as John Harris had lent his early copy of Jawbreaker to the guys at theFresno computer store. But rarely would people ask for public domain programsby name: they wanted the ones they saw advertised and discussed in magazines,demonstrated in computer stores. It was not so important to have amazingly cleveralgorithms. Users would put up with more commonplace ones.The Hacker Ethic, of course, held that every program should be as good as youcould make it (or better), infinitely flexible, admired for its brilliance of conceptand execution, and designed to extend the user's powers. Selling computerprograms like toothpaste was heresy. But it was happening. Consider theprescription for success offered by one of a panel of high-tech venture capitalists,gathered at a 1982 software show: "I can summarize what it takes in three words:marketing, marketing, marketing." When computers are sold like toasters,programs will be sold like toothpaste. The Hacker Ethic notwithstanding.Ken Williams yearned for the bestsellers, games whose very names had the impactof brand names. So when his star programmer, John Harris, mentioned that hewould like to try converting a popular coin-op arcade game called "Frogger" to theAtari Home Computer, Ken liked the idea. Frogger was a simple yet bewitchinggame in which the player tried to manipulate a cute little frog over a heavilytrafficked highway and across a stream by making it hop on the backs of logs andturtles; the game was popular, and, if well hacked, might well be a bestsellingcomputer game. "John Harris saw it and said it was really neat. He told me hecould program it in a week. I agreed it looked trivial," Ken later recalled.Instead of having Harris copy the program and give it another name, Ken Williamsplayed by corporation rules. He called the owner of the game's rights, the Segadivision of the Gulf& Western conglomerate. Sega did not seem to understand thevalue of their property, and Ken managed to acquire computer-disk and cassetterights for a paltry 10 percent royalty fee. (Sega licensed cartridge rights to theParicer Brothers game company; the marketers of "Monopoly" were breaking intothe videogame market.) He set John Harris to work immediately on the conversionof the game to the Atari computer. He also assigned a programmer to do an Appleversion, but since the Apple graphics were not well suited to the game, it would bethe Atari which would showcase the excellence of Ken's company.John Harris guessed that it would be a quick and dirty three-week project (hisoriginal one-week boast had been an idle one) to do a perfectly admirable Atariversion of Frogger. This was the kind of illusion with which hackers often beginprojects. Working in the office he had set up in the smallest of three bedrooms inhis rambling orange-wood house a room cluttered with papers, discardedhardware, and potato-chip bags John put the graphics on the screen in short order;during that period, he later recalled, "I glued my hands to the keyboard. One time I

started programming at three in the afternoon. After cranking out code for a while,I looked out and it was still light outside and I thought, 'It seems like I've beentyping for more than a few hours.' And of course it had already been through thenight and that was the next morning."The work went swiftly, and the program was shaping up beautifully. A friend ofJohn's in San Diego had written some routines to generate continuous music, usingthe three-voice sound synthesizer chip in the Atari to mingle the strains of theoriginal Frogger theme with "Camptown Races," all with the gay contrapuntal upbeatof a calliope. Harris' graphic shapes were never better the leaping frog, thelittle hot rods and trucks on the highway, the diving turtles and the goofy-lookingalligators in the water ... every detail lovingly denned on shape tables, worked intoassembly-language subroutines, and expertly integrated into game play-It was thekind of game, Harris believed, that only a person in love with gaming couldimplement. No one but a true hacker would approach it with the lunatic intensityand finicky artistic exactitude of John Harris.It did not turn out to be a quick and dirty three-week project, but no one had reallyexpected it to. Software always takes longer than you expect. Almost two monthsinto the project, though, John was well over the hump. He decided to take off workfor a couple of days to go back to San Diego for Software Expo, a charity benefitfor muscular distrophy. As a leading software artist, John was going to display hiswork, including the nearly completed Frogger. So John Harris packed the prereleaseFrogger into his software collection, and took the whole box with him toSouthern California.When traveling with a cargo as valuable as that, extreme care was called for.Besides including the only version of Frogger, the most important program JohnHarris had ever written (John had a backup copy, of course, but he brought thatalong in case the primary disk didn't boot), John's library included almost everydisk he owned, disks loaded with software utilities self-modified assemblers,routines for modifying files, music generators, animation routines, shape tables ...a young lifetime of tools, the equivalent to him of the entire drawer of paper-tapeprograms for the PDP-1 at MIT. One could not turn one's back on a pricelesscollection like that; one held it in one's hand almost every moment. Otherwise, inthe single moment that one forgot to hold it in one's hand and turned one's back onit for instance, during a moment of rapt conversation with an admirer well, asMurphy's Law holds ("Whatever can go wrong, will"), one's valuable softwarelibrary could be tragically gone.That was precisely what happened to John Harris at the Software Expo.

The instant that John Harris ended his interesting conversation and saw that hissoftware collection was gone, he knew his soul had been wounded. Nothing wasmore important to John than the floppy disks in that box, and he felt the voiddeeply. It was not as if the computer had chomped up one disk and he could gointo mara-thon mode for a few days to restore what he had lost onto the screen.This was a full-blown masterpiece totally wiped. And even worse, the tools withwhich he had created the masterpiece were gone as well. There was no worsedisaster imaginable.John Harris went into a deep depression.He was much too upset to boot up his Atari and begin the laborious task ofrewriting Progger when he returned to Oakhurst. For the next two months, hewrote no more than ten lines of source code. It was hard to even sit in front of thecomputer. He spent almost all day, every day, at Oakhurst's single arcade, a smallstorefront in a tiny shopping center across the street from the two-story officebuilding that On-Line was moving into. As arcades went, this was a hole, withdark walls and nothing for decoration but the videogame machines themselves,and not even the latest models. But it was home to John. He took a part-time job ascashier. He would exchange game tokens for quarters, and when he wasn't on dutyhe would play Starpath and Robotron and Berzerk and Tempest. It seemed to help.Other times he would get in his four-wheel-drive truck, go off-road, look for thebiggest hill he could find, and try to drive to its crest. He would do anything, infact, but program."I spent almost every hour of every day down at the arcade waiting for some girl towalk in there," he later recalled. "I'd go home and play a game on my computerand then try to slip in the program disk and try to start programming as if I wereplaying the game." None of it worked. "I could not motivate myself to write twolines of source code."Ken Williams' heart was unmoved by John Harris' loss. It was hard for Ken tohave sympathy for a twenty-year-old boy to whom he was paying several thousanddollars a month in royalties. Ken felt a sense of friendship toward John, but Kenhad also developed a theory about friends and business. "Everything is personaland good friends up to about ten thousand dollars," Ken later explained. "Oncepast ten thousand dollars, friendship doesn't matter." The possible earnings ofFrogger were worth many times that five-figure threshold.Even before John had once again proved his idiocy to Ken Williams by hiscarelessness at the Software Expo, Ken had been impatient with his aceprogrammer. Ken thought John should have written Frogger in less than a monthto begin with. "John Harris is a perfectionist," Ken Williams later said. "A hacker.

He will keep working on a project for two months after anyone else would havestopped. He likes the ego satisfaction of having something out that's better thananything else in the marketplace." Bad enough, but the fact that John was notworking at all now, just because he suffered a setback, drove Ken wild. "He wouldsay his heart wasn't in it," Ken recalled. "Then I would find him in the arcade,working for tokens!"In front of John's friends, Ken would make nasty remarks about how late Froggerwas. Ken made John too nervous to think of pithy rejoinders right on the spot.Only away from Ken could John Harris realize he should have said that he was notKen's employee, he was a free-lance programmer. He had not guaranteed Ken anydelivery date. John could do whatever he wanted. That was what he should havesaid. Instead, John Harris felt bad.It was torture, but finally John dragged himself to the Atari and began to rewritethe program. Eventually he re-created his earlier work, with a few extraembellishments as well. Forty-four colors, the player-missile graphic routines fullyredefined, and a couple of neat tricks that managed to make the eight bits of theAtari 6502 chip emulate ten bits. John's friend in San Diego had even made someimprovement on the three-voice concurrent sound track. All in all, John Harris'version looked even better than the arcade game, an astounding feat since arcadegames used custom-designed chips for high speed and solid-color graphics, andwere almost never approximated by the less powerful (though more versatile)home computers. Even experienced programmers like Jeff Stephen-son wereimpressed.The dark period was over, but something had changed in the relationship betweenKen and John. It was emblematic of the way that On-Line was changing, into moreof a bureaucracy than a hacker Summer Camp. Whereas the procedure forreleasing John's previous games had been impromptu testing on-site ("Hey! Wegot a game to play today! If everyone likes it, let's ship it!"), now Ken had aseparate department to test games before release. To John, it seemed that it nowtook about fifty exchanges of interoffice memos before anyone got around tosaying that he liked a game. There were also logjams in packaging, marketing, andcopy protection. No one quite knew how, but it took over two more months twomonths after John had turned in his fully completed Frogger for the game to bereleased.When it was finally on the market, everyone recognized that Frogger was a terrificconversion from arcade to home computer. John's check for the first month'sroyalties was for thirty-six thousand dollars, and the program went to number oneon Softsel Distributors' new "Hot List". of programs (which was compiled weekly

and patterned after Billboard's record chart), staying there for months.Ken Williams never forgot, though, the troubles that John Harris had given himduring the depressed stage, when it looked like John would never deliver aworking Frogger. And by the summer of 1982, Ken began to plan for the day thathe would be free of all the John Harrises of the world. As far as Ken Williams wasconcerned, the age of the hacker had ended. And its end had come not a momenttoo soon.Like his early role model, Jonas Cord of The Carpetbaggers, Ken Williams lovedmaking deals. He would call a prospective! programmer on the telephone and say,without any shame and only a slight sense of parody, "Why don't you let me makeyou rich?" He also liked dealing with executives from giant corporations on a peerbasis. In 1982, one of the early boom years of the computer revolution, KenWilliams talked to many people, and the kinds of deals he made indicated whatkind of business home computer software was becoming, and what place, if any,hackers, or the Hacker Ethic, would have in the business."On-Line's crazy," Williams said that summer. "I have this philosophy that I eitherwant to pretend to be IBM or not be here."He dreamed of making a national impact on the mass marketplace. In the summerof 1982, that meant the Atari VCS machine, the dedicated game machine forwhich bestselling games were not counted in tens of thousands, as Apple softwarewas, but in millions.Atari regarded the workings of its VCS machine as a secret guarded somewhatmore closely than the formula for Coca-Cola. Had it been a formula for a softdrink, the schematic plan of the VCS which memory location on the chip triggeredcolor on the screen, and which hot spot would ignite sound might well haveremained within Atari's vaults. But this was the computer industry, where codebreakinghad been a hobby ever since the lock-hacking days at MIT. With theadded incentive of heady profits obtainable by anyone who topped the rathermundane software offerings that complacent Atari sold for its machine, it was onlya matter of time before the VCS secrets were broken (as were the Atari 800secrets).The first companies to challenge Atari on the VCS, in fact, were start-ups formedby the former Atari programmers who had been called "towel designers" by Atari'spresident. Almost all of Atari's VCS wizards jumped ship in the early 1980s. This

was no small loss, because the VCS machine was hopelessly limited in memory,and writing games on it required skills honed as finely as those required in haikucomposition. Yet the Atari programmers who left knew how to extend the machinefar beyond its limitations; the games they wrote for their own companies madeAtari's look silly. The improved quality of the games extended the market life ofthe VCS for years. It was a stunning justification of the hacker insistence thatwhen manuals and other "secrets" are freely disseminated the creators have morefun, the challenge is greater, the industry benefits, and the users get rewarded bymuch better products.Meanwhile, other companies were "reverse engineering" the VCS, dissecting itwith oscilloscopes and unspeakably high-tech devices until they understood itssecrets. One such company was Tiger Toys, a Chicago-based company whichcontacted Ken Williams to set up an arrangement to share his programming talent.Williams flew three hackers to Chicago, where Tiger Toys taught them what abitch the VCS was to program. You had to be penurious with your code, you hadto count cycles of the machine to space out the movements of things. John Harrisin particular hated it, even though he and Roberta Williams had sat down one nightand figured out a nifty new VCS layout for lawbreaker which looked less like Pac-Man. John Harris was used to the much faster routines on the Atari 800 computer,and was indignant that this other machine refused to accept similar routines. Heconsidered the VCS ridiculous. But John really wanted to do a program that wouldblow Atari's VCS version of Pac-Man out of the water, and with the newJawbreaker scheme he was able, in his opinion, to accomplish that task. Atari'sVCS Pac-Man was full of flicker, a big loser; John's VCS program had no flicker,was colorful, and was blindingly fast.Ken Williams' dealings did not stop with the VCS market. Since computer gameswere becoming as successful as the movies, he was able to pursue ties to thatindustry. The world-famous creator of the Muppets, Jim Henson, was coming outthat Christmas with a $20 million movie called Dark Crystal that had the earmarksof a blockbuster. Ken and Henson made a deal.While Ken guessed that the idea of tying a computer game to an unreleased moviewas risky what if the movie bombed? Roberta Williams loved the idea of writingan adventure game based on Dark Crystal characters. She considered computergames as much a facet of the entertainment world as movies and television, andthought it natural that her genre should merge with those glamorous counterparts.Indeed, other videogame and computer companies were working on projects withmovie tic-ins. There was Atari's "E.T.," Fox Videogames' "M.A.S.H.," and ParkerBrothers' "The Empire Strikes Back." A computer game company named DataSoftwas even working on an adventure game based on the television show "Dallas."

This was quite a step from the early days, when all a programmer had to work withwas creativity. Now he could work with a bankable property. If Dark Crystal wasnot quite the big leagues, the next deal was. For this one, Ken Williams wasdealing with the biggest company of all.IBM.International Business Machines, toe-to-toe with the Coarse-gold, California,company that did not exist two years ago. White-shirted, dark-tied, batchprocessedIBM'ers coming to Ken's new corporate headquarters, which consistedof a series of offices in the same building that housed the little office whereOakhursters and Coarsegoldians paid their electric bills, a little furniture store onthe ground floor, and a beauty parlor next to the office where Ken ran marketingand advertising.To On-Liners, hackers, and Oakhurst natives dressed in Summer Camp shorts andT-shirts, IBM's cloak-and-dagger behavior was absurd. Everything was sosolemnly top secret. Before IBM would divulge even an inkling of its intentions,its poker-faced personnel insisted that everyone who might possibly know aboutthe deal and this was to be kept to the smallest number of people possible signlengthy and binding nondisclosure forms which mandated severe tortures andcomplete frontal lobotomies, almost, to anyone leaking the name of the threeinitialcompany or its plans.The predictions of Computer Lib author Ted Nelson and others that the personalcomputer revolution would put IBM "in disarray" had proven a patheticunderestimation of the monolithic firm. The Hulking Giant of computer companieshad proven to be more nimble than anyone had expected. In 1981, it hadannounced its own computer, the IBM "PC," and the very specter of this entry ledmany in the small computer industry to make preparations for rolling over anddropping dead for IBM, which they promptly did when the IBM's PC machine wasput on the marketplace. Even people who hated IBM and its batch-processedphilosophy rolled over and dropped dead, because IBM had done something whichrepresented a virtual turnaround from everything they had previously stood for:they opened their machine up. They encouraged outsiders to write software. Theyeven enlisted outside firms to help design the thing, firms like Microsoft, headedby Bill Gates (the author of the original software piracy letter, directed at theHomebrew Altair BASIC copiers). Gates wrote the IBM operating system whichalmost instantly became a new industry standard. It was almost as if IBM hadstudied the Hacker Ethic and decided that, in this case, it was good business senseto apply it.

IBM did not plan to apply the Hacker Ethic too much, though. It still valuedsecrecy as a way of life. So IBM waited until all the nondisclosure forms weresigned before its men in the white shirts told Ken Williams what they had in mind.IBM was planning a new machine for the home, cheaper and better at playinggames than the PC. It was code-named Peanut, but would eventually be known asPCjr. Would On-Line like to do a new kind of adventure interpreter, moresophisticated than anything that came before it? And also write an easy-to-useword processing program for the PCjr? Ken thought they could, no problem, andwhile Roberta began charting yet another adventure plot. Ken set about hiring atop secret team of wizards to hack code for the project.It would cost On-Line a lot of money to participate in some of these high-rollingventures. But Ken Williams had taken care of that by the most significant deal ofall. Venture capital. "I had never even heard of venture capital," Ken Williamslater said. "I had to be convinced to take it." Still, On-Line was spending moneyvery quickly, and the $1.2 million the company received from the Boston firmcalled TA Associates (plus two hundred thousand dollars for Ken and Robertapersonally) was essential to maintain cash flow. In return, TA got 24 percent of thecompany and consultation rights on various aspects of the business.The woman at TA who made the deal was vibrant, gray-haired Jacky Morby, withprecise features, a studied intensity, and the ability to insinuate herself as a distantgodmother to the company. Jacky Morby was very experienced in situations wherebrilliant entrepreneurs begin companies that grow so fast they threaten to get outof hand, and she immediately advised Ken Williams, in such a way that he knewthis was not merely casual advice, to get some professional management. Sherecognized that Ken was not an MBA type not one who would properly nurture hiscompany to take its place in the traditional line of companies that make thiscountry great and venture capital firms like TA very rich. If On-Line Systems wereto go public and shift everybody into Croesus Mode, there would have to be a firmrudder to guide it in the waters ahead. Ken's rudder was bent. He kept veering towild schemes, crazy deals, and hacker Summer Camp blowouts. Someone wouldhave to come in and supply a new rudder.The idea was not unappealing to Ken, who had announced to So/talk as early asMarch 1981 that he was "firing himself from the On-Line staff in hopes that [he'd]be able to get some programming done." And surely it was clear that somethinghad to be done about the managerial mess that was thickening as the company soldmore software, took on more deals, tried to get hold of more programmers, andshuffled more paper, even if a lot of the paper was in the form of data handled inApple computers.The problem came from Ken's hacking On-Line as if it were a computer system,

tweaking a marketing plan here, debugging the accounting there. Like hiscomputer hacking, which was characterized by explosive bursts of innovation andinattention to detail, his business style was punctuated by flashes of insight andfailures to follow through on ideas. He was among the first to recognize the valueof a low-cost word processing package for the Apple (a culmination of the ideaMITs Model Railroad Club hackers had when they wrote "Expensive Typewriter"on the TX-0), and had the patience to support the program through innumerablerevisions the program, eventually called "Screenwriter II," would gross over amillion dollars in sales. But his friendly competitors would laugh at his habit ofwriting huge royalty checks for programmers on the same checkbook he used forhis supermarket accounts. He would help develop a program called "TheDictionary," which corrects an Apple user's spelling, but then would place amagazine advertisement for the product which contained ten spelling errors,including a misspelling of the word "misspell."Ken's new office was just about buried in junk. One new employee later reportedthat on first seeing the room, he assumed that someone had neglected to take out ahuge, grungy pile of trash. Then he saw Ken at work, and understood. The twentyeight-year-oldexecutive, wearing his usual faded blue Apple Computer T-shirtand weatherbeaten jeans with a hole in the knee, would sit behind the desk andcarry on a conversation with employees or people on the phone while goingthrough papers. The T-shirt would ride over Ken's protruding belly, which wasexperiencing growth almost as dramatic as his company's sales figures. Proceedingat lightning pace, he would glance at important contracts and casually throw themin the pile. Authors and suppliers would be on the phone constantly, wonderingwhat had happened to their contracts. Major projects were in motion at On-Linefor which contracts hadn't been signed at all. No one seemed to know whichprogrammer was doing what; in one case two programmers in different parts of thecountry were working on identical game conversions. Master disks, some withoutbackups, some of them top secret IBM disks, were piled on the floor of Ken'shouse, where one of his kids might pick it up or his deg piss on it. No, KenWilliams was not a detail person.He knew it, too. Ken Williams came to believe that his company had grown so bigit had to be run in a more traditional manner by someone without hackertendencies. Finally, he came up with a candidate. His former boss, DickSunderiand.Ken knew Dick Sunderiand as a representative of the vague qualities that arespectable business should have, qualities that On-Line conspicuously lacked:predictability, order, control, careful planning, uniform outlook, decorum,adherence to guidelines, and a structured hierarchy. It was no accident that thesemissing qualities were things that hackers loathed. If Ken had set out to find

someone who best represented the antithesis of the Hacker Ethic, he would havebeen hard-pressed to top his former boss. The act was akin to someoneacknowledging that he was sick, and perversely choosing the worst-tastingmedicine as a restorative.There was something more insidious in the choice as well. One reason why Kenhad left Informatics several years earlier was that Dick Sunderiand had told him,"Ken, you have no management potential." The idea of being Dick Sunderland'sboss, therefore, appealed greatly to Ken's affection for toppling the establishedorder.For Dick Sunderiand, the prospect of working for Ken Williams initially struckhim as absurd. "Come up and run my company!" Ken had chirped to him over thephone from this mountain complex near Yosemite. This was no way to recruitexecutives, thought Dick. There is no way, he told himself, I am going to getmixed up in a deal like this. Dick was completing an MBA program, a movewhich he felt would put him in line for the very top positions at Informatics. Butby the time Ken called him a second time, Sunderiand had been worrying abouthis future at Informatics, and had been thinking of the booming microcomputerfield. In early June, Dick drove up, and had lunch at the Broken Bit with themotley crew of Oakhurst retreads and college dropouts that made up Ken's uppermanagement. He looked at the venture capital deal and was impressed. Eventually,he came to think that On-Line, as he later put it, "had a hell of a potential,something I could work with. I could bring what was missing cohesive leadershipto make things jell." Dick realized the home software industry was "new, like clay... you could mold it and make it happen, make a winner ... BOOM! It was theopportunity of a lifetime for me."On the other hand, he would be working for Ken Williams. For over a month, Dickand his wife April would spend hours sitting in the backyard of the Los Angeleshouse they had carefully decorated over the years, kicking around this fantasy thatwould mandate their evacuation from the house, and it would be clear that thenumber one risk was the personality of this wild programmer-tumed-softwareczar.Dick consulted professionals to discuss what it would be like, a carefulmanager working for this reckless entrepreneur; he spoke to management experts,even a psychiatrist. Sun-derland became convinced he could handle the KenProblem.On September 1, 1982, Dick Sunderland began as the president of On-LineSystems, which coincidentally was also changing its name. Reflecting theproximity of Yosemite, the company would now be called Sierra On-Line, and thenew logo had a drawing of Half-Dome Mountain in a circle. A change toaccommodate the new age.

A week before Dick arrived, Ken was feeling expansive. It was the day that hedrifted over to give his blessing to the hacker who had "auditioned" with his WallWars game. After that encounter, he talked to a visitor about the potential stardomof his charges. He admitted that some of his authors had become brand names,almost like rock stars. "If I release a game and put the John Harris name on it, itwill sell a ton more copies than if I don't," he said. "John Harris is a householdname in [Atari] households. Among Atari computer owners, probably a higherpercentage have heard of John Harris than [of] most rock stars."But now that Dick Sunderland's approach was imminent, Ken was hoping that theprogrammers' power would be lessened. He was now a hacker who was convincedthat hackers should be stifled. He was counting on Dick to get the standardprogrammer royalty down from 30 percent to 20. "I don't think you need a geniusof programming" to make a hit game, said Ken. "The days of needing an A-studentprogrammer to write an acceptable game aren't over, but within a year of beingover. Programmers, they're not a dime a dozen, but they're 50K a dozen. Movingthe spaceship [on the video display] isn't a problem anymore. What's needed is toguess what the marketplace wants, access to the distribution channels, money,gimmicks, marketing promotion."Sitting in his office that day, speaking in his startlingly candid what-the-hell tone,guessing that his company would "either be $200 million in sales by 1985 orbankrupt," adding "I'm not real hung up on which," Ken Williams promised toretreat to the mountain, like some high-tech pilgrim, and contemplate the next stepin bringing about the computer millennium. But to the surprise of almost no one,Ken Williams did not keep his promise to "fire himself." It would have been as outof character as a hacker abandoning a hot game program before all the properfeatures were written into it. Ken Williams had presented the company to Dick asif his goal getting a company to a point where it was big enough to be left to amanager were accomplished. But like a hacker, Ken Williams did not see things interms of goals. He was still enamored of the process of running On-Line, and theclash of cultures between hacker informalism and bureaucratic rigidity threw thecompany into turmoil.It was almost as if a fight were being waged for the soul of the industry. Amongthe first things Dick Sunderland tried to impose at Sierra On-Line was a rigidcorporate structure, a hierarchy in which employees and authors would only bepermitted to take up problems with immediate superiors. Dick requested thesecretaries to distribute copies of the organization chart, with a box at the top forKen, one underneath for Dick, and a series of boxes underneath, all connected bylines which represented the only authorized channels of communication. That thisapproach was antithetical to hackerism did not disturb Dick, who felt that hacker

attitudes had almost brought the company to bankruptcy and ruin.Dick particularly wanted an end to Summer Camp. He had heard stories about therowdy goings-on, the drugs, the impromptu parties, the pranks during workinghours ... he'd even heard from the janitorial staff that there'd been actual fucking inthe office at night! Those kinds of things had to stop. He particularly wanted Kento maintain a more executive-like relationship with his employees, and to promotemore orderly, rational lines of communication. How can you maintain ahierarchical structure when the chief executive gets in his hot tub with low-levelemployees?To Dick's mind, the flow of information should be channeled with discretion, withan unambiguous interpretation controlled by the people at the top. People whodon't have the broad view of things should not be upset by getting dribs and drabsof information. What Dick had to contend with at On-Line, though, was anincredible rumor mill, fed by the unfettered flow of information that company hadbeen accustomed to. And Ken Williams, Dick said, "nurtures [the rumor mill]rather than quells it. He has no sense of discretion!" Everything was public recordwith Ken, from his personal life to his bank account.Dick was convinced, though, that Ken knew On-Line needed responsiblemanagement, or it would die. But Ken was so reluctant to step back. Sunderlandcould settle the personnel situation, bring in carefully considered candidates, keepthe payroll under control ... and then Ken would tell him, bang, that he just hiredsomebody to be his administrative assistant, a job opening that did not exist untilthat very minute. "And who did he hire?" Dick would say. "Some guy driving aPepsi truck in L.A.!""This is casebook stuff," Dick said. He recalled reading about it in business school:entrepreneur who gets going on a brilliant idea, but can't handle it when thebusiness gets big. It all came from the hacker origins of the company. Ken wassaying that the time for hackers was over; he wanted to limit programmers' powerin the company. But he wasn't making it easy for Dick.It was particularly tough trying to negotiate the royalty down from 30 to 20percent when the programmers had the impression that the company was rolling inmoney. It really wasn't, but no one believed that when they saw green just aboutfalling from the windows. Everyone knew about the house Ken was buildingoutside of town. It would be four hundred feet long. A party room that would bethe biggest in the area. A crew of over a dozen were working full-time on it ... theyhad constructed an entire office on the work site, with phone hookups andeverything. The house was not even half finished, and already Ken had invited the

whole company to come to the site on weekends to play in the built-in racquetballcourt. It was not the best way to convince programmers to opt for austerity.Ken Williams' point of view was somewhat different. He had hired Dick, andwould often defend him. But he thought it necessary to keep his hand in. Ken feltresponsible to the people he had hired, and to the vision of the company itself. Heknew the industry as well as anyone; Dick was a newcomer to the family. Also,Ken Williams was having too much fun: leaving now would be like walking awayfrom a crap table when you're on the hottest roll of your life. Or, more to the point,it was like telling a hacker that he could no longer play with the machine. Thosewords did not register with hackers. Once you had control, the godlike power thatcomes from programming mastery, you did not want to let go of it.Roberta Williams would agree. Just as Ken treated On-Line like a complexcomputer program to be hacked, Roberta thought of the company as a creativeproject which should be lovingly embellished and elegantly structured, like anadventure game. Like authors of an adventure game, she and Ken had enjoyedultimate control over the company; turning it over was difficult. She compared thesituation to hiring a governess: "You would think, wouldn't it be great to havesomeone come in and watch the kids every day while I'm doing this thing I want todo. I can design adventure games. But then she starts telling the kids everythingthey can do 'Oh yes, you can have a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.' And I maynot believe in peanut butter and jelly. I might prefer them to have beef. Thatperson says, 'Peanut butter is good, there's a lot of protein in peanut butter. Youhired me, let me do my job.' That's what we're running into with Dick. He said,'You gave me the power to do this, you wanted to go off and program.' Now weare saying, 'Yeah, that's what we thought we wanted, but it turns out we don't wantto give up control.'"While the management of Sierra On-Line struggled to find itself, the ThirdGeneration hackers there were glum over the changes in their company. Theywould talk over frozen dinners at the Hexagon House before playing Dungeonsand Dragons. Or they would discuss the deteriorating moral state of the companyover pizza and Cokes at Danny's, a bleak roadhouse on Route 41 with picnic-styletables covered with plastic checkered tablecloths. Most of the customers werelocal families who didn't seem to like the On-Line people much, but it was almostthe only place in town where you could get a pizza and play videogames, whichthe hackers played compulsively, with no visible sense of involvement or eveninterest, while they waited for their food.

They were proud of their positions, and almost puzzled at their good fortune ingetting paid for work they loved. In the early 1980s, hacking games was about theonly form of commercially viable artistry where, with almost no capital, you couldtruly be an auteur: single-handedly you could conceive, script, direct, execute, andpolish a work, completing an objet d'art which was every bit as good as thebestselling game on the market. This Third Generation found itself in anartistically privileged position. The fact that publishers competed for their waresmade things pleasant on the one hand, but confusing on the other. There were norules for this kind of thing. It was a rare twenty-year-old hacker who had thebusiness acumen and intestinal fortitude to cope with a negotiator as forceful asKen Williams, or as formally intimidating as Dick Sunder-land. Since moneywasn't the main issue for the hackers, they'd agree to almost anything if theythought it was fair. Business wasn't as much fun as hacking was.Still, in the fall of 1982, it was the most creative programmers who drove theindustry. Broderbund was riding high on "Choplifter," written by a twenty-eightyear-oldformer artificial-intelligence hacker named Dan Gorlin. The game wasbased on the Iran hostage crisis: a chopper crossed enemy lines and tried to rescuesixty-four hostages little animated figures who waved when they saw thehelicopter. It was the big game of the year, and consistent with the Carlstons'classy approach to the business. They loved their hackers. They talked all the timeabout what great artists their "game designers" were.Sinus had been developing its own superstars, but Gebelli, the designer who haddone almost all their games in the first year of Sirius' existence, was not one ofthem. According to Jerry Jewell, Gebelli thought that Sirius was not the bestagency for display and sale of his artworks this after receiving a quarter of amillion dollars in his first year, noted Jewell incredulously and, along with adefecting Sirius executive, began his own company, modestly named GebelliSoftware. It did not join the top ranks of the industry.Sirius survived the loss by importing teen-age hackers from other parts of thecountry, and they delivered some hit games called "Beer Run," "Twerps," and"The Earth Dies Screaming." Jerry Jewell acted as a sometimes rowdy big brotherto his young programmers. What Jewell really lusted after was the mass VCSmarket, and after signing a major deal to develop games for Twentieth-CenturyFox's new videogame division he was afire with visions of his products ashousehold words, not just in the Apple or Atari world, but everywhere. He figuredthat some of his programmers might make as much as a million dollars a year.At On-Line, where the VCS had been a mere flirtation, Ken Williams and DickSunderland were not talking about a million dollars a year for their programmers.They were trying to cut the royalty down from 30 to 20 percent. And when On-

Line hackers gathered at places like Danny's, they would compare notes and findthat they were in agreement: 30 percent was fair, and 20 percent was not.Br0derbund and Sirius were still offering higher royalties. Some of the hackershad been approached by an exciting new company called Electronic Arts. Itconsisted of ex-Apple people who promised to treat hackers as culture heroes, likerock stars.Ken and Dick had tried to convince them that 20 percent was a fair figure in lightof the drastically increased costs of promoting and testing and distributing a gamein this new, more professional stage of the industry. On-Line was increasing itsadvertising, hiring more support people, boosting its promotional staff. But theprogrammers saw Sunderland and his regime as bureaucracy, to which, as hackers,they had a generic allergy. They missed the days of Summer Camp andhandshakes for contracts. John Harris, for instance, chafed at the idea of paying alawyer to help him negotiate a six-figure contract ("They charge one hundreddollars just to read it!" he howled). Harris and the other On-Line hackers wouldsee all these managers and support people being hired, just to do the same thingthat the company did before release the games that the hackers wrote. From theirpoint of view, it seemed to indicate another hacker sin inefficiency. Along with anemphasis on the sizzle of marketing rather than the substance of hacking.For instance, On-Line spent a lot of money for colorful new boxes in which topackage their games but did not see fit to include the name of the programmer onthe package. Ken had thought it sufficient to give that credit only in the instructionmanual stuffed inside the box. "The authors should realize that this will give usmore money for advertising and royalties," he said. It was indicative of a new"professionalism" in dealing with authors.But to listen to the conversations at Danny's during the fall of 1982, it was clearthat an atmosphere conducive to hacking was far more important to thoseprogrammers than a mantle of "professionalism." And the consensus was thatalmost every programmer was thinking of leaving.Even if Ken Williams was aware of a potential programmer exodus, the problemseemed of little concern to the founder of the company. Williams was busy hiringa staff of programmers quite different from the potential detectors. Impatient withthe hackers who had come to him with their assembly-language skills and unevenwork habits fully formed, Ken decided to try an alternate source: he would utilizethe messianic power of the computer to create programming gurus where noneexisted. After all, the now testy hackers who were complaining about the royaltycuts had come to him with, at most, the experience of a game or two. Now theyfelt he owed them the world. Why not find people before that first game, peoplewho had some programming skills but were not yet assembly-language wizards,

and let them develop under him? Surely they would not be so ungrateful as toleave him for some random offer from another firm. But more important, thisdaring kind of recruitment would be in keeping with the vision that Ken had forhis company: the place where the computer future comes to the people, improvingtheir lives.He set up On-Line's old office above the TV sales shop on Route 41 as an officeespecially for in-house programmers. Some of the people working there wereroyalty-basis programmers whom Ken had offered free living space to, like ChuckBueche, a twenty-one-year-old programmer who drove to the Sierras from Texasin an old Jaguar XKE and who wrote under the nom de computer of "Chuckles."Dick liked one specific part of Chuckles' first game, a maze-chase called "CreepyCorridors": the piercing, hideous scream heard when the little man you weremoving through the maze got caught by the monster who chased him. Consideringthe relatively brain-damaged sound capabilities of the Apple, the scream was quitean achievement. Chuckles had screamed the most hideous scream he could into atape recorder, and used a digital analyzer to print out five long pages of data that,when fed into the Apple, would exactingly POKE the memory location toduplicate the scream. It took almost a fifth of the available memory of themachine, but to Chuck it was worth it. The purer programmers at On-Line wereappalled at the inefficiency.A few of the newer programmers, though, were so far behind Chuck that issueslike that were almost incomprehensible to them. The qualifications of thesenewcomers ranged from college degrees in computer science to a passion forgetting stoned and playing videogames. Two were students of Japanese extractionwhom Ken had hired because someone had told him that Orientals werefantastically devoted workers. Some were attracted because of the excellent skiingat nearby Badger Pass. Others hoped to convert On-Line games from one machineto another by day, and hack The Great American Computer Game by night. All inall, in the space of a few months Ken had hired almost a dozen inexperienced, nonhackerprogrammers for bargain-basement wages, in hopes that they would growas quickly as the industry was growing.Of all Ken's new programmers, none exemplified his zeal for reforming lives bycomputer power as much as did Bob and Caro-lyn Box. Bob Box was in his fifties:they had lived in the area for well over a decade and worked at their ranch-stylehome five miles from Oakhurst, in the almost undetectable hamlet of Ahwahnee.Bob, who had dark hair, soulful eyes, and a nose of basset-hound proportions, wasapproximately four feet in height. He was a former New Yorker, a formerengineer, a former race car driver, a former jockey, and a former Guinness Book ofWorld Records champion in gold panning. Carolyn Box was slightly over five feettall, had long brown hair and a world-weary attractiveness, and was the current

Guinness Book of World Records champion in gold panning. They'd marriedtwenty-six years ago, when Carolyn was fifteen. For the past few years, they'dbeen running a gold-prospecting supply business and searching for gold in thePresno River, which ran in their backyard. The Oakhurst-Coarsegold area was onthe southern rim of the California mother lode, and the gold the Boxes dredged upfrom the river one morning they came up with two thousand dollars' worth in ahalf hour financed their programming courses at a Fresno trade school.They had realized that the gold of the 1980s would be software, and their goal wasto work at On-Line. Though Carolyn Box had been apprehensive about dealingwith a computer, she instantly understood the required concept, as if computerswere a language she'd always been talking. It was almost supernatural. She was thefirst one in the history of the school to get a 4.0 average in her courses. Bob didwell, too: programming was like gold panning, he realized you proceeded inlogical steps, and concentrated while you did it.But when they presented themselves to Ken, he was skeptical. He told them thatprogrammers usually peaked at nineteen and were over the hill at twenty evenKen, at twenty-eight, was just about washed up. (Not that he believed it.) Kenwanted to give the Boxes a chance, though, because they fit right in with thedream he had about On-Line and the great computer future. So he told them to putup something on the screen using assembly language, in thirty days. The Boxes'school had taught them programming in high-level languages on mainframecomputers; they knew nothing about Apple assembly language. But working dayand night, they came up with an 82-line program only five days later. It moved adot around the screen. Ken asked them to try something else, and, again workingalmost every waking hour, the Boxes created a 282-line program with a littleairplane moving around the high-resolution screen. Ken hired them, and set themto work programming a pet project of his, an educational game.Soon the Boxes were hard at work getting a little dog, whom they named Dustyafter their own dog, to walk across the screen. They would proudly explain tovisitors that their hack used a sophisticated technique called exclusive-or-ing,which allowed for zero-flicker animation. They felt they'd given life to Dusty Dog."This dog is like our pet," Carolyn Box would say. When Ken first saw Dusty Dogmove across the screen, the little basset legs moving with steady, non-flickeringfluidity, he almost burst. "It's days like this that make you proud to be in thisbusiness," he told them. Even these middle-aged gold prospectors could besoftware superstars ... and Ken was the Moses who led them to the promisedComputer Land.

To Roberta Williams, it all represented something: the rehabilitation of the Boxes,Ken's community-minded efforts, her own ascension to the rank of bestsellinggame designer, the big Dark Crystal collaboration with Henson Associates, theartistic efforts of their software superstars, and above all the fantastic way thatcomputers had nurtured what was a mom-and-pop bedroom operation to a $1Omillion-a-yearcompany that would soon be employing over one hundred people.She considered their story inspiring. It said a lot about the power of the computer,and the different, better lives that people would be leading with the computer. Inthe two years of On-Line's growth, Roberta had shed some of her shyness,exchanging a bit of it for a fierce pride in their accomplishments. "Look at us!"she'd sometimes say in conversation, partially in disbelief and partially as an allpurposetrump card. "People ask me," she said that fall of 1982, " 'Don't you justsit around and say "Wow"? Doesn't it do something for you?' The answer is thatwe're just so constantly amazed all the time that it's almost a state of mind."Roberta wanted the message of On-Line spread to the world. She insisted that On-Line hire a New York public relations firm to promote not only the programs, butthe people behind them. "Programmers, authors, are going to be the future newentertainers," she explained. "It might be presumptuous to say they might be newRobert Redfords ... but to a certain extent [they will be] idolized. Tomorrow'sheroes."Dick Sunderland did not share Roberta's enthusiasm for the New York publicrelations firm. He had come out of an industry where programmers wereanonymous. He was worried about On-Line's programmers getting big heads fromall that attention. It's tough enough to deal with a twenty-year-old who's making ahundred thousand a year can you imagine how tough it will be after he's profiled inPeople magazine, as John Harris would be that winter?The spotlight was beginning to find its way to the mysterious software companywhose letterhead still carried the address of the Williamses' A-frame woodenhouse from which they had run the company when it was a two-person operation.Mudge Ranch Road, Coarsegold, California. The world wanted to know: Whatkind of computer madness had taken hold out there in the sticks, and what sorts ofmillions were being made, there on Mudge Ranch Road? There was no subject inthe media hotter than computers in the early 1980s, and with the New York publicrelations firm helping channel the dazzled inquisitors, a steady stream of longdistancephone calls and even long-distance visitors began to arrive in Oakhurstthat autumn.This included an "NBC Magazine" camera crew which flew to Oakhurst fromNew York City to document this thriving computer-age company for its video

magazine show. NBC shot the requisite footage of Roberta mapping a newadventure game at her home, Ken going over his phone messages, Ken andRoberta touring the building site of their new home. But the NBC producer wasparticularly anxious to speak to the heart of the company: the young programmers.Whiz kids writing games and getting rich. The programmers, those in-house andthose working for royalties, were duly assembled at the programming office.The NBC producer, with his gray hair, bushy moustache, and twinkling eyes,resembled a carnival barker who knows the gruesome ropes, yet has maintainedcompassion. He urged the programmers to play at the terminals so his crew couldshoot an establishing shot of a thriving factory that measured production by linesof computer code. One of the hackers immediately began concocting a program tocreate a twenty-one-sided flower on the screen a program involving the retentionof the value of pi to the sixth decimal place. Even after the NBC crew finished theestablishing shot, the teen-age programmer felt compelled to finish the displayhack.The producer by then was interviewing one of Ken's twenty-one-year-old whizkids."Where is the industry going?" he asked him solemnly.The whiz kid stared at the producer. "I have no idea," he said.

19ApplefestTHE Third Generation lived with compromises in the Hacker Ethic that wouldhave caused the likes of Greenblatt and Gosper to recoil in horror. It all stemmedfrom money. The bottom line of programming was ineluctably tied to the bottomline on a publisher's ledger sheet. Elegance, innovation, and coding pyrotechnicswere much admired, but a new criterion for hacker stardom had crept into theequation: awesome sales figures. Early hackers might have regarded this asheresy: all software all information should be free, they'd argue, and pride shouldbe invested in how many people use your program and how much they areimpressed with it. But the Third Generation hackers never had the sense ofcommunity of their predecessors, and early on they came to see healthy salesfigures as essential to becoming winners.One of the more onerous of the compromises in the Ethic grew out of publishers'desire to protect their sales figures. It involved intentional tampering withcomputer programs to prevent a program from being easily copied by users,perhaps for distribution without further payment to the publisher or author. Thesoftware publishers called this process "copy protection," but a substantialpercentage of true hackers called it war.Crucial to the Hacker Ethic was the fact that computers, by nature, do not considerinformation proprietary. The architecture of a computer benefited from the easiest,most logical flow of information possible. Someone had to substantially alter acomputer process to make data inaccessible to certain users. Using one shortcommand, a user could duplicate an "unprotected" floppy disk down to the lastbyte in approximately thirty seconds. This ease was appalling to softwarepublishers, who dealt with it by "copy-protecting" disks: altering the programs byspecial routines which prevented the computer from acting naturally whensomeone tried to copy a disk. A digital roadblock which did not enhance theprogram's value to the user, but benefited the seller of the program.The publishers had legitimate reason to resort to such unesthetic measures. Theirlivelihood was invested in software. This was not MIT, where software was

subsidized by some institution. There was no ARPA footing the bill. Nor was thisthe Homebrew Computer Club, where everyone was trying to get his hardwarebuilt and where software was written by hobbyists, then freely swapped. This wasan industry, and companies would go broke if no one bought software. If hackerswanted to write games free and hand them out to friends, that was their business.But the games published by On-Line and Br0derbund and Sirius were not merelypaper airplanes of truth released into the wind to spread computer gospel. Theywere products. And if a person coveted a product of any sort in the United Statesof America, he or she had to reach into a pocket for folding green bills or a plasticcredit card in order to own it.It drove publishers crazy, but some people refused to recognize this simple fact.They found ways to copy the disks, and did. These people were most commonlyhackers.Users also benefited from breaking disks. Some of them could rattle off a list ofrationalizations, and you would hear them recited like a litany in meetings of users'groups, in computer stores, even in the letters column of Softalk. Software is tooexpensive. We only copy software we wouldn't buy anyway. We only do it to try outprograms. Some of the rationalizations were compelling if a disk was copyprotected,a legitimate owner would be unable to make a backup copy in case thedisk became damaged. Most software publishers offered a replacement disk if yousent them a mangled original, but that usually cost extra, and besides, who wantedto wait four weeks for something you already paid for?But to hackers, breaking copy protection was as natural as breathing. Hackershated the fact that copy-protected disks could not be altered. You couldn't evenlook at the code, admire tricks and learn from them, modify a subroutine thatoffended you, insert your own subroutine... You couldn't keep working on aprogram until it was perfect. This was unconscionable. To hackers, a program wasan organic entity that had a life independent from that of its author. Anyone whocould contribute to the betterment of that machine-language organism should bewelcome to try. If you felt that the missiles in Threshold were too slow, youshould be welcome to peruse the code, and go deep into the system to improve onit. Copy protection was like some authority figure telling you not to go into a safewhich contains machine-language goodies ... things you absolutely need toimprove your programs, your life, and the world at large. Copy-protect was afascist goon saying Hands Off. As a matter of principle, if nothing else, copyprotecteddisks must therefore be "broken." Just as the MIT hackers felt compelledto compromise "security" on the CTSS machine, or engaged in lock hacking toliberate tools. Obviously, defeating the fascist goon copy-protect was a sacredcalling, and would be lots of fun.

Early varieties of copy-protect involved "bit-shifting" routines that slightlychanged the way the computer read information from the disk drive. Those werefairly simple to beat. The companies tried more complicated schemes, each onebroken by hackers. One renegade software publisher began selling a programcalled "Locksmith," specifically designed to allow users to duplicate copyprotecteddisks. You didn't have to be a hacker, or even a programmer, to breakcopy protection anymore! The publisher of Locksmith assured the Apple Worldthat his intent, of course, was only to allow users to make backup copies ofprograms they'd legally purchased. He insisted that users were not necessarilyabusing his program in such a way that publishers were losing sales. AndBuckminster Fuller announced he was becoming a placekicker for the New YorkJets.With most publishers guessing that they lost more than half their business tosoftware pirates (Ken Williams, with characteristic hyperbole, estimated that forevery disk he sold, five or six were pirated from it), the copy-protection stakeswere high. Oddly, most companies hired as copy-protect specialists the same kindof young hacker who commonly spent hours figuring out countermeasures to bustsomeone else's protection routine. This was the case with Sierra On-Line. Its copyprotectperson was Mark Duchaineau. He was twenty years old, and for some timeduring the big 1982 San Francisco Applefest, he single-handedly held this tenmillion-dol-lar-a-yearcompany hostage. Mark Duchaineau was yet another ThirdGeneration hacker who had been seduced by computers. He had brown hair whichflowed magnificently down his back. His blue eyes blazed with an intensity whichhinted of raging fires beneath his almost orientally calm demeanor, fires whichcould easily lead him to inexplicable acts. He had merged his sensibilities with thecomputer at Castro Valley (California) Junior High School. "They had a teletype,"he would later explain. "After school I would stay many hours. They let meprogram away. I was never popular, just a loner. [Other] kids would get intobaseball or whatever, I was into science and math. [I didn't have] really closefriends; I didn't mind. It was really interesting being able to teach a machine howto do things. You communicate with the machine ... it's like dealing with anotherperson. There's this whole other universe you almost live in when you'reprogramming. And when you get into it young like I did, you feel a oneness withthe computer, almost as if it's an extension of yourself. When I print comments inmy code, I say things like 'We do this, we do that...' It's like Us."Without computer access. Mark Duchaineau later said, "there would have beenthis big void ... it would be like you didn't have your sight, or hearing. Thecomputer is like another sense or part of your being."Coming to this discovery in the late seventies, Mark was able to get access tocomputers for his personal use, and become a hacker of the Third Generation.

While still in high school, he landed a job at the Byte Shop in Hayward. He lovedworking at the computer shop. He'd do some of everything repairs, sales, andprogramming for the store owner as well as the customers who needed customprograms. The fact that he was getting no more than three dollars an hour didn'tbother him: working with computers was pay enough. He kept working at the shopwhile he attended Cal State at Hayward, where he zipped effortlessly through mathand computer courses. He transferred to Berkeley, and was shocked at therigorousness of the computer science curriculum there. He had developed a hackerattitude: he could work intensely for long periods of time on things that interestedhim, but had little patience for the things that didn't. In fact, he found it virtuallyimpossible to retain what he called "the little nitpicking things that I knew I'dnever need" that were unfortunately essential for success in Berkeley's computerscience department. So like many Third Generation hackers, he did not get thebenefit of the high-level hacking that took place in universities. He dropped out forthe freedom that personal computers would provide, and went back to the ByteShop.An intense circle of pirates hung out at the shop. Some of them had even beeninterviewed in an article about software piracy in Esquire that made them seemlike heroes. Actually, Mark considered them kind of random hackers. Mark,however, was interested in the kinds of discoveries that it took to break down copyprotection, and was fairly proficient at breaking copy-protected disks, though hereally had no need for the programs on the disks. A student of the Hacker Ethic, hedidn't think too much of the idea of being a person who writes copy-protectionschemes.But one day Mark was playing around with the Apple operating system. He oftendid this the common hacker pursuit of wandering around within a system. "My bigthing is discovery," he explained later. Working with computers, he could alwaysunearth something new, and got incredible satisfaction from these finds. Mark wastrying to figure out what turned the disk drive on and off in the operating system,and soon knew what triggered it, spun it, worked the head, moved the motor. Ashe experimented with variations on the usual ways to work the disk drive, herealized that he was on to a very big discovery: a new way to put information on adisk.Mark's scheme involved arranging data in spiraling paths on the disk, soinformation could not be accessed concentrically, like a needle following a record,but in several spiraling paths. That was why Mark called the scheme "Spiradisk."The different arrangement would thwart programs which broke copy protectionand allowed pirates to copy disks. While not being totally pirate-proof (nothing is),Mark's scheme would defy Locksmith, and any other commercial scheme. Andwould take a hell of a long time for even a devoted hacker to crack.

Through a friend who was working on a game for On-Line, Mark met KenWilliams. Ken expressed only vague interest in Mark's scheme, and over the nextfew months they talked about it over the phone. Ken always seemed to pick outfaults in Mark's system. For one thing, Mark's scheme consumed too much spaceon a floppy disk. Spiradisk only allowed you to put in half the information youcould normally fit on a disk.While fixing that, Duchaineau came up with another revelation, which allowedhim not only to store the full amount of information on a disk but also to speed upthe process by which the computer and the disk drive swapped information. Atfirst, Duchaineau doubted it could be done. But like any good hacker, he tried, andafter some intense hours of hacking he looked up, flabbergasted, and said, "Gee,this works."According to Duchaineau's calculations, the Spiradisk process worked twentytimes faster than the normal Apple operating system. That meant that you couldload the information from a disk into the computer memory in a fraction of thetime. It was revolutionary, truly amazing. Mark Duchaineau did not understandwhy Ken Williams was so reluctant to use it.Ken saw some value in Duchaineau's system but did not want to risk his wholecompany on an untried scheme concocted by some random kid genius. In his twoyears as head of On-Line, Ken had seen plenty of them by now true wizards whowere brilliant con-ceptualists, but hackers in the worst sense, people who couldn'tfinish. What insurance did he have that Duchaineau could or would fix any direbugs that would inevitably appear in such a revolutionary scheme? He wasimpressed enough with Duchaineau, though, to ask him to come to Oakhurst to domore conventional copy protection. Mark, miffed at Ken's rejection of Spiradisk,said he didn't think so."What do you want to get paid?" Ken asked him.Mark Duchaineau had been living at home and working in the computer store forthree dollars an hour. He took a shot and said, "Ten bucks an hour," mainlybecause, he later said, "that sounded like a neat number to me.""Well," said Ken, "what if I let you live in one of my houses and give you $8.65 anhour?"Deal.

Ken basically wanted a fairly reliable copy-protect system to work with the FormMaster, a big disk-copying machine On-Line had bought to chum out products.Could Mark come up with a program that could do that? Yes. In half an hour,Duchaineau conceived of a plan, and set about writing code for the next twentyfourhours, finishing with a complete protection scheme that he says "wasn'tincredibly reliable, wasn't very high-quality, but it did work, if you [had] cleandisk drives and normal disk speeds." Over the next few months, Mark used it toprotect about twenty-five products.He also became the official Dungeonmaster for a running Dungeons and Dragonsgame at Hexagon House. Built as a traditional suburban family home, the housewas beginning to show some wear from neglect by a shifting roster of hackerboarders.The walls, the wooden banisters, and the kitchen cabinets all had abattered, war-pocked look. No one had bothered to get furniture, and the mainroom had only a Formica dining table and cheap kitchen chairs, a six-foot-tallsword-dueling arcade game, and a large color TV without a stand, connected to aBetamax that seemed to constantly play Conan the Barbarian. On D&D nights, afew of the programmers would gather around the table, while Mark sat crossleggedon the soiled wall-to-wall carpet surrounded by hardbound D&D guides forrunning games. He would roll dice, ominously predicting that this person ... ortroll, as the case might be ... had a 40 percent chance of getting hit by a lightningbolt cast by a wizard named Zwemif. He'd roll an eighteen-sided die, peer down atit, and look up with those disconcertingly intense eyes and say, already eager forthe next crisis, "You're still alive." Then he'd thumb through the book for anotherlife-and-death confrontation for the role players. Running a D&D game was agreat exercise in control, just as computers were.Mark kept lobbying for Spiradisk. His eagerness to implement the hard-to-crackscheme was not due to a desire to thwart would-be pirates; Duchaineau consideredit a sacrifice to bring about his more altruistic master plan. He hoped Spiradiskwould generate enough royalties for him to begin his own company, one whichwould be guided not by the unproductive standards of commercialism, but by theforward-thinking goals of research and development. Duchaineau's companywould be a hacker paradise, with programmers having every conceivable tool attheir disposal to create awesome software. If a programmer felt the companyneeded a piece of equipment, say some supercalibrated oscilloscope, he would nothave to get permission from unconnected management channels ... he and hisfellow hackers would have a large say in the process. Initially, Mark's companywould write state-of-the-art software Mark himself dreamed of writing theultimate computer version of Dungeons and Dragons.But software was only the beginning. Once revenues could support it, Mark'scompany would get into hardware. The ultimate goal would be to create a

computer good enough to handle an arcade game as good as the most sophisticatedcoin-operated games. It would have a built-in music synthesizer better than themost advanced current models; it would have more than enough power to runMark's dream software "environment" called SORDMASTER (Screen OrientedData Manipulation System), which would be like taking the best program runningtoday and extending its value to the tenth power ... a computer, in Mark's words,that would "do anything you want."Finally, Ken Williams agreed to allow the Dungeonmaster to copy-protect On-Line's programs with Spiradisk. Mark would get forty dollars an hour for settingthings up, five thousand dollars a month to maintain the system, and a 1 percentroyalty on all disks which used his system. Mark also fixed it so that the first thinga user would see when he booted up a Spiradisk was the name of Mark's"company," Bit Works.As Ken suspected, there were problems with the scheme. The disks often had to berebooted once or twice before the program would properly load. Williams began toget disenchanted with Duchaineau. In Ken's view, Mark was one of those brilliantbut unfocused hacker prima donnas. Ken believed that Mark was capable ofpulling off a coup that could prove critical for the whole industry: creating a diskformat that would support Apple, Atari, and IBM on the same disk, instead of thecurrent system, which required a separate disk to run on each machine. "Markknows how to do it," Ken complained. "He could do it in six weeks. He doesn'twant to make the effort. It's work. He sat down, worked for a week, lost interest inthe project. He can do it, but it doesn't excite him. It's not fun." According to KenWilliams, "You'd have to be suicidal to let your company depend on a guy likeDuchaineau." When it was pointed out to Ken that his company did depend on thatThird Generation hacker, Ken Williams admitted that that was the case.This came into sharp focus at the annual Applefest in San Francisco. One of thehighlights of that big weekend event, a bazaar in which all the companies sellingproducts for the Apple would display and sell their wares, was to be theintroduction of a long-awaited and ornately augmented sequel to one of the bestlovedApple games of all time, "Ultima." In a tremendous coup, On-Line Systemshad landed the game and its mercurial author, who wrote under the pseudonym ofLord British.The original Ultima was a fantasy role-playing game where the player created acharacter, assigned certain "attribute points" in areas of durability, wisdom,intelligence, dexterity, and strength, and, traveling about a mysterious planet,searched dungeons and towers, went to villages for supplies and helpful gossip,and fought elves, warriors, and wizards. Even though the game was written inBASIC and ran rather slowly, it was a masterful feat of imagination, and was an

Apple bestseller. But when Lord British prepared his sequel, he let it be knownthat he wished to leave his current publisher who, he said, was not paying him allhis royalties.He was deluged with offers from software houses. Though he was only twenty atthe time, Lord British was no stranger to pressure situations: his real name wasRichard Garriott, and he was the son of Skylab astronaut Owen K. Garriott. He'dknown and enjoyed the reflected limelight of his father's fame, especially when hisSkylab 2 was aloft and the family seemed the focus of the world's attention.Richard had grown up in the engineering-intensive Nassau Bay area of Houston,and had gotten into computers in high school, where he convinced his teachers toallow him to take private classes in programming. His curriculum was writinggames.In many respects, he was a well-adjusted all-American boy. On the other hand, hewould stay up all night on the Apple Computer in his bedroom. "Once the suncame up I'd realize how late it was and crash right there on the spot," he laterexplained. He had long held an interest in fantasy role-playing games, and wasparticularly fascinated by medieval culture, belonging to a club called the Societyof Creative Anachronisms. While a freshman at the University of Texas, he joinedthe fencing team, but was really much more into swashbuckling free-swinging,climbing-on-table, Errol Flynn-style sword-fighting. He wanted to merge his twointerests, and attempted to make a computer game that would do it. After writingfor months, he completed his twenty-eighth game and named it "Alkabeth," andwas astounded when a publisher who happened to see one of the copies thatRichard sent to friends for free offered to publish it and send him money. Whynot? He requested the pseudonym Lord British because some kids at a computercamp once teased him that he sounded as if he'd come from England (he didn't).Alkabeth made enough money for several college educations. His next game,Ultima, was more ambitious, and with his six-figure royalties he bought a car,established fat Keogh and IRA accounts, and invested in a Houston restaurant.Now he was considering real estate.Garriott saw his follow-up as something special. He had learned machine languageespecially to write it, and was dizzy with the new power it gave him: he felt that itenabled him to see the memory, the microprocessor, the video circuitry ... youunderstood what each bit did and where the data lines went. And the speed it gaveyou was incredible. Only with this power could he bring Ultima 2 to fruition.Because, in Ultima 2, Richard Garriott was writing a true epic, one that enabledthe player to do more than any player of a computer game had ever done before.He insisted that some of these abilities be listed in the box in which the programwas sold:

●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●Seize ShipsHijack AirplanesTravel Throughout the Solar SystemClash with Innocent BystandersBe Pursued by KGB AgentsGet Accosted in Dark AlleysBattle Pirates on the Open SeaBe Seduced in a BarDine at Your Favorite RestaurantMeet Prominent People Within the Computer IndustryCast Magical Spells at Evil CreaturesVisit the Castle of Lord BritishExplore Deep Dark Deadly DungeonsBurglarize MerchantsSlay Vicious CreaturesCharge Through Impenetrable Forces andGrow to Wield the Most Powerful Magic Known to ManGarriott had embodied the metaphor of the computer creating and populating aprivate universe into a game which allowed the player to live in the world of LordBritish's imagination. Moving the character that you created by designatingpersonality traits, you gained powers, tools, transportation craft, weapons ... andamong the murderous Ores and evil wizards, you might also chance uponcharacters based on real people, many of them friends of Richard Garriott'scharacters who, in keeping with their real personalities, would give you crypticinformation that helped to solve the riddle.Richard Garriott might have displayed Joycean ambition and intricacy, but headmittedly lacked literary skills: "I can't spell, have no grammar techniques, andhave read less than twenty-five books in my life." This embarrassed him at first,but now he told himself that the computer was a viable artistic form. And inpeddling Ultima 2 to a new publisher, his prime concern, besides a nonnegotiable30 percent royalty rate, was that the package and marketing be artisticallyconsistent with the virtuoso computer program contained therein. This wouldrequire a large, professionally illustrated box, a cloth map of the universe withlines designating time warps, special cardboard cards holding the dozens ofcommands available to players, and an elaborate, oversized manual in which eachof the sixteen pages resembled a faded sheepskin document.None of these demands discouraged software publishers from attempting to signthis most bankable of hackers. Ken Williams pursued him relentlessly, smelling

estseller. After flying the young author to Oakhurst, he agreed to all of LordBritish's demands, even the 30 percent royalty. Ken Williams wanted him to signthen and there, and, Garriott later said, "got all huffy at the fact that I wasn't goingto sign anything [that day]." But after he returned to Texas, Garriott did sign. "Icouldn't see a reason not to."Now, after months of delay, some due to an unexpectedly long debugging period(there has never been an unexpectedly short debugging period in the history ofcomputers), some due to the fact that the cloth maps were ordered from a firm inIran, which was suddenly closed off to American commerce after the hostagecrisis, the program was complete.Garriott had the game in hand at Applefest; festooned in gold chains and a suedeand-leathertunic, the tall, brown-haired, angular-featured Texan drew crowds tothe On-Line booth as he unveiled his masterpiece. The people could not believetheir good fortune as they gathered around the twenty-one-year-old Garriott, whowas casually demonstrating how they might find occasion in Ultima 2 to travel toPluto. This is the guy who wrote Ultima! Back orders for the $59.95 programnumbered in the tens of thousands;Richard Garriott expected the first royalty check for Ultima 2 to be bigger than thesum of checks he had previously collected for game authorship. He would havebeen a very happy young man, except for this one problem that was preventingUltima 2 from being released that very weekend. The problem was MarkDuchaineau. He had not copy-protected the program, and it was not clear that hewould.The Dungeonmaster had insisted to Dick Sunderland that his Spiradisk systemwould work perfectly on Ultima 2, speeding up the loading time, and substantiallyslowing down the pirate network eagerly awaiting the challenge of breaking it. Hedismissed On-Line's previous Spiradisk problems as insignificant. He hinted thatthere might be some problems copy-protecting the program without Spiradisk.Dick suspected that Mark's arguments were motivated by his eagerness to promoteSpiradisk and to collect the royalty which would be worth over ten thousanddollars on a best-seller like Ultima 2.Richard Garriott, his friend and fellow programmer Chuck Bueche, and On-Line'sproduct manager jointly concluded that Spiradisk would be too risky. DickSunderland called Duchaineau to tell him to copy-protect the old way. But Markwas still evasive.Dick was furious. This odd-looking creature, this twenty-one-year-old

megalomanic Dungeonmaster, living in one of Ken's houses, taking advantage ofOn-Line's reputation to promote his system ... now had the gall to hint to Dick thatthe most lucrative program of the season would not ship because he wanted tocopy-protect his way! As frightening as his threat sounded. Mark, as the sole copyprotectperson, had the power to back it up it would take weeks to bring in areplacement. What was even more frightening was that Mark Duchaineau, if hechose, could withhold his services for On-Line's entire product line! The companycould not release any products without him.Sunderland was at a loss. Ken had not arrived at the Fest. He was still on his wayback from Chicago, where he had attended the convention of pinball and coin-opvideogame manufacturers. Dick did not even have the technical wherewithal tojudge the validity of Duchaineau's claims. So he recruited one of On-Line's youngprogrammers, Chuck Bueche, to go to the long bank of pay phones by the entranceto Applefest and call Duchaineau not letting on that it was at Dick's behest, ofcourse and get a grasp of the technicalities involved. It wouldn't hurt, either, if theprogrammer softened the Dungeonmaster's hard line.Indeed, though Bueche was an uneasy double agent, the call seemed to break thelogjam. Perhaps what made Duchaineau relent was that the call reminded him hewas slowing down a process that would eventually allow users to benefit from afellow programmer's triumph Mark Duchaineau was in the awkward role of ahacker trying to stop another hacker's worthy program from getting out. In anycase, he agreed to copy-protect the product, though when Ken Williams found outabout the incident, his regard for the hacker Mark Duchaineau sank even lower.He later vowed to run Duchaineau out of Oakhurst in tar and feathers as soon asOn-Line could figure out how to replace him.For two years, the Applefest show had been the prime gathering of the AppleWorld companies like On-Line, Sirius, Br0derbund, and dozens of suppliers ofsoftware, add-on boards, and peripherals that ran on the Apple. It was a time tocelebrate the machine that had given the Brotherhood its livelihood andinspiration, and the companies were more than happy to entertain the thousands ofApple owners eagerly immersing themselves in a sea of arcade games, printerbuffers, disk drives, programming guides, joysticks, RAM cards, RGB monitors,war simulations, and hard-shell computer carrying cases. It was a time to renewthe bonds within the Brotherhood, to seek new programmers, to write up orders, tolet people see who you were and how you were running your own show.But the 1982 San Francisco Applefest would turn out to be the last of the

important Applefests. For one thing, On-Line and its competitors were nowreleasing programs for several machines; the Apple was no longer dominant. Also,the companies were beginning to see the open-to-users shows as drains on time,energy, and money resources which could be spent on what were becoming theessential shows: the big, trade-only Consumer Electronics Shows in Las Vegasand Chicago. Where the hero was not the hacker, but the man who wrote up sales.Still, the show was packed, one more indication of the economic explosion thathad come to computers. Amid Applefest's din of shuffling feet, voices, andelectronic game noises, what emerged was a melody of unprecedented prosperity.Almost everywhere you turned there were millionaires manning booths,millionaires who only two years ago were mired in obscure and unprofitableactivities. Then there were the start-ups, with smaller booths or with no booths atall, dreamers drawn by the thrilling, aphrodisiac scent emanating from the AppleWorld and the related world of home computers.That smell of success was driving people batty. People idly swapped unbelievablestories, with even the most startling high-tech Horatio Alger saga effortlesslytopped by a more startling example of the boom. It was a gold rush, but it was alsotrue that the minimum buy-in for serious prospectors was a more formidable sumthan it had been when Ken Williams began. Venture capital was a necessity,obtained from the men in pinstripe suits who dined at the mediocre Frenchrestaurants in the Valley, uttered In-Pursuit-Of-Excellence koans at industryseminars ("Marketing, Marketing, Marketing"), and solemnly referred tothemselves as "risk-takers." These were intolerable people, carpetbaggers of thehacker dream, but if you could get them to wink at you, the rewards could beendless. No one knew this better than the people at the Applefest who wereworking to start a company called Electronic Arts. Their idea was to bypass whatthey regarded as the already old-fashioned practices of the companies in theBrotherhood, and establish a firm that was even newer than New Age. A companythat took software into another realm entirely.Electronic Arts had denned its mission in a little booklet directed to "softwareartists" they were trying to lure away from their current publishers. Thisprospectus sounded like something penned by an ad copywriter who hadsuccessfully merged the sensibilities of three-piece suits and top-grade Hawaiiandope. It was loaded with one-sentence paragraphs which contained words like"excitement," "vision," and "nontraditional." Its true brilliance lay in the focus ofits appeal aimed directly at the hacker heart of its readers. Electronic Arts knewbetter than to whip up the greed factor by promising hackers enough royalties tobuy cherry-red Trans-Ams and Caribbean trysts with hot-blooded softwaregroupies. It confided instead: "We believe that innovative authors are more likelyto come from people who are independent and won't work in a software 'factory'

or 'bureaucracy.'" It promised to develop fantastic and powerful tools and utilitiesthat would be available to EA authors. It vowed to maintain the kind of personalvalues that hackers appreciate more than money. What this would result in was "agreat software company." The implication was that as far as creative, honest,foward-thinking programmers with hacker values were concerned, there was atpresent no such company.Electronic Arts was the brainchild of Trip Hawkins, who had quit his job asApple's director of marketing for the LISA project to do this. He started thecompany out of an extra room in the office of a venture capital firm. Hawkinsbrought together a team from Apple, Atari, Xerox PARC, and VisiCorp, and, in acoup sure to charm the heart of any hacker, got Steve Wozniak to agree to sit onthe board of directors.Electronic Arts had no booth at the Applefest, but its presence was felt. It hosted abig party on opening night, and its people worked the show floor like politicians.One of them, a former Apple executive named Pat Mariott, a tall, thin, blondwoman with huge round glasses and a deep tan, was enthusiastically explainingthe company to a reporter. Trip started Electronic Arts, she said, because he sawhow fast the business was starting to happen and he "didn't want to miss thewindow." Pat went with him because she saw it as an opportunity to have fun and,not incidentally, make money."I want to get rich, by the way," she said, explaining how, in Silicon Valley,wealth was omnipresent. Everywhere you looked you saw its artifacts: BMWs,stock options, and, though she didn't mention it, cocaine in snowdrift quantities.This was not your garden-variety, hundred-thousand-dollar-a-year wealth, eitherthis was Croesus Mode, where floating-point arithmetic was barely sufficient tocount the millions. When you saw your friends come into it, you thought, Why notme? So when a window into wealth opened, you naturally leapt through it. Therehas never been a window as inviting as that of the software industry. Pat Mariottsummed it up in a whisper, quoting gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson: "Whenthe going gets weird, the weird turn pro."Pat Mariott hoped to kick into Croesus Mode without compromising her sixtiesshapedpersonal values. She would never, for instance, work for a cutthroatcompany. Pat had been a programmer herself, experiencing hacker culture atBerkeley and the professional milieu at evil IBM. "Berkeley was truth and beauty.IBM was power and money. I wanted both," she said. Electronic Arts seemed theway. The products and philosophy of the company would be troth and beauty, andthe company founders would all be powerful and rich. And the programmers, whowould be treated with the respect they deserved as the artists of the computer age,would be elevated to the status of rock or movie stars.

This message managed to find its way around the Applefest, enough so knots ofprogrammers began gathering outside the Convention Hall for the buses thatsupposedly would take them to the Stanford Court Hotel, where Electronic Artswas throwing its big party. One odd group included, among others, several On-Line programmers and John "Captain Crunch" Draper.John Draper, whose dark stringy hair was flying out in all directions, had donewell by himself. During his stint in prison after he was caught using the Applephone interface as a blue box, he had written a word-processing program called"Easy Writer," which made him a considerable sum. Amazingly, when IBMsought a program to issue as its official word processor, it chose Easy Writer; thecompany that published Draper's program had the good sense to act asintermediary with IBM, not letting on that the w program's author was thenotorious Captain Crunch. Reputedly, Draper had made a million dollars from thetransaction. You wouldn't have known it from his faded jeans, his old polo shirt,and his apparent need for dental work. Mark Duchaineau regarded him with amixture of awe and repulsion as the former phone hacker harangued him aboutsome technical aspect of the IBM PC.Soon, they gave up on the bus and hailed a cab. The cab driver made the mistakeof smoking. John Draper almost ripped the cigarette out the driver's mouth,demanding at the top of his lungs that all the cab windows be opened in the chilly,damp November night of San Francisco.The hotel was quite fancy, and the hackers, in jeans and sneakers, seemedintimidated. Electronic Arts had prepared for them, though: along with a rock bandplaying dance music, the company had rented over a dozen stand-up, coinoperatedvideogames, adjusted to give unlimited free games. This was where thehackers immediately headed. As the party heated up, it was apparent that many ofthe industry's biggest authors had appeared, some to check things out, othersgenuinely interested in this newer-than-new-age venture.The center of attention, though, was EA board member Steve Wozniak, cited in aseries of speeches as "the man who started it all." It was an epithet that would havehaunted some young genius eager to shake the past and get on to newer things, butWozniak seemed to revel in it; for over a year now he had been traveling aroundthe country to industry gatherings, accepting the same accolades. He had spent aconsiderable portion of his Croesus Mode bankroll on presenting massive rockfestivals. He still fervently believed in the Hacker Ethic, and wherever he went henot only preached that gospel but set himself as an example of it. Tonight, forinstance, he preached to a small group on the evils of secrecy, using Apple's

current policy as a prime example. The secrecy and the stifling bureaucracy therewere such that he was not sure if he would ever return to the company built on hisbrainchild, the Apple II.All in all, the party was a success, crackling with the sweet feeling that everybodywas riding on the crest of a tidal wave. Were things like this in the early days ofHollywood? In the record industry in the sixties? The future stood at their feet, ablend of hackerism and untold wealth, and the aggregate impression was thathistory was being made right there.The On-Line hackers left impressed. Some would sign with Electronic Arts in thefollowing months. And one of the hackers left with a particularly satisfied grin hehad scored the high totals on Pac-Man, Robotron, and Donkey Kong. For abestselling author, a night to remember.Ken Williams arrived at Applefest in a bad mood. The pinball manufacturers'convention in Chicago had been frustrating; giant companies, particularly Atari,had thrown truckloads of money at the coin-op manufacturers to nail down firstrights of refusal for the home computer version of any game that was even vaguelyplayable. A repeat ofFrogger, which Ken had procured for a mere 10 percentroyalty fee, was out of the question.Ken, traveling with Roberta, went straight to his company's Applefest display. On-Line had taken a huge booth, situated right at the entrance, by the escalators whichwould carry the masses down into the underground Brooks Hall complex. Thebooth featured a giant photo mural of a Sierra waterfall, emphasizing the namechange from On-Line Systems. The booth also had plenty of computer-joystickmonitorcombinations embedded within panels so that the hordes of computerfreakyoungsters could play the latest Sierra On-Line games. The monitors wereset into the panels well above eye level, so spectators could easily appreciate howdeftly crafted the games were. And to draw customers to the booth, a hugeprojection-screen color television was hooked up to a computer whichcontinuously played the best-selling On-Line game, Progger. Since the Appleversion did not have the continuous music and arcade-level graphics of JohnHarris' Atari version, On-Line employees discreetly hid an Atari 800 computerunderneath a drape, and was running that version at the Applefest: the equivalentof displaying a Japanese car at a General Motors exhibition. With all those crowds,all that hoopla, who would notice?Two people who noticed were Al and Margot Tommervik, publishers of Softalk.

They noticed right away because Frogger was not just another On-Line program tothem. It represented a depressing turn of events. Like everyone who had seen JohnHarris' brilliant conversion, they had been awed and delighted when they saw itearlier that year. But when they viewed the Apple counterpart soon after, theywere shocked. It was awful. To Al and Margot, the miserable graphics in thisversion of Frogger represented at best an error, and at worst an absolute betrayal ofthe Apple market, which had nurtured On-Line in the first place.The Apple World was a spiritual preserve to the Tommerviks, and it seemed thatby making an inferior Apple Frogger, On-Line had contemptuously spit on thefloor of this exalted preserve. Obviously, Al and Margot owed it to the rest of theApple World to do something they rarely did in their magazine: give a game anegative review. The reviewer they assigned agreed with the Tommerviks, andwrote a scathing description of the game: "It has about as much soul as month-oldlettuce in the Sahara," he wrote. "Your frog resembles a chess pawn with vestigialwings ... the logs on the river look like they just escaped from an Oscar Meyerfactory..."The reviewer did not stop there. He asked what had become of the company whichonce stood as a "bastion of quality in a sea of mediocrity." While giving Atariowners a great program, On-Line was giving Apple owners "a slap in the face."Serious stuff, cutting to the heart of the Hacker Ethic, which instructs you to keepworking until your hack tops previous efforts. "Have they forsaken us?" the reviewasked of On-Line.Since Margot and Al had been so close to Ken and Roberta, they tried to explainthe review to their friends before it appeared in the December Softalk. But theyhad difficulty reaching Ken or Roberta. The lines of bureaucracy were hardeningat On-Line; no longer would one of the Williamses be picking up the phone. You'dget a receptionist, who would connect yon to a secretary, who would take yourname and your company's number and tell you someone would return your call. Ifyou were lucky. Finally, Al reached Ken's brother John, who said there werereasons the game looked the way it did ... but these reasons were never presentedto the Tommerviks. People at On-Line were too swept up in management battlesto explain.Al and Margot had carried early copies of the magazine to Applefest with them.Seeing On-Line's devious trick with the Atari Frogger only confirmed their beliefthat the review was a righteous one. They figured that after talking to Ken andRoberta, things would be amicably settled. Weren't they all in this for the samething? To maintain the fantastic humanistic momentum of Apple World? Youcouldn't let a disagreement like Frogger affect an important mission like that.

When someone at On-Line's booth gave Ken a copy of the new Softalk, he turnedimmediately to the Frogger review. Roberta read over his shoulder. They hadknown the review would be negative, and more or less expected some criticism ofthe game's graphics, though not in such scathing language. But they had no ideathat the review would go on to question whether the company, by releasing such agreat Atari version of Frogger and such a pitiful Apple version, had sold out theApple World. "Either Frogger is a mistake or a betrayal," the review concluded."You'll have to make up your own mind.""This goes way beyond what's fair," Ken said. For one thing, he said, Softalk didnot realize how difficult it was to do the game on the Apple as compared to theAtari. The Tommervicks had apparently chosen to attack the company all after theWilliamses had helped get the magazine off the ground when the Brotherhood wasjust forming. Roberta thought that this confrontation had been brewing for a while:for some reason Softalk seemed always to give On-Line short shrift. But everytime Roberta asked the Tommervicks if anything was wrong, they said things werefine."They don't want us in that magazine," Roberta told Ken. "We should pull ourads."It was another sign that the Brotherhood was not inviolate. Things were biggernow than personal friendships. Now that the companies of the Brotherhood weremore like Real World businesses, they were competing among themselves. TheWilliamses rarely spoke to people at Br0derbund or Sirius, and never swappedsecrets anymore. Jerry Jewell later summed it up: "We used to socialize a lot withBr0derbund and On-Line ... now the attitude is that if you invite competitors toparties, all they're going to do is dig up as much dirt about you as they can and tryto hire your programmers away. [Socializing] gets less and less possible as thebusiness gets more and more cutthroat. You want your competitors to know lessand less what you're doing." It was something you had to accept.Ken touched on this briefly when he ran into Doug Carlston on the show floor.Doug seemed to have changed the least he was as sincere and open as he alwayswas, the sanest in the Brotherhood. Both agreed that they should get togethermore, as they had in the old days, one year ago. They discussed new competition,including one new company which was entering the market with $8 million incapital. "That makes us look like toys," said Carlston. "We got a million [inventure capital]. You got ..." "A million two," said Ken. "You gave up more. Wegave up 25 percent." "No, we gave up 24."They talked about Sirius Software's no-show at the Applefest another indication

that the action was switching to trade-only shows. Ken thought that Jerry Jewell'spush to mass-market cartridges was a good one. "He'll be richer than all of us," hepredicted.Doug smiled. "I don't care if everybody else gets rich ... as long as I do.""I don't care if anybody gets rich," said Ken, "as long as I get richer."Ken tried to throw himself into the spirit of the show, and took Roberta, lookingchic in designer jeans, high boots, and a black beret, on a quick tour of thedisplays. Ken was a natural schmoozer, and at almost every booth he wasrecognized and greeted warmly. He asked about half a dozen young programmersto come up to Oakhurst and get rich hacking for On-Line.Though they took pains to avoid the Softalk booth, the Williamses did run intoMargot Tommervik. After an awkward greeting, she asked Ken if he'd seen the"Dark Crystal" cover."All I saw was the Frogger review," he said. Pause. "I thought it was kinda nasty."Margot hugged him to show no hard feelings. "Oh Ken, the game was crummy,"she said. "We did it because we love you. Because your stuff is so much betterthan that. We expect more of you.""Well," said Ken, smiling through his teeth, "didn't you think it went beyond thegame? It said all kinds of things about our company."Margot would not hear about it. The Williamses, though, did not consider thatmatter closed. To them, it was one more case of how people changed when thingsgot big.That night On-Line hosted a dinner at an Italian restaurant at North Beach. Kenhad been talking for weeks about the potential for a good, old-fashioned night ofOn-Line rowdiness, but though everybody was in a celebratory mood, the affairnever took off. Maybe because only two programmers were invited RichardGarriott and Chuck Bueche and the rest of the people were older, many of themmired in the mind-frame of sales, accounting, and marketing. There were the usualrepeated toasts, and of course there was the Steel peppermint schnapps large swigsof it from a bottle with a metal drink-pourer attached. Many of the toasts weredirected to the guest of honor, Steve Wozniak. Ken had run into him thatafternoon, and to Ken's delight the legendary hacker had accepted the belatedinvitation to dinner. Ken Williams made a point of telling Woz about his prize

possession, the most cherished tie he had to the spirit of the liberating age of thehome computer: an original Apple I motherboard. Ken loved that hunk of epoxyand silicon; it meant something to him that Woz himself had hand-wired it in agarage, back in the Pleistocene era of 1976. Woz never tired of hearing aboutHomebrew days, and he appreciated Ken's compliment. Wozniak smiled widely ashe was toasted, this time by Dick Sunderland. The Steel went around once more.For Woz, though, the highlight of the evening was meeting Lord British. Monthsafterward, he was still talking about how excited he'd been to talk to such a genius.Dinner was followed by a hectic trip to a disco in the Transamer-ica building.After all that reveling, Ken and Roberta were exhausted by the time they returnedto their hotel. An emergency call awaited them. There had been a fire in the A-frame wooden home on Mudge Ranch Road. Only the heroism of a baby-sitter hadsaved their two sons. The house, though, was severely damaged. Ken and Robertademanded to speak to their children to make sure they were safe, and immediatelydrove home.It was daylight by the time they arrived at the site where their house once stood.The children were safe, everything seemed covered by insurance, and theWilliamses had planned to move anyway the following year, to the palatial homecurrently under construction. The fire was not the catastrophe it might have been.Ken Williams had only one lingering sorrow: the loss of a certain irreplaceablematerial item in the home, an artifact that meant something to him far beyond itsraw utility. The fire had consumed Ken's Apple I motherboard, his link to theidealistic beginning of the humanistic era of computers. It was somewhere in therubble, damaged beyond repair, never to be found.

20Wizard vs. WizardsIN December of 1982, Tom Tatum, lanky, dark-haired, mous-tached, and as coolas his lazy Southern drawl implied, stood at the ballroom podium of the Las VegasSands. Behind him, sitting uncomfortably on a row of chairs, were ten hackers.Tom Tatum, former lawyer, lobbyist, and Carter campaign aide, now a leadingpurveyor of video "docusports" programming, thought he had ser-endipitouslylatched on to a jackpot bigger than that of any slot machine in the casino onlyyards away from where he stood."This is the event where Hollywood meets the Computer Age," said Tom Tatum tothe crowd of reporters and computer tradespeople in town for the Comdex show."The ultra-contest of the eighties."Tom Tatum's creation was called "Wizard vs. Wizards." It was to be a televisioncontest where game designers play each other's games for a set of prizes. Tatumhad gathered programmers from companies like On-Line and Sirius because hesensed the arrival of a new kind of hero, one who fought with brains instead ofmuscle, one who represented America's bold willingness to stay ahead of the restof the world in the technological battle of supremacy: the hacker.Unlike Tom Tatum's previous sports productions, which included the 1981 MauiWindsurfing Grand Prix and the Telluride Aerobatics Invitational, this "Wizard vs.Wizards" had the potential to draw a new audience to the docusports genre. "Onlya small percentage of the population will own a Super Cross bike," he laterexplained. "But when you look at people computing at home, it's awesome."Obviously, the contests people cared about were now occurring in arcades and infront of Apple computers. Imagine how many would tune in to see pros compete.What's more, as Tatum put it, "the sizzle in this show is the double whammy" ofthe authors themselves those weird, sci-fi computer guys competing against eachother."These are the new stars!" said Tom Tatum in Las Vegas, but the new stars

seemed ill at ease being paraded on a Las Vegas stage like so many misshapenMiss Universe contenders. The beauty in hack-erism was Taoistic and internal,blindingly impressive when one could perceive the daring blend of idealism andcerebration, but less than compelling when presented as a chorus line in a LasVegas ballroom. The hacker smiles were wooden, their suits ill-fitting (though afew were wearing specially made though still ill-fitting athletic warm-up suits).Even the most obtuse observer could divine that most of them would rather behome hacking. But with mixed motivations of curiosity, pressure from theirpublishers, a desire to spend a few days in Vegas, and, yes, vanity, they had cometo the Sands to compete in the hottest thing Tom Tatum had ever done, with thepossible exception, he later conceded, of the Miller High Life Super Cross Finals.The contest would include hackers from seven companies. Jerry Jewell was on thescene with Sirius' two most awesome arcaders. On-Line would arrive tomorrow.After the presentation, Jewell bragged to one of the competitors that one of hismen might well be the world's best videogamer. "I've seen him play Robotron forfour hours," he said.The hacker was not intimidated. "You see this?" he replied in a shrieky voice,holding his hand out. "This is my Robotron blister. I usually stop after an hourbecause my hands are so sensitive."Later, in his hotel room, Jewell watched as his hackers practiced the gamesscheduled for the competition. Jewell was exultant about his company's deal withTwentieth-Century Fox Games. The VCS cartridges his programmers nowdesigned were widely distributed and heavily marketed by Fox; his was the firstcompany of the Brotherhood to have its games advertised on television, anddistributed in mass-market outlets. "It's one thing to see your Apple product on thewall of a computer store," Jerry Jewell was saying, "but when you see a rack ofyour stuff in K-Mart, you know you've arrived."Ken Williams arrived in Las Vegas in time for a pre-contest meeting that Tatumheld for the twelve contestants and their sponsors. Having bounced back quicklyfrom the fire, Williams was ready to be the only competitor in the show who wasactually a publisher. He and the others drew chairs in a semicircle to hear Tatumdescribe the rules."This is a new kind of contest," Tom Tatum addressed the group. "It wouldn'thappen except for television. It is created for television. The rules have beendeveloped for television." He explained that two sets of conflicting values wereinvolved in this new kind of contest: Value One was the urge for an honest, faircompetition, and Value Two was the need to do everything possible to make

things look good on television. Tatum said that both values were important, butwhenever the two values conflicted he would choose Value Two.Then Tatum described the image with which the show would begin: a shot of thenighttime Las Vegas neon strip with a wizard symbol of the hacker looming overit, bolts of lightning streaming from his fingertips. An omnipotent New Age icon.This image seemed to impress the computer people, as did the picture Tom Tatumdrew of the benefits of competing in a television event. It might boost them,Tatum said, to the status of household names. "Once this show hits and othershows start to happen, things will start to happen," Tatum said. "You can earnincome from other sources, like advertising products."On the morning of the television show, before the cameras were turned on, themeager audience in the Sands Ballroom was able to witness something that ten ortwenty years before would have been considered beyond the imagination ofHeinlein, Bradbury, or even MIT's resident visionary Ed Predkiif Makeupspecialists casually were applying pancake makeup to the faces of antsy youngcomputer programmers. The age of the media hacker had begun.Tom Tatum had hired a soap opera actress, coined to kill and armed with a toothpolishsmile, to host the show. She had trouble with her opening line about howthis was the first time in interga-lactic history that the world's computer wizardsand techno-ge-niuses had gathered to compete; it took fifteen iterations before atake. Only then did the competition begin, and only then was it woefully clear howboring it was to watch a bunch of hackers sitting at long tables, joysticks betweentheir legs, each with one sneakered foot curled under the chair and the other footextended under the table, jaw slightly slack, and eyes dully planted on the screen.Unlike more compelling forms of video competition, the programmers wereundemonstrative when clearing a screen of aliens or getting wiped out by anavenging pulsar ray. Discerning spectators had to watch very carefully forgrimaces or for squinty frustration to tell when a wrong move ended in a videoexplosion. When players were confonted with the despised GAME OVER signalbefore the five-minute time limit was reached, they would sadly raise a hand soone of the judges would take note of the score. A lackluster agony of defeat.Tatum figured that this videogenic deficiency would be remedied by quick cutting,shots of the computer screens, and pithy interviews with the silicon gladiators. Theinterviews generally went like the one that the soap opera star conducted withSirius' nineteen-year-old Dan Thompson, who quickly established himself as afront-runner.

SOAP OPERA STAR: How does it feel to have such a commanding lead goinginto the semi-finals?THOMPSON (shrugs): Great, I guess.Cut! Can we do this one again? The second time, Dan did not shrug. Once more,please? By now, Dan Thompson's digital logic and problem-solving technique hadbeen applied to the puzzle. As soon as the question left the soap opera star'smouth, he leaned to the mike, eyes to the camera."Well, it feels wonderful. I just hope I can continue this..." He had synthesized thesuperficialities ofjockspeak.Thompson, beneficiary of hours of joysticking at a Chuck E. Cheese Pizza TimeTheatre in Sacramento, won the contest. Ken Williams had performed admirably,considering he barely had a chance to look at some of the games before he playedthem; the fact that he placed sixth overall was testament to his ability to instantlyget to the heart of a computer game, and the fact that at twenty-eight he still hadsome reflexes left.In Tatum's suite that night, the video impresario was beside himself. "I think we'veseen the most revolutionary television event in years," he said. He predicted thatthese hackers would capture the imagination of America athletes who don't take aphysical beating, but emanate a transfixing intensity. He raised his liquor glass tothe future of the hacker as the new American hero.One On-Line programmer who had shown signs of becoming a media hero wasBob Davis, the former alcoholic whom Ken Williams had elevated to the status ofgame author and considered a best friend. Williams had co-written with Davis theadventure game Ulysses and the Golden Fleece, and the closing lines of MargotTommervik's Softalk review read like a triumphal justification of Ken Williams'decision to go into partnership with the computer to change the world:On-Line Systems has two new winners in "Ulysses": The adventure, which is thebest from On-Line since "Wizard and the Princess"; and Bob Davis, a new authorfrom whom we hope we'll be seeing many new adventures.The package Sierra On-Line sent to entice prospective authors included an openletter from Bob Davis, who told of his experience of being "bitten by the computerbug," seeing his game go through a painless production process, and receivingroyalties, "more than ample and always on time." Davis concluded by writing: "So

now I just spend my time skiing the slopes of Lake Tahoe, watching my videorecorder, driving my new car and living quite comfortably in my new threebedroomhouse. I strongly suggest you do the same."Yet not long after Ken's return from Las Vegas, Bob Davis could not be reached atthe ski slopes, behind the wheel of his car, or in his new home. He was receivingvisitors only at the Fresno County jail. Davis wore a scuffed red prison jumpsuitand a haunted look. He had long, bright red hair, an unkempt red beard, and worrylines in his face that made him seem older than his twenty-eight years. Since theglass between prisoner and visitor was thick, his discussions were conductedthrough telephone receivers at either side of the glass.Bob Davis had not received many visitors in his few weeks in jail. He had beentrying to get Ken Williams to bail him out, so far unsuccessfully. He had gonefrom alcoholic to software superstar to drug-addicted convict, all in months. Hehad thought the computer would deliver him. But the computer had not beenenough.For a high school dropout turned boozer who secretly liked logic puzzles,programming had been a revelation. Davis found that he could get so deeply into itthat he didn't need to drink any more. His fortunes in the company rose as heheaded the Time Zone project, co-wrote his adventure game, and began to leamassembly language for the confounding VCS machine. But just as suddenly as hislife had changed for the better, it began to fall apart."I have a little bit of trouble handling success," he said. The heady feeling he gotfrom a being a bestselling software author made him think he could handle thekinds of drugs that had previously made his life miserable.There had been drugs around On-Line, but Bob Davis could not indulge with themoderation that others managed. It affected his work. Trying to leam VCS codewas hard enough. But Davis' quick success with Ulysses, written in Ken Williams'relatively simple Adventure Development Language, had geared him to instantprogramming gratification, and he became frustrated. "I tried to make up excuses,"Davis later said. "[I said] On-Line was becoming too corporate for me." He quit,figuring he'd write games on his own and live on royalties.He had been working on a VCS game, but despite hours of trying to get somemovement on the screen, he couldn't. Though Ken Williams realized that Bob wasthe kind of person who got his breakthroughs only when someone guided him "Ifsomeone's there, he'll be there [working] till 4 A.M.," Ken once commented Kencould not take the time to help his friend. Davis would try to reach Ken and tell

him how unhappy he was, but Ken was often out of town. Bob would take morecoke, shooting it directly into his veins. At odds with his wife, he would leave thehouse when shot up, all the time yearning to be home, back in the new, computercenteredlife he had begun: the kind of software superstar life he had talked aboutin that first-person testimonial that On-Line was still including in the package sentto prospective authors.Bob Davis would return home late at night, find his wife gone, and begin callingeveryone he knew at On-Line, all the programmers' houses, places where he knewshe couldn't possibly be, in hopes someone might know where she was. Evenstrangers who answered the phone would hear his plaintive voice, scraped to barebones of panic. "Have you seen my wife?" No, Bob. "Do you know where shemight be?" I haven't seen her, Bob. "It's very late, and she isn't home, and I'm veryworried." I'm sure she'll come home. "I hope she's all right," Bob would say,choking back sobs. "No one will tell me where she is." Everyone felt horribleabout Bob Davis. It was one of the first things that tipped off Dick Sunderland thatOn-Line was not just another company in just another industry: the very nightDick was hired, Davis was out on one of his Oakhurst crawls. Here was this ghost,this haunting blight of the computer dream, this golden opportunity missed. Likean unrelenting conscience, Bob Davis would plague his former friends with calls,often begging for money. Programmer and Jehovah's Witness Warren Schwader,who had liked Bob despite his frequent swearing and smoking, once offered to payhis mortgage bill directly, and Bob, wanting cash instead, slammed down thephone ... but later convinced Warren to lend him a thousand dollars.Like everybody else, Schwader wanted to believe that Bob Davis could come backto the computer and program his way out of his drug-ridden whirlpool. Eventuallythey all gave up. People like steady programmer Jeff Stephenson, who tried toenroll Bob in an AA program, got disgusted when Bob began passing bad checks."My habit ran from three hundred to nine hundred dollars a day," Davis laterexplained. "I wound up driving my wife out. I tried to kick the habit twice." Butcouldn't. He asked Dick Sunderland for advances on his royalties, and when Dickrefused, he offered to sell his future royalties "for a pittance," Sunderland latersaid. But soon Davis' royalties were going straight to the bank to pay off pastdebts. He was selling the furniture to get more money for drugs. Finally, he soldhis Apple computer, the instrument of magic that had made him into somebody.It was a relief to the people at On-Line when Bob Davis wound up in jail. Arrestedat a motel. People assumed the charge was passing bad checks, but Davis himselfsaid it was for cocaine, and that he'd pled guilty. He wanted to get into a drugrehabilitation program to start over again. He'd been trying to get a message toKen, but Ken figured that Bob Davis was better off in jail, where he might shakethe habit.

The author of the twelfth bestselling computer game in the country, according toSoftsel's Hot List, spoke into the prison telephone and explained how he'd blownit, how he'd seen the dazzling light the computer gave, basked in it, but could notlive up to it. He was in mid-sentence when the phone went dead and visitors toFresno Jail had to go back into the night. The visitor could make out his words ashe screamed them into the glass before he was led off: "Have Ken call me."Bob Davis' plight exemplified the disarray at Sierra On-Line that winter. On thesurface it seemed a company approaching respectability conglomerates stilltendered buy-out offers, the most recent for $12.5 million plus a $200,000-a-yearcontract for Williams. But underneath the veneer of a growing, thriving enterprisewas nagging doubt. This was heightened by a December 1982 announcement thatAtari's sales figures of videogames had plum-meted. People at On-Line and othercomputer game companies refused to see this as indication that the field was afading fad.Disorganization had only increased with Sierra On-Line's new, unwieldy size. Forinstance, one game which Dick had thought compelling, a multilevel game with amining scenario, had been languishing in the acquisitions department for weeks.The programmer called to make a deal, and by the time Dick managed to trace itspath through the company, the college student who had programmed the game hadgiven up on On-Line and sold the program to Broderbund. Under the name "LodeRunner," the game became a bestseller, named "1983 Game of the Year" by manycritics. The story was an eerie parallel to what had occurred when Ken Williamshad tried to sell Mystery House to Apple less than three years before the youngcomputer company, too muddled in management to move with the lightning-quickresponses that the computer industry demanded, did not get around to expressinginterest until too late. Was Sierra On-Line, still an infant company, already adinosaur?The conflict for control beween Ken Williams and Dick Sunder-land had grownworse. The newer, sales-oriented people supported Dick; most of the earlyemployees and the programmers, though, disliked the president and his secretivemanagement techniques. Feelings toward Ken were mixed. He would speak of On-Line spirit; but then, he would speak of the company "growing up," as if computersoftware was something that required a traditionally run company, replete withbusiness plans and rigid bureaucracy. If this were true, what did this say about thehacker dream of relying on the computer as a model of behavior that wouldimprove and enrich our lives? It was a moral crisis that haunted all of the industry

pioneers who had begun their businesses thinking that the magic technology theyhad to offer would make their businesses special. Mass marketing loomed in frontof them like some omnipotent Tolkienesque ring: could they grab the ring and notbe corrupted? Could whatever idealism existed in their mission be preserved?Could the spirit of hackerism survive the success of the software industry?Ken worried about this: "When I used to work for Dick, I used to bitch aboutworking eight to five [and not in the freewheeling, hacker mode]. Now I want aprogramming staff that works from eight to five. It's like going from being ahippie to being a capitalist or something. I think there's a lot of programmers[here] who feel betrayed. Like John Harris. When he came up, it was open house,my door was open anytime. He could come in, we could talk programmingtechniques. I'd take him places. We never did business with a contract. Didn't needit. If we didn't trust each other, we shouldn't do business together. [Now] that'schanged. I don't know what my goals are anymore. I'm not sure which is the wayto run the company. Somehow, by hiring Dick, I copped out. It's the uncertaintythat bothers me 1 don't know if I'm right or wrong."Inexplicable events kept occurring. Like the incident in the programming office. Ayoung man working overtime drawing computer pictures for the overdue DarkCrystal adventure game, an On-Line employee from nearly the beginning, putdown his graphics tablet one day and began screaming, pounding the walls,pulling down posters, and waving a long knife at the terrified young woman whohad been tracing pictures beside him. Then he grabbed a stuffed toy dog andfuriously stabbed it, tearing it to shreds, its stuffing flying around the tinyworkroom. The programmers in the next room had to stop him, and the young manwaited quietly until he was calmly led away. Explanation: he just lost it, was all.Hacker JeffStephenson, working on the secret IBM project (also behind schedule),expressed the overall frustration: "I don't know who the company is being run for,but it's not the authors, who strike me as the bread and butter of the company. Theattitude is 'So you're John Harris, who needs you?' We do. He'd made a lot ofbucks for this company. But they seem to think that as long as you can get fancypacking and nice labels, it's going to sell."Indeed, John Harris had noticed this trend. The talkative game designer who hadwritten two of the most popular programs in microcomputer history was tornbetween loyalty and disgust at the way the Hacker Ethic was being ignored. Harrishadn't liked the fact that authors' names weren't on the new boxes, and he certainlyhadn't liked it when, after he mentioned this to Dick, Dick replied, "Hold on beforewe do anything, when is your next game for us done?" Quite a change from theSummer Camp days. Harris believed that the times everybody would stop workingand pull pranks like going to Hexagon House and turning everything in the house,

even the furniture, upside down were the best times for On-Line; everybodyworked better and harder for a company that was fun to work for.John Harris was also upset by what he considered the company's retreat from highartistic standards. John took it as a personal offense if the company released agame he felt was brain-damaged in some way. He was absolutely horrified at theAtari and Apple versions of Jawbreaker 2. The fact that the games were officialsequels to his original game design was nettling, but John wouldn't have minded ifhe'd felt the games were superbly executed. But they weren't the smiley faces weretoo big and the ends of the chutes in which the faces moved back and forth wereclosed. John resented the drop in quality. He felt, in fact, that On-Line's newergames in general weren't very good.Perhaps the worst thing of all about On-Line as far as John was concerned was thefact that Ken Williams and his company had never sufficiently genuflected towhat, in John Harris' mind was the undeniable greatness of the Atari 800. He had asavage identification with that machine. John sadly concluded that at On-Line,Atari would always have second billing to the Apple. Even after the Froggerdebacle, when John's Atari version was state-of-the-art and the Apple version wasrelatively a mess, Ken did not seem to take the Atari seriously. This depressedJohn Harris so much that he decided he would have to leave On-Line for acompany which shared his views on the Atari.It was not easy. On-Line had been good to John Harris. He now had a house,respect, reporters from People magazine coming to interview him, a four-wheeldrivetruck, a projection television, a hefty bank account, and, after all thosetravails from Fresno to Club Med, John Harris now had a girlfriend.At a science-fiction convention, he'd run into a girl he'd known casually in SanDiego. She had changed since then "She looked great," John would later recall."She lost weight and had got a nose job." She was now an actress and a bellydancer in Los Angeles. She had even been asked to dance, John explained, at themost prestigious belly dancing location in Hollywood. "In San Diego, she'd alwaysseemed to be with someone else; this time she wasn't. She paid more attention tome than [to] anyone else. We spent nineteen out of the next twenty-four hourstogether." He saw her often after the sci-fi convention; she would stay at his housefor weeks, and he would go to L.A. to see her. They began to talk of marriage. Itwas a happiness that John Harris had never known.He knew that his mentor Ken Williams had been instrumental in bringing aboutthe change in his life. It would seem logical, then, that John Harris, harboringthese deep doubts about the company with which he was so closely identified,

would have taken his objections directly to Ken Williams. But John Harris couldnot bring himself to talk to Ken about how close he was to leaving On-Line. He nolonger trusted Ken. When John would try to explain why he felt cheated by On-Line, Ken would talk about all the money John was making. At one point, Kentold a reporter from People that John was making $300,000 a year, and whenHarris had tried to correct that figure, Ken had embarrassed him by giving John hismost recent royalty check. The four-month check (Harris was paid monthly, butsometimes would not get around to picking it up for a while) was for $160,000.But that wasn't the point; Ken never talked about the money On-Line was makingfrom John Harris' work. Instead of telling Ken this, though, John would just agreewith whatever Ken proposed. He didn't know if it was shyness or insecurity orwhat.So he did not talk to Ken Williams. He visited his new girlfriend and he worked ona new assembler for the Atari and visited the local arcade (setting a high score onthe Stargate machine) and thought up ideas for his next game. And talked to thepeople at Synapse Software, a company which took the Atari 800 seriously.In fact, Synapse was almost exclusively an Atari Home Computer softwarecompany, though it was planning to do conversions to other systems. The gamesSynapse produced were full of action, explosions, shooting, and brilliantlyconceived graphics. John Harris considered them awesome. When he went to visitthem in Berkeley, he was impressed that the programmers were catered to, thatthey swapped utilities and communicated by a company-run computer bulletinboard. When John Harris found out from a Synapse programmer that part of asound routine on one Synapse game had been literally lifted out of the object codefrom a copy of the Frogger disk stolen from John at the Software Expo that theftwhich had plunged John into his deep and painful depression he was less angry atthe violation than he was delighted that a Synapse hacker had gone through hiscode and found something worth appropriating. Synapse promised John that hewould get all the technical support he needed; he could join their community ofprogrammers. And they offered a straight 25 percent royalty. In short, Synapseoffered everything to an Atari hacker that On-Line did not.John agreed to do his next project for Synapse. On-Line's software superstar wasgone.John was sitting in his house wondering how to tell Ken Williams when the phonerang. "Earth," John answered, as usual. It was Ken. John was flustered. "I'mprogramming for Synapse now," he blurted out, in a tone that Ken took to beinsufferably cocky. Ken asked why, and John told him because they were offering25 percent royalty instead of Ken's 20 percent. "That was kind of stupid," Kensaid. But John had many things to say. In a rush, he began to finally say all the

things to Ken about On-Line that he'd been too intimidated to say before. Evenmore things than he'd previously thought of: John later would shudder at thememory of it telling the president of the company which had done so much forhim that the company's products were garbage.John Harris, with all his lost programs, quirky source codes, perfectionist delays,and Atari 800 chauvinism, had been the hacker soul of Sierra On-Line. He hadbeen both the bane of Ken Williams' existence and the symbol of Ken'saccomplishments. His closeness with Ken had been representative of the newbenevolence which companies like On-Line would substitute for the usual chasmsbetween boss and worker. Now John Harris was gone, having delivered a jeremiadon the way On-Line had abandoned its original mission. What he left behind wasFrogger for weeks now the bestselling program on the Softsel Hot List.Far from being shaken by the loss of John Harris, Ken seemed ebullient in theaftermath. It was as if he had not been crowing several months back that JohnHarris' name on an Atari program would sell games. Ken was certain that the ageof the independent game-hacking auteur was over: "I think I have a view ofauthors which is different from authors' views of authors, and I pray I'm right.Which is, the [hackers] I'm dealing with now just happen to be in the right spot atthe right time. John Harris was. He's a mediocre programmer who's not creative atall who happened to be programming Atari at the right time."Instead of a hacker wasting time trying to make a product perfect, Ken preferredless polished programs that shipped on schedule, so he could start building an adcampaign around them. Not like Frogger, which was held up because one day JohnHarris decided he just didn't want to work. "You can't run a business on peoplewho get depressed when their stuff gets stolen. You need people who will deliverwhen they say they will, at the price they say they will, and are able to work theirproblems out by themselves. John Harris wants you to go drinking with him, geton the phone, go to Club Med, get him laid. I'm a real expert on John Harris andhis emotional problems. I wouldn't want to be basing my 1983 game plan andplacing orders for $300,000 in ROM cartridges based on a game John Harris issupposed to deliver. If his girlfriend didn't like him, or said he was bad in bed, he'dbe gone.""If you can do [Frogger] with the silly talent we have in place, imagine what'llhappen when we have a real company in place. We'll be unstoppable. If I go ondepending on guys who could leave me at any minute because somebody'soffering more, or could suddenly quit working one day because their girlfriends

are seeing somebody else, then the company's doomed ultimately. It's just a matterof time. I have to get rid of the crybabies."To Ken, software, the magic, messianic, transmogrifying, new-age tool, had cometo that. Business. Cut off from his own hacker roots, he no longer seemed tounderstand that the hackers did not make decisions based on traditional businessterms, that some hackers would not consider working for companies where theydid not get a warm feeling, that some hackers were reluctant to work forcompanies at all.But then, Ken did not care very much at all what hackers thought. Because he wasthrough with them. Ken was seeking professional programmers, the kind of goalorientedpeople who approached a task as responsible engineers, not prima donnaartistes hung up on getting things perfect and impressing their friends. "Good,solid guys who will deliver," was the way Ken put it. "We'll lose our dependenceon programmers. It's silly to think programmers are creative. Instead of waiting forthe mail to come, for guys like John Harris to design something, we're going to getsome damn good implementers who aren't creative, but good."Ken felt he had already found some latent game wizards who'd been buried incorporate programming jobs. One of these goal-oriented pros Ken recruited was alocal programmer for the phone company. Another was a Southern Californiafamily man in his forties who had worked for years doing government contractsusing digital imagery, he said, "with obvious military implications." Another was arural Idaho vegetarian who lived with his family in a wooden geodesic dome.On Ken went, trying to replace the hackers with professionals. He already deemedthe great experiment taking place in the old office on Route 41, where heattempted to turn novices into assembly-language programmers, an overall loser. Ittook too long to train people, and there was really no one around who had both thetime and the technical virtuosity to be a guru. Finding enough assembly-languageprogrammers was tough, and even a dragnet of headhunters and classified adscould not guarantee the winners Ken needed in the next year. He would needmany, since his 1983 game plan was to release over one hundred products. Fewwould involve original creative efforts. On-Line's programming energy insteadwould go into converting its current games to other machines, especially the lowcost,mass-market, ROM-cartridge-based computers, like the VIC-20, or TexasInstruments. On-Line's expectations were stated in its "strategy outline": "Webelieve the home computer market to be so explosive that 'title saturation' isimpossible. The number of new machines competing for the Apple/Atari segmentin 1983 will create a perpetually new market hungry for the winning 1982 titles.We will exploit this opportunity..."

The company's energy became focused into converting product into other product.It was an approach which stifled the hacker joy of creating new worlds. Ratherthan building on past successes in a quest for brilliant programs, On-Line wastrying to maximize sales by duplicating even moderate successes, often-onrelatively limited machines on which the games looked worse than the originals.Nowhere in the flurry to convert was there provision for rewarding an effort likeHarris' Frogger, which was so artistically accomplished that it hit the market withthe force of an original work.Back at his unkempt electronic split-level, John Harris was philosophizing that"professional" programmers any programmers who didn't have a love for gamingin their hearts and hacker perfectionism in their souls were destined to makesoulless, imperfect games. But Ken Williams was not talking to John Harris, whoafter all was programming for Synapse now. Ken Williams was about to hold ameeting that would put On-Line in contact with a new enterprise one that woulddeliver an entire assembly line of professional programmers to do conversions. Atdirt-cheap prices!It sounded too good to be true, and Ken entered into the meeting with suspicion.His contact in this new venture was a shoulder-length-haired, Peter Lorre-eyedbusinessman named Barry Friedman. Friedman's fortunes had risen along with thecrazily swelling tide of the home computer industry. Originally, he hadrepresented artists who did illustrations for the advertisements and packaging ofOn-Line products, then had branched out to eventually handle all the art work for afew computer companies. From there, he began to service software companieswith all sorts of needs. If you wanted to know where to find the best price forROM cartridges, he could act as middleman to get you cheap ROMs, perhaps fromsome obscure Hong Kong supplier.Lately, he had been hinting of access to tremendous sums of capital to those whoneeded it. The other day, Ken said, Barry had called him up and asked how muchan outsider would need to buy On-Line. Ken pulled a $20 million figure out of theair and hung up. Barry called back that day saying $20 million was fine. Ken, stillnot taking it too seriously, said, "Well, I'd need control, too." Barry called back notlong after, saying that was OK, too. The crazy thing about it was that as dubious asKen was about Barry Friedman and his growing stable of companies (you nevercould be sure which corporate name would be on the business card Barry or hiscolleagues handed you), he always seemed to deliver on his promises. It was as ifBarry Priedman were the beneficiary of some Faustian bargain, Silicon Valleystyle.This new deal sounded the most astonishing of all. Friedman was escorting to the

meeting with Ken Williams the two founders of a start-up company he wasrepresenting. A company that did nothing but conversions. The rates seemedbargain-basement a ten-thousand-dollar fee and a 5 percent royalty. The companywas called "Rich and Rich Synergistic Enterprises," Rich being the first name ofboth the founders.Barry Friedman, wearing a yellow polo shirt, unbuttoned to reveal a gold chainthat complemented his silver-and-diamond bracelet and gold watch, led bothRiches and one of his partners, a short, blond, button-nosed man dressed in asomewhat punk suit. This was Tracy Coats, a former rock music manager whorepresented backers from "a very wealthy family." This piece of information wasconveyed sotto voce, with a knowing raise of the eyebrow.With little further fanfare, they took seats around the long, wooden conferencetable in the boardroom which adjoined Ken's office: a perfectly nondescriptcarpeted and white-walled room with wooden bookcases and a blackboard; arandom, anonymous room that might exist in any small office complex in any kindof company."Rich and Rich..." said Ken, looking over the resumes of the two programmers. "Ihope you'll make me rich."Neither Rich laughed, and if their unwrinkled visages were any indication,laughing was not something in which the Riches indulged to excess. They were allbusiness, and their resumes were even more no-nonsense than their appearance.Both had held responsible positions in the digital-intensive area of the recentlycompleted Tokyo Disneyland ("The whole place is based on silicon," said RichOne), but that authoritarian fun factory was the closest thing to frivolity in theirresumes, which were crammed with phrases like snake circuit analysis, JetPropulsion Lab, nuclear control, missile systems analyst, Hound Dog Missileflight internal guidance and control system. Both Riches wore sports jacketswithout ties, and the clothes had the well-maintained air that clothes take on whendraped over compulsively maintained bodies. Both looked in their thirties, withwell-cropped hair and attentive eyes, constantly scanning the room forindiscretions.Rich Two spoke. "Our people are from more of a professional arena than others inthe home computer field. People who have been in a more controlled environmentthan home computer types. People who know how to document and write codecorrectly." Rich Two paused. "Not hacker types," he added.Their company would develop a set of tools and techniques for game conversion.

The techniques, algorithms, and cross-assemblers would, of course, be proprietary.Because of that, Rich and Rich would routinely keep their source code. It wouldbe sequestered at Rich and Rich's offices in Southern California. No matter howbrilliant the tricks were, no matter how elegant the bum, it would not be availablefor hacker reading pleasure. Only the product would be available. Opacity. Peoplebuying programs as product, with the programming deeply hidden, as unimportantas the machinery which makes grooves in records that play music. Likewise, theprogrammers at Rich and Rich would be anonymous. No hacker egos to cope with.Just submit a wish list of games and the assembly line would churn them out.Ken loved the idea. "It will make them rich and make me money," he saidafterward. If the two trial projects he gave to Rich and Rich worked out, he said, "Icould do all my conversions with them! This is much better than John Harris!"Ken was feeling at the top of his game. Besides Rich and Rich, a reporter for TheWall Street Journal was in town, talking to him and Roberta for a piece about thecompany. As he often did in the middle of the day, he rewarded himself by leavingthe office and heading out to the site of his new house. Today, they were loweringthe seven twenty-five-foot-long roof beams which would go over the mammothgame room in the house, not far from the indoor racquetball court. He put a flannelshirt over his ragged, blue Apple T-shirt and he drove over to the muddy site andwatched the hydraulic crane lift the beams, and the twelve-man work crew settleeach one into its niche. It went smoothly, like a well-written subroutine thatworked the first time the code was assembled, and Ken stared with a dazed prideat what he was building. "Isn't it weird?" he kept asking. "Isn't it weird?"The house went on and on, rambling down the hill for a hundred and forty feet; theframe finally filling out, with stairs you could climb and doorways to peepthrough. Right now the house was open to the elements, for wind to blow throughand rain to fall through, and no doors or walls prevented free movement. Aperfect, endless hacker house. But the builders would soon put walls to keep theworld from peering in the house, and doors to keep the people in the house frombursting in and violating a person's privacy. No one in his right mind would wantit any different.The same with hackerism, perhaps ... no one running a business could want itreally run by the Hacker Ethic. Sooner or later you had to cope with reality; youwould yearn for those old, familiar walls and doors which were always consideredso natural that only madmen would eliminate them. Only in a computer simulationmaybe, using the computer to hack Utopia, could you preserve that sort ofidealism. Maybe that was the only place you could preserve a dream. In acomputer.Ken walked around the house a few times, talked to the builder, and then was

eminded that he had to get back. He had to speak to the reporter from The WallStreet Journal about the strange little mom-and-pop software company that hadstarted with an adventure game.Ken and Roberta Williams held the housewarming party on Labor Day weekend,1983. Over two hundred people wandered through the ten-thousand-square-footcedarwood house, admired the stained-glass pictures, marveled at the fireplace ofriver rock, participated in a tournament on the racquetball court (which had a fullcolorApple Computer logo embedded in the gleaming wood), sweated in thesauna, relaxed in the hot tub, played tug-of-war in the backyard Fresno River,spiked volleyballs on the court, watched video piped in from the satellite dishoutside, laughed at the comedy troupe flown in from San Francisco, and played thesix coin-op arcade games in the giant game room with the full-length wet bar.It was a bittersweet occasion. Between the competition from big-moneynewcomers, the slump in the economy, the huge capital outlay for ROM cartridgesfitting low-end machines like the VIC-20 (outlays which would never berecouped), and Sierra On-Line's lack of a new, innovative, Third Generationhacker-coded hit, the company was headed for a year with revenues lower than theprevious year. Ken had been forced to seek more venture capital, three milliondollars of it. A half million had gone directly to him, considerably less than thecost of the new house.Earlier that summer, Ken had asked Dick Sunderland to meet him at the BrokenBit. Before they exchanged a word, Ken handed his former boss a note which read,"You are hereby terminated as president of Sierra On-Line." Dick Sunderland wasfurious, and eventually filed a lawsuit against Ken and On-Line. "I'm mad," hewould explain. "I have my reputation. I've built him a company that can, be run,and he wants to mn it." Other On-Liners, especially those who fondly rememberedthe Summer Camp days, rejoiced. They took Sunderiand's name plate from hisparking space and stuck it on the door to the women's lavatory. They took a pile ofmemos dating from the Sunderland regime, which was dubbed "The Age ofOppression," and tossed them into an impromptu bonfire. For a fleeting moment itwas as if the employees of a company could reduce the bureaucracy to ashes.There were other optimistic notes. Ken had hopes that his new, low-cost wordprocessingprogram would bring in money, and that he would do well with amillion-dollar deal to license the cartoon characters from "B.C." and "The Wizardof Id." He was negotiating with John Travolta for use of the actor's name in a bodyfitness program. But despite these projects, the software business had turned out to

e more precarious than it had first appeared.One only had to talk to Jerry Jewell to find out why: Jewell of Sinus did comedown from Sacramento, and he was lamenting the disastrous end to his Twentieth-Century Fox Games deal the cartridge games that his company had written hadbeen lost in the 1983 videogame glut, and he had received almost no money inexchange for focusing his entire market thrust on the Atari VCS machine. Hiscompany was hanging by a thread, and he doubted whether any of theBrotherhood would be able to survive in the next few years. His top programmershad left him, days before he was about to lay them off.Ken Williams was still having programmer problems, too. There was the hackerwho was running the IBM project, far behind schedule. There were some of the"professional" programmers who, not familiar with the pleasures of immersioninto a computer-game universe, were unable to synthesize those pleasuresthemselves. There was even a dispute with Bob and Carolyn Box: the two goldpanners-tumed-programmershad rejected Ken's criticisms of the game theyshowed him, and had left the company to be independent software authors.And then there was John Harris. Lately, he and Ken had been feuding over aroyalty disagreement on Frogger, still On-Line's bestselling program. ParkerBrothers wanted to buy the program to convert to cartridge, and Ken offered John20 percent of the two-hundred-thousand-dollar buy-out. To John that was notenough. They discussed it in Ken's office. It had ended with Ken Williams lookingat his former software superstar and saying, "Get out of my office, John Harris.You're wasting my time."That was the last time they had spoken before the housewarm-ing, to which Kenhad not invited John. Nonetheless, Harris had showed up with his girlfriend, whowas wearing a large diamond engagement ring he had given her. Ken greeted thehacker cordially. It was not a day for animosity, it was a day for celebration. Kenand Roberta Williams had their new, eight-hundred-thousand-dollar house, and nodark clouds hung over the Sierras, at least. The computer had delivered them all toriches and fame they had never dared dream of, and as dusk peeked over MountDead-wood, Ken Williams, dressed in shorts and a T-shirt, danced happily to thetunes of a bluegrass band he had shipped in from Southern California. Later on,just as he always dreamed, he sat in the hot tub with friends, a millionaire in histwenties with a hot tub in the mountains. As the friends sat in the hot tub, theirarms ringing the side, they could hear the faint electronic sounds of the arcadegames in the nearby game room, mingling incongruously with the rustling Sierraforest.

EpilogueThe Lastof theTrue HackersCambridge:1983The Last of the True HackersAROUND the time of Ken Williams' housewarming party, twenty-five years afterthe MIT Tech Model Railroad Club discovered the TX-0, a man who calledhimself the last true hacker sat in a room on the ninth floor of Tech Square a roomcluttered with printouts, manuals, a bedroll, and a blinking computer terminalconnected to a direct descendant of the PDP-6, a DEC-20 computer. His name wasRichard Stallman, and he spoke in a tense, high-pitched voice that did not attemptto veil the emotion with which he described, in his words, "the rape of the artificialintelligence lab." He was thirty years old. His pale complexion and scraggly darkhair contrasted vividly with the intense luminescence of his deep green eyes. Theeyes moistened as he described the decay of the Hacker Ethic at Tech Square.Richard Stallman had come to MIT twelve years before, in 1971, and hadexperienced the epiphany that others had enjoyed when they discovered that pure

hacker paradise, the Tech Square monastery where one lived to hack, and hackedto live. Stallman had been entranced with computers since high school. At campone summer, he had amused himself with computer manuals borrowed from hiscounselors. In his native Manhattan, he found a computing center to exercise hisnew passion. By the time he entered Harvard he was an expert at assemblylanguages, operating systems, and text editors. He had also found that he had adeep affinity for the Hacker Ethic, and was militant in his execution of itsprinciples. It was a search for an atmosphere more compatible with hacking thatbrought him from Harvard's relatively authoritarian computing center, downMassachusetts Avenue, to MIT.The thing he liked about the AI lab at Tech Square was that "there were noartificial obstacles, things that are insisted upon that make it hard for people to getany work done things like bureaucracy, security, refusals to share with otherpeople." He also loved being with people for whom hacking was a way of life. Herecognized that his personality was unyielding to the give-and-take of commonhuman interaction. On the ninth floor he could be appreciated for his hacking, andbe part of a community built around that magical pursuit.His wizardry soon became apparent, and Russ Noftsker, the administrator of theAI lab who had taken the tough security measures during the Vietnam protests,hired Stallman as a systems programmer. Richard was often in night phase, andwhen the people in the lab discovered after the fact that he was simultaneouslyearning a magna cum laude degree in physics at Harvard, even those masterhackers were astonished.As he sat at the feet of such as Richard Greenblatt and Bill Gosper, whom heconsidered his mentor, Stallman's view of the Hacker Ethic solidified. He came tosee the lab as the embodiment of that philosophy, a constructive anarchism which,as Stallman wrote into a computer file once, "does not mean advocating a dog-eatdogjungle. American society is already a dog-eat-dog jungle, and its rulesmaintain it that way. We [hackers] wish to replace those rules with a concern forconstructive cooperation."Stallman, who liked to be called by his initials, RMS, in tribute to the way helogged on to the computer, used the Hacker Ethic as a guiding principle for hisbest-known work, an editing program called EMACS which allowed users tolimitlessly customize it its wide-open architecture encouraged people to add to it,improve it endlessly. He distributed the program free to anyone who agreed to hisone condition: "that they give back all extensions they made, so as to help EMACSimprove. I called this arrangement 'the EMACS commune,'" RMS wrote. "As Ishared, it was their duty to share; to work with each other rather than against."EMACS became almost a standard text editor in university computer science

departments. It was a shining example of what hacking could produce.But as the seventies progressed, Richard Stallman began to see changes in hisbeloved preserve. The first incursion was when pass words were assigned toOfficially Sanctioned Users, and unauthorized users were kept off the system. As atrue hacker, RMS despised passwords, and was proud of the fact that thecomputers he was paid to maintain did not use them. But the MIT computerscience department (run by different people than the AI lab) decided to installsecurity on its machine.Stallman campaigned to eliminate the practice. He encouraged people to use the"Empty String" password a carriage return instead of a word. So when the machineasked for your password, you would hit the RETURN key and be logged on.Stallman also broke the computer's encryption code and was able to get to theprotected file which held people's passwords. He started sending people messageswhich would appear on screen when they logged onto the system:I see you chose the password [such and such]. I suggest that youswitch to the password "carriage return." It's much easier to type,and also it stands up to the principle that there should be nopasswords."Eventually I got to a point where a fifth of all the users on the machine had theEmpty String password," RMS later boasted.Then the computer science laboratory installed a more sophisticated passwordsystem on its other computer. This one was not so easy for Stallman to crack. ButStallman was able to study the encryption program, and, as he later said, "Idiscovered that changing one word in that program would cause it to print out yourpassword on the system console as part of the message that you were logging in."Since the "system console" was visible to anyone walking by, and its messagescould easily be accessed by any terminal, or even printed out in hard copy,Stallman's change allowed any password to be routinely disseminated by anyonewho cared to know it. He thought the result "amusing."Still, the password juggernaut rolled on. The outside world, with its affection forsecurity and bureaucracy, was closing in. The security mania even infected theholy AI computer. The Department of Defense was threatening to take the AImachine off the ARPAnet network to separate the MIT people from the highlyactive electronic community of hackers, users, and plain old computer scientists

around the country all because the AI lab steadfastly refused to limit access to itscomputers. DOD bureaucrats were apoplectic: anyone could walk in off the streetand use the AI machine, and connect to other locations in the Defense Departmentnetwork! Stallman and others felt that was the way it should be. But he came tounderstand that the number of people who stood with him was dwindling. Moreand more of the hard-core hackers were leaving MIT, and many of the hackerswho had formed the culture and given it a backbone by their behavior were longgone.What had happened to the hackers of yesteryear? Many had gone to work forbusinesses, implicitly accepting the compromises that such work entailed. PeterSamson, the TMRC hacker who was among the first to discover the TX-0, was inSan Francisco, still with the Systems Concepts company co-founded by masterphone hacker Stew Nelson. Samson could explain what had happened:"[Hacking] now competes for one's attention with real responsibilities working fora living, marrying, having a child. What I had then that I don't have now is time,and a certain amount of physical stamina." It was a common conclusion, more orless shared by people like Samson's TMRC colleague Bob Saunders (working forHewlett-Packard, two children in high school), David Silver (after growing up inthe AI lab, he now headed a small robotics firm in Cambridge), Slug Russell (theauthor of Spacewar was programming for a firm outside of Boston and playingwith his Radio Shack home computer), and even Stew Nelson, who despiteremaining in Bachelor Mode complained that in 1983 he wasn't able to hack asmuch as he'd like. "It's almost all business these days, and we don't have that muchtime for the technical stuff we'd like to do," said the man who over two decadesago had instinctively used the PDP-1 to explore the universe that was the phonesystem. There would never be another generation like them; Stallman realized thisevery time he saw the behavior of the new "tourists" taking advantage of thefreedom of the AI computer. They did not seem as well intentioned, or as eager toimmerse themselves into the culture, as their predecessors. In previous times,people seemed to recognize that the open system was an invitation to do goodwork, and improve yourself to the point where you might one day be considered areal hacker. Now, some of these new users could not handle the freedom to pokearound a system, with everyone's files open to them. "The outside world is pushingin," Stallman admitted. "More and more people come in having used othercomputer systems. Elsewhere it's taken for granted that if anybody else can modifyyour files you'll be unable to do anything, you'll be sabotaged every five minutes.Fewer and fewer people are around who grew up here the old way, and know thatit's possible, and it's a reasonable way to live."Stallman kept fighting, trying, he said, "to delay the fascist advances with everymethod I could." Though his official systems programming duties were equally

divided between the computer science department and the AI lab, he went "onstrike" against the Lab for Computer Science because of their security policy.When he came out with a new version of his EMACS editor, he refused to let thecomputer science lab use it. He realized that, in a sense, he was punishing users ofthat machine rather than the people who made policy. "But what could I do?" helater said. "People who used that machine went along with the policy. Theyweren't fighting. A lot of people were angry with me, saying I was trying to holdthem hostage or blackmail them, which in a sense I was. I was engaging inviolence against them because I thought they were engaging in violence toeveryone at large."Passwords were not the only problem Richard Stallman had to face in what wasbecoming more and more a solitary defense of the pure Hacker Ethic at MIT.Many of the new people around the lab had learned computing on small machinesand were untutored in hacker principles. Like Third Generation hackers, they sawnothing wrong with the concept of ownership of programs. These new peoplewould write exciting new programs just as their predecessors did, but somethingnew would come along with them as the programs appeared on the screen, sowould copyright notices. Copyright notices! To RMS, who still believed that allinformation should flow freely, this was blasphemy. "I don't believe that softwareshould be owned," he said in 1983, years too late. "Because [the practice]sabotages humanity as a whole. It prevents people from getting the maximumbenefit out of the program's existence."It was this kind of commercialism, in Richard Stallman's view, that delivered thefatal blow to what was left of the idealistic community he had loved. It was asituation that embodied the evil, and immersed the remaining hackers into bitterconflict. It all began with Greenblatt's LISP machine.With the passing of years, Richard Greenblatt had remained perhaps the prime linkto the days of ninth-floor hacker glory. In his mid-thirties now, the single-mindedhacker of the Chess Machine and MacLISP was moderating some of his moreextreme personal habits, grooming his short hair more often, varying his wardrobemore, and even tentatively thinking about the opposite sex. But he still could hacklike a demon. And now he was beginning to see the realization of a dream he hadformed long ago a total, all-out hacker computer.He had come to realize that the LISP language was extensible and powerfulenough to give people the control to build and explore the kind of systems thatcould satisfy the hungriest hacker mentality. The problem was that no computer

could easily handle the considerable demands that LISP put on a machine. So inthe early seventies Greenblatt started to design a computer which would run LISPfaster and more efficiently than any machine had done before. It would be a singleusermachine finally a solution to the esthetic problem of time-sharing, where thehacker is psychologically frustrated by a lack of ultimate control over the machine.By running LISP, the language of artificial intelligence, the machine would be apioneering workhorse of the next generation of computers, machines with theability to learn, to carry on intelligent dialogues with the user on everything fromcircuit design to advanced mathematics.So with a small grant, he and some other hackers notably Tom Knight, who hadbeen instrumental in designing (and naming) the Incompatible Time-sharingSystem began work. It was slow going, but by 1975 they had what they called a"Cons" machine (named for the complicated "constructor operator" function thatthe machine performed in LISP). The Cons machine did not stand alone, and hadto be connected to the PDP-10 to work. It was two bays wide, with the circuitboards and the tangle of wires exposed, and they built it right there on the ninthfloor of Tech Square, on the uplifted floor with air-conditioning underneath.It worked as Greenblatt hoped it would. "LISP is a very easy language toimplement," Greenblatt later explained. "Any number of times, some hacker goesoff to some machine and works hard for a couple of weeks and writes a LISP. 'See,I've got LISP.' But there's a hell of a difference between that and a really usablesystem." The Cons machine, and later the stand-alone LISP machine, was a usablesystem. It had something called "virtual address space," which assured that thespace programs consumed wouldn't routinely overwhelm the machine, as was thecase in other LISP systems. The world you built with LISP could be much moreintricate. A hacker working at the machine would be like a mental rocket pilottraveling in a constantly expanding LISP universe. For the next few years theyworked to get the machine to be a stand-alone. MIT was paying their salaries, andof course they were all doing systems work on ITS and random AI hacking, too.The break came when ARPA kicked in money for the group to build six machinesfor about fifty thousand dollars each. Then some other money came to build moremachines.Eventually the hackers at MIT would build thirty-two LISP machines. From theoutside, the LISP computer looked like a central air-conditioning unit. The visualaction all occurred in a remote terminal, with a sleek, long keyboard loaded withfunction keys and an ultra-high-resolution bit-mapped display. At MIT the ideawas to connect several LISP machines in a network, so while each user had fullcontrol he could also be hacking as part of a community, and the values arisingfrom a free flow of information would be maintained.

The LISP machine was a significant achievement. But Greenblatt realized thatsomething beyond making a few machines and hacking on them would benecessary. This LISP machine was an ultimately flexible world-builder, anembodiment of the hacker dream ... but its virtues as a "thinking machine" alsomade it a tool for America to maintain its technological lead in the artificialintelligence race with the Japanese. The LISP machine had implications biggerthan the AI lab, certainly, and technology like this would be best disseminatedthrough the commercial sector. Greenblatt: "I generally realized during this wholeprocess that we [were] probably gonna start a company some day and eventuallymake these LISP machines commercially. [It was a] sooner-or-later-it's-gonnahappenkind of thing. So as the machine got to be more complete we startedpoking around."That was how Russell Noftsker got into the situation. The former AI labadministrator had left his post under duress in 1973 and gone to California to gointo business. Every so often he would come back to Cambridge and stop by thelab, see what the AI workers were up to. He liked the idea of LISP machines andexpressed interest in helping the hackers form a company."Initially pretty much everyone was against him," Greenblatt later recalled. "At thetime that Noftsker left the lab I was on considerably better terms with him thananyone else. Most of the people really hated this guy. He had done a bunch ofthings that were really very paranoid. But I said, 'Well, give him a chance.'"People did, but it soon became clear that Noftsker and Greenblatt had differentideas of what a company should be. Greenblatt was too much a hacker to accept atraditional business construct. What he wanted was something "towards the AIpattern." He did not want a load of venture capital. He preferred a bootstrapapproach, where the company would get an order for a machine, build it, then keepa percentage of the money and put it back into the company. He hoped that hisfirm could maintain a steady tie to MIT; he even envisioned a way where theycould all remain affiliated with the AI lab. Greenblatt himself was loath to leave;he had firmly set out the parameters for his universe. While his imagination hadfree rein inside a computer, his physical world was still largely bounded by hiscluttered office with terminal on the ninth floor and the room he had rented sincethe mid-sixties from a retired dentist (now deceased) and the dentist's wife. Hewould travel all over the world to go to artificial intelligence conferences, but thediscussions in these remote places would be continuations of the same technicalissues he would debate in the lab, or in ARPAnet computer mail. He was verymuch defined by the hacker community, and though he knew thatcommercialization to some extent was necessary to spread the gospel of the LISPmachine, he wanted to avoid any unnecessary compromise of the Hacker Ethic:like lines of code in a systems program, compromise should be bummed to the

minimum.Noftsker considered this unrealistic, and his point of view filtered down to theother hackers involved in the project. Besides Tom Knight, these included someyoung wizards who had not been around in the golden age of the ninth floor, andhad a more pragmatic approach to what was called for. "My perception [ofGreenblatt's idea] was to start a company which made LISP machines in sort of agarage shop. It was clear that it was impractical," Tom Knight later said. "Theworld just isn't that way. There's only one way in which a company works and thatis to have people who are motivated to make money."Knight and the others perceived that Greenblatt's model for a company wassomething like Systems Concepts in San Francisco, which included former MIThackers Stewart Nelson and Peter Samson. Systems Concepts was a small-scalecompany, guided by a firm resolve not to have to answer to anyone holding pursestrings. "Our initial goal was not necessarily to get infinitely rich," explained cofounderMike Levitt in 1983, "but to control our own destiny. We don't oweanybody anything." The MIT hackers, though, asked what the impact of SystemsConcepts had been after over a decade, they concluded, it was still small and notterribly influential. Knight looked at Systems Concepts "Low-risk, don't take anyexternal funding, don't hire anybody you don't know, that mode," he said. "Notgoing very far." He and the others had a larger vision for a LISP machinecompany.Russ Noftsker also saw, and exploited, the fact that many of the hackers werereluctant to work in a company led by Greenblatt. Greenblatt was so focused onmaking LISP machines, on the mission of hacking, on the work that had to bedone, that he often neglected to acknowledge people's humanity. And as old-timehackers got older, this was more and more an issue. "Everyone tolerated him forhis brilliance and productivity," Noftsker later explained, "[but] finally he startedusing the bludgeon or cat-o'-nine-tails to try to whip people into shape. He'd beratepeople who weren't used to it. He'd treat them like they were some kind ofproduction mule team. It finally got to the point where communications hadbroken down and they even took the extreme measure of moving off the ninthfloor in order to get away from Richard."Things came to a head in a meeting in February 1979, when it was clear thatGreenblatt wanted a hacker-style company, and power to insure that it remain so.It was an awkward demand, since for so long the lab had, as Knight put it, "beenrun on anarchistic principles, based on the ideal of mutual trust and mutual respectfor the technical confidence of the people involved built up over many years." Butanarchism did not seem to be The Right Thing in this case. Nor, for many, wasGreenblatt's demand. "I couldn't see, frankly, having him fulfilling a presidential

ole in a company that I was involved in," said Knight.Noftsker: "We were all trying to talk him out of it. We begged him to accept astructure where he would be equal to the rest of us and where we would haveprofessional management. And he refused to do it. So we went around the roomand asked every single person in the technical group if they would accept anorganization that had any of the elements [that Greenblatt wanted]. And everyonesaid they would not participate in [such a] venture."It was a standoff. Most of the hackers would not go with Greenblatt, the father ofthe LISP machine. Noftsker and the rest said they would give Greenblatt a year toform his own company, but in somewhat less than a year they concluded thatGreenblatt and the backers he managed to find for his LISP Machine Incorporated(LMI) were not "winning," so they formed a heavily capitalized company calledSymbolics. They were sorry to be making and selling the machines to whichGreenblatt had contributed so much, but felt it had to be done. LMI people feltbetrayed; whenever Greenblatt spoke of the split, his speech crawled to a slowmumble, and he sought ways to change the uncomfortable subject. The bitterschism was the kind of thing that might happen in business, or when peopleinvested emotion in relationships and human interaction, but it was not the kind ofthing you saw in the hacking life.The AI lab became a virtual battleground between two sides, and the two firms,especially Symbolics, hired away many of the lab's remaining hackers. Even BillGosper, who had been working at Stanford and Xerox during that time, eventuallyjoined the new research center Symbolics had formed in Palo Alto. WhenSymbolics complained about the possible conflict of interest of LMI peopleworking for the AI lab (it felt that MIT, by paying salaries to those LMI parttimers,was funding their competitor), the hackers still affiliated with the lab,including Greenblatt, had to resign.It was painful for everybody, and when both companies came out with similarversions of LISP machines in the early 1980s it was clear that the problem wouldbe there for a long time. Greenblatt had made some compromises in his businessplan making, for example, a deal whereby LMI got money and support from TexasInstruments in exchange for a fourth of the stock and his company was surviving.The more lavish Symbolics had hired the cream of hackerism and had even signeda contract to sell its machines to MIT. The worst part was that the ideal communityof hackers, those people who, in the words of Ed Fredkin, "kind of loved eachother," were no longer on speaking terms. "I'd really like to talk to [Greenblatt],"said Gosper, speaking for many Symbolics hackers who had virtually grown upwith the most canonical of hackers and now were cut off from his flow ofinformation. "I don't know how happy or unhappy he is with me for having thrown

in with the bad guys here. But I'm sorry, I'm afraid they were right this time."But even if people in the companies were speaking to each other, they could nottalk about what mattered most the magic they had discovered and forged inside thecomputer systems. The magic was now a trade secret, not for examination bycompeting firms. By working for companies, the members of the purist hackersociety had discarded the key element in the Hacker Ethic: the free flow ofinformation. The outside world was inside.The one person who was most affected by the schism, and its effect on the AI lab,was Richard Stallman. He grieved at the lab's failure to uphold the Hacker Ethic.RMS would tell strangers he met that his wife had died, and it would not be untillater in the conversation that the stranger would realize that this thin, plaintiveyoungster was talking about an institution rather than a tragically lost bride.Stallman later wrote his thoughts into the computer:It is painful for me to bring back the memories of this time. Thepeople remaining at the lab were the professors, students, and nonhackerresearchers, who did not know how to maintain the system,or the hardware, or want to know. Machines began to break andnever be fixed; sometimes they just got thrown out. Needed changesin software could not be made. The non-hackers reacted to this byturning to commercial systems, bringing with them fascism andlicense agreements. I used to wander through the lab, through therooms so empty at night where they used to be full and think, "Ohmy poor AI lab! You are dying and I can't save you." Everyoneexpected that if more hackers were trained, Symbolics would hirethem away, so it didn't even seem worth trying ...the whole culturewas wiped out...Stallman bemoaned the fact that it was no longer easy to drop in or call arounddinnertime and find a group eager for a Chinese dinner. He would call the lab'snumber, which ended in 6765 ("Fibonacci of 20," people used to note, pointing outa numerical trait established early on by some random math hacker), and find noone to eat with, no one to talk with.Richard Stallman felt he had identified the villain who destroyed the lab:Symbolics. He took an oath: "I will never use a Symbolic LISP machine or help

anybody else to do so... I don't want to speak to anyone who works for Symbolicsor the people who deal with them." While he also disapproved of Greenblatt's LMIcompany, because as a business it sold computer programs which Stallmanbelieved the world should have for free, he felt that LMI had attempted to avoidhurting the AI lab. But Symbolics, in Stallman's view, had purposely stripped thelab of its hackers in order to prevent them from donating competing technology tothe public domain.Stallman wanted to fight back. His field of battle was the LISP operating system,which originally was shared by MIT, LMI, and Symbolics. This changed whenSymbolics decided that the fruits of its labor would be proprietary; why shouldLMI benefit from improvements made by Symbolics hackers? So there would beno sharing. Instead of two companies pooling energy toward an ultimatelyfeatureful operating system, they would have to work independently, expendingenergy to duplicate improvements.This was RMS's opportunity for revenge. He set aside his qualms about LMI andbegan cooperating with that firm. Since he was still officially at MIT, andSymbolics installed its improvements on the MIT machines, Stallman was able tocarefully reconstruct each new feature or fix of a bug. He then would ponder howthe change was made, match it, and present his work to LMI. It was not easy work,since he could not merely duplicate the changes he had to figure out innovativelydifferent ways to implement them. "I don't think there's anything immoral aboutcopying code," he explained. "But they would sue LMI if I copied their code,therefore I have to do a lot of work." A virtual John Henry of computer code, RMShad single-handedly attempted to match the work of over a dozen world-classhackers, and managed to keep doing it during most of 1982 and almost all of 1983."In a fairly real sense," Greenblatt noted at the time, "he's been out-hacking thewhole bunch of them."Some Symbolics hackers complained not so much because of what Stallman wasdoing, but because they disagreed with some of the technical choices Stallmanmade in implementation. "I really wonder if those people aren't kiddingthemselves," said Bill Gosper, himself torn between loyalty to Symbolics andadmiration for Stallman's master hack. "Or if they're being fair. I can seesomething Stallman wrote, and I might decide it was bad (probably not, butsomeone could convince me it was bad), and I would still say, 'But wait a minuteStallman doesn't have anybody to argue with all night over there. He's workingalone! It's incredible anyone could do this alone!'"Russ Noftsker, president of Symbolics, did not share Greenblatt's or Gosper'sadmiration. He would sit in Symbolics' offices, relatively plush and well decoratedcompared to LMI's ramshackle headquarters a mile away, his boyish face knotting

with concern when he spoke of Stallman. "We develop a program or anadvancement to our operating system and make it work, and that may take threemonths, and then under our agreement with MIT, we give that to them. And then[Stallman] compares it with the old ones and looks at that and sees how it worksand reimplements it [for the LMI machines]. He calls it reverse engineering. Wecall it theft of trade secrets. It does not serve any purpose at MIT for him to do thatbecause we've already given that function out [to MIT]. The only purpose it servesis to give that to Greenblatt's people."Which was exactly the point. Stallman had no illusions that his act wouldsignificantly improve the world at large. He had come to accept that the domainaround the AI lab had been permanently polluted. He was out to cause as muchdamage to the culprit as he could. He knew he could not keep it up indefinitely. Heset a deadline to his work: the end of 1983. After that he was uncertain of his nextstep.He considered himself the last true hacker left on earth. "The AI lab used to be theone example that showed it was possible to have an institution that was anarchisticand very great," he would explain. "If I told people it's possible to have no securityon a computer without people deleting your files all the time, and no bossesstopping you from doing things, at least I could point to the AI lab and say, 'Look,we are doing it. Come use our machine! See!' I can't do that anymore. Without thisexample, nobody will believe me. For a while we were setting an example for therest of the world. Now that this is gone, where am I going to begin from? I read abook the other day. It's called Ishi, the Last Yahi. It's a book about the last survivorof a tribe of Indians, initially with his family, and then gradually they died out oneby one."That was the way Richard Stallman felt. Like Ishi."I'm the last survivor of a dead culture," said RMS. "And I don't really belong inthe world anymore. And in some ways I feel I ought to be dead."Richard Stallman did leave MIT, but he left with a plan: to write a version of thepopular proprietary computer operating system called UNIX and give it away toanyone who wanted it. Working on this GNU (which stood for "Gnu's Not Unix")program meant that he could "continue to use computers without violating [his]principles." Having seen that the Hacker Ethic could not survive in theunadulterated form in which it had formerly thrived at MIT, he realized thatnumerous small acts like his would keep the Ethic alive in the outside world.

What Stallman did was to join a mass movement of Real World hackerism set inmotion at the very institution which he was so painfully leaving. The emergence ofhackerism at MIT twenty-five years before was a concentrated attempt to fullyingest the magic of the computer; to absorb, explore, and expand the intricacies ofthose bewitching systems; to use those perfectly logical systems as an inspirationfor a culture and a way of life. It was these goals which motivated the behavior ofLee Felsenstein and the hardware hackers from Albuquerque to the Bay Area. Thehappy by-product of their actions was the personal computer industry, whichexposed the magic to millions of people. Only the tiniest percentage of these newcomputer users would experience that magic with the all-encompassing fury of theMIT hackers, but everyone had the chance to ... and many would get glimpses ofthe miraculous possibilities of the machine. It would extend their powers, spurtheir creativity, and teach them something, perhaps, of the Hacker Ethic, if theylistened.As the computer revolution grew in a dizzying upward spiral of silicon, money,hype, and idealism, the Hacker Ethic became perhaps less pure, an inevitableresult of its conflict with the values of the outside world. But its ideas spreadthroughout the culture each time some user flicked the machine on, and the screencame alive with words, thoughts, pictures, and sometimes elaborate worlds builtout of air those computer programs which could make any man (or woman) a god.Sometimes the purer pioneers were astounded at their progeny. Bill Gosper, forinstance, was startled by an encounter in the spring of 1983. Though Gosperworked for the Symbolics company and realized that he had sold out, in a sense,by hacking in the commercial sector, he was still very much the Bill Gosper whoonce sat at the ninth-floor PDP-6 like some gregarious alchemist of code. Youcould find him in the wee hours in a second-floor room near El Camino Real inPalo Alto, his beat-up Volvo the only car in the small lot outside the nondescripttwo-story building which housed Symbolics' West Coast research center. Gosper,now forty, his sharp features hidden behind large wire-frame glasses and his hairknotted in a ponytail which came halfway down his back, still hacked LIFE,watching with rollicking amusement as the terminal of his LISP machine crankedthrough billions of generations of LIFE colonies."I had the most amazing experience when I went to see Return of the Jedi," Gospersaid. "I sat down next to this kid of fifteen or sixteen. I asked him what he did, andhe said, 'Oh, I'm basically a hacker.' I almost fell over. I didn't say anything. I wascompletely unprepared for that. It sounded like the most arrogant thing I everheard."The youngster had not been boasting, of course, but describing who he was. Third

Generation hacker. With many more generations to follow.To the pioneers like Lee Felsenstein, that continuation represented a goal fulfilled.The designer of the Sol and the Osbome 1, the co-founder of Community Memory,the hero of the pseudo-Heinlein novel of his own imagination often would boastthat he had been "present at the creation," and he saw the effects of the boom thatfollowed at a close enough range to see its limitations and its subtle, significantinfluence. After he made his paper fortune at Osbome, he saw it flutter away justas quickly, as poor management and arrogant ideas about the marketplace causedOsborne Computer to collapse within a period of a few months in 1983. Herefused to mourn his financial loss. Instead he took pride in celebrating that "themyth of the mega-machine bigger than all of us [the evil Hulking Giant,approachable only by the Priesthood] has been laid to rest. We're able to comeback down off worship of the machine."Lee Felsenstein had learned to wear a suit with ease, to court women, to charmaudiences. But what mattered was still the machine, and its impact on people. Hehad plans for the next step. "There's more to be done," he said not long afterOsborne Computer went down. "We have to find a relationship between man andmachine which is much more symbiotic. It's one thing to come down from onemyth, but you have to replace it with another. I think you start with the tool: thetool is the embodiment of the myth. I'm trying to see how you can explain thefuture that way, create the future."He was proud that his first battle to bring computers to the people had been won.Even as he spoke, the Third Generation of hackers was making news, not only assuperstar game designers, but as types of culture heroes who defied boundariesand explored computer systems. A blockbuster movie called WarGames had as itsprotagonist a Third Generation hacker who, having no knowledge of thegroundbreaking feats of Stew Nelson or Captain Crunch, broke into computersystems with the innocent wonder of their Hands-On Imperative. It was one moreexample of how the computer could spread the Ethic."The technology has to be considered as larger than just the inanimate pieces ofhardware," said Felsenstein. "The technology represents inanimate ways ofthinking, objectified ways of thinking. The myth we see in WarGames and thingslike that is definitely the triumph of the individual over the collective dis-spirit.[The myth is] attempting to say that the conventional wisdom and commonunderstandings must always be open to question. It's not just an academic point.It's a very fundamental point of, you might say, the survival of humanity, in asense that you can have people [merely] survive, but humanity is something that'sa little more precious, a little more fragile. So that to be able to defy a culturewhich states that 'Thou shalt not touch this,' and to defy that with one's own

creative powers is ... the essence." The essence, of course, of the Hacker Ethic.

Afterword: Ten Years After"I think that hackers dedicated, innovative, irreverent computer programmers arethe most interesting and effective body of intellectuals since the framers of the U.S.Constitution... No other group that I know of has set out to liberate a technologyand succeeded. They not only did so against the active disinterest of corporateAmerica, their success forced corporate America to adopt their style in the end. Inreorganizing the Information Age around the individual, via personal computers,the hackers may well have saved the American economy... The quietest of all the'60s sub-subcultures has emerged as the most innovative and powerful..."Stewart BrandFounder, Whole Earth CatalogIN November 1984, on the damp, windswept headlands north of San Francisco,one hundred fifty canonical programmers and techno-ninjas gathered for the firstHacker Conference. Originally conceived by Whole Earth Catalog founder StewartBrand, this event transformed an abandoned Army camp into temporary worldheadquarters for the Hacker Ethic. Not at all coincidentally, the event dovetailedwith the publication of this book, and a good number of the characters in its pagesturned up, in many cases to meet for the first time. First-generation MIT hackerslike Richard Greenblatt hung out with Homebrew luminaries like Lee Felsensteinand Stephen Wozniak and game czars Ken Williams, Jerry Jewell, and DougCarlston. The brash wizards of the new Macintosh computer met up with peoplewho hacked Spacewar. Everybody slept in bunk beds, washed dishes and bussedtables, and slept minimally. For a few hours the electricity went out, and peoplegabbed by lantern light. When the power was restored, the rush to the computerroom where one could show off his hacks was something probably not seen in thiscountry since the last buffalo stampede.I remember thinking, "These be the real hackers." I was in a state of high anxiety,perched among one hundred fifty potential nit-picking critics who had been issuedcopies of my first book. Those included in the text immediately found their namesin the index and proceeded to vet passages for accuracy and technologicalcorrectness. Those not in the index sulked, and to this day whenever theyencounter me, in person or in the ether of cyberspace, they complain. Ultimately,the experience was exhilarating. The Hacker Conference, which would become an

annual event, turned out to be the kickoff for a spirited and public debate,continued to this day, about the future of hacking and the Hacker Ethic as definedin this book.The term "hacker" has always been bedeviled by discussion. When I was writingthis book, the term was still fairly obscure. In fact, some months beforepublication, my editor told me that people in Double-day's sales force requested atitle change "Who knows what a hacker is?" they asked. Fortunately, we stuck withthe original, and by the mid-eighties the term had become rooted in the vernacular.Unfortunately for many true hackers, however, the popularization of the term was adisaster. Why? The word hacker had acquired a specific and negative connotation.The trouble began with some well-publicized arrests of teenagers whoelectronically ventured into forbidden digital grounds, like government computersystems. It was understandable that the journalists covering these stories wouldrefer to the young perps as hackers after all, that's what the kids called themselves.But the word quickly became synonymous with "digital trespasser."In the pages of national magazines, in television dramas and movies, in novels bothpulp and prestige, a stereotype emerged: the hacker, an antisocial geek whoseidentifying attribute is the ability to sit in front of a keyboard and conjure up acriminal kind of magic. In these depictions, anything connected to a machine ofany sort, from a nuclear missile to a garage door, is easily controlled by thehacker's bony fingers, tapping away on the keyboard of a cheap PC or aworkstation. According to this definition a hacker is at best benign, an innocentwho doesn't realize his tme powers. At worst, he is a terrorist. In the past fewyears, with the emergence of computer viruses, the hacker has been literallytransformed into a virulent force.True, some of the most righteous hackers in history have been known to sneer atdetails such as property rights or the legal code in order to pursue the Hands-OnImperative. And pranks have always been part of hacking. But the inference thatsuch high jinks were the essence of hacking was not just wrong, it was offensive totrue hackers, whose work had changed the world, and whose methods couldchange the way one viewed the world. To read of talentless junior high schoolstudents logging on to computer bulletin boards, downloading system passwords orcredit bureau codes, and using them to promote digital mayhem and have themedia call them hackers... well, it was just too much for people who consideredthemselves the real thing. They went apoplectic. The hacker community stillseethes at the public burning it received in 1988 at Hacker Conference 5.0, when areporting crew from CBS News showed up ostensibly to do a story on the glory ofcanonical hackers but instead ran a piece loaded with security specialists warningof the Hacker Menace. To this day, I think that Dan Rather would be well advised

to avoid attending future Hacker Conferences.But in the past few years, I think the tide has turned. More and more people havelearned about the spirit of true hacking as described in these pages. Not only arethe technically literate aware of hacker ideas and ideals, but they appreciate themand realize, as Brand implied, that they are something to nurture.Several things have contributed to this transformation. First was the computerrevolution itself. As the number of people using computers grew from hundreds ofthousands to hundreds of millions, the protean magic of the machine spread itsimplicit message, and those inclined to explore its powers, naturally sought outtheir antecedents.Second was the Net. Millions of people are linked together on computer networks,with the bulk of serious hackers joining the ten million people on the confederationcalled the Internet. It's a pipeline connecting people to each other, facilitatingcollaborative projects. And it's also a hotbed of conferencing and conversation, asurprising amount of it dealing with issues arising from the Hacker Ethic and itsconflicts with finances and the Real World.Finally, true hackers became cool. Under the rubric of "cyberpunk," a termappropriated from the futuristic noir novels of smart new science fiction writerslike William Gibson, Bruce Sterling, and Rudy Rucker, a new cultural movementemerged in the early 1990s. When the flagship publication of the movement,Mondo 2000 (a name change from Reality Hackers) began to elucidate cyberpunkprinciples, it turned out that the majority of them originated in the Hacker Ethic.The implicit beliefs of MIT's Tech Model Railroad Club (Information Should BeFree, Access to Computers Should Be Unlimited and Total, Mistrust Authority...)have been shuffled to the top of the stack.By the time cyberpunk hit the Zeitgeist, the media was ready to embrace a broader,more positive view of hacking. There were entire publications whose point of viewran parallel to hacker principles: Mondo 2000, and Wired, and loads of fanzineswith names like Intertek and Doing Boing. There was an active computer tradepress written by journalists who knew that their industry owed its existence tohackers. Even more significant, the concepts of hackerism were embraced byjournalists at the same traditional publications whose cluelessness had taintedhackerism to begin with.Once people understood what motivated hackers, it was possible to use those ideasas a measure to examine the values of Silicon Valley. At Apple Computer inparticular the hacker ideals were considered crucial to the company's well-being ...its very soul. Even more straitlaced companies came to realize that if they were to

lead in their fields, the energy, vision, and problem-solving perseverance ofhackers were required. In turn, it would be required of the companies to loosentheir rules, to accommodate the freewheeling hacker style.Best of all, these ideas began to flow beyond the computer industry and into theculture at large. As I learned while writing Hackers, the ideals of my subject couldapply to almost any activity one pursued with passion. Burrell Smith, the designerof the Macintosh computer, said it as well as anyone in one of the sessions at thefirst Hacker Conference:"Hackers can do almost anything and be a hacker. You can be a hacker carpenter.It's not necessarily high tech. I think it has to do with craftsmanship and caringabout what you're doing."Finally, an update of a few principal characters in Hackers, a decade later.Bill Gosper is a consultant living in Silicon Valley. He still hacks, pursuing thesecrets of mathematics, fractals, and the game of Life, while making a living as aconsultant. He is also still a bachelor, explaining to an interviewer in the bookMore Mathematical People that having children, or even a mate, would beproblematic in that "no matter how conscious an effort I made to give kids theattention that they deserve, they would sense the computer was winning out."Richard Greenblatt's Lisp Machines company got swallowed in the corporate maw.After working as a consultant, he now runs his own small company, devoted tomaking medical devices that combine voice information and data over telephonelines. He thinks a lot about the future of hacking, and mes the day whencommercialization overwhelmed the kind of projects routinely undertaken (withgovernment funding) at MIT in the golden days. But, he says, "the good news isthat the cost of this stuff is falling so rapidly that it's possible to do things as aquote-unquote hobby It's possible to do serious work on your own."Unlike some of his fellow personal computer pioneers from the Homebrew era.Lee Felsenstein never became wealthy. Though he enjoyed fame within the technoculture,his own enterprises, conducted through his struggling Golemics company,remained marginal. Recently, however, he landed a dream job as a leadingengineer at Interval, a well-funded new Silicon Valley company devoted toconcocting the next generation of technical wizardry. As he approaches fifty, Lee'spersonal life is more settled he's had several serious relationships and is currentlyliving with a woman he met through the Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link computernetwork. He remains passionately committed to social change through computers.He has long been circulating the idea of forming a sort of digital Boy Scouts

(though not gender specific) called the Hacker's League. And he still believes thatCommunity Memory, once it gets on the network, will have an impact on theworld.Ken Williams is still chairman of Sierra On-Line. The company has had its highsand lows, but like its successful competitor Broderbund and unlike the defunctSirius, it is bigger than ever, employing around 700 people at its Oakhurstheadquarters. Sierra went public in 1992; Ken's holdings make him many times amillionaire. Sierra also has invested millions of dollars in an interactive computergame-playingnetwork; AT&T has purchased twenty percent of the venture.Roberta Williams is Sierra's most popular game designer, acclaimed for her King'sQuest series of 3-D graphic adventure games.Ken Williams thinks that there's little room for the old hacker spirit at Sierra. "Inthe early days, one person, John Harris, could do a project," Ken says. "Now, ourgames have fifty or more names in the credit. We don't do any products without atleast a million development budget. In King's Quest VI, there is a seven-hundredpagescript, read by over fifty professional actors. It was the single largest voicerecordingproject ever done in Hollywood."Ken Williams tells me that John Hams still lives in the Oakhurst area, operating asmall business selling software to generate display screens for cable televisionoperators. According to Williams, John Harris is still writing his software for thelong discontinued Atari 800 computer.As one might expect of the last true hacker, Richard Stallman has mostemphatically remained true to the ideals of the MIT Artificial Intelligence lab. Hiscompany, the Free Software Foundation, is, according to Wired, "the world's onlycharitable organization with the mission of developing free software." Stallman hasalso been an instrumental force in the League for Software Freedom, a groupreflecting his belief that proprietary software is a pox upon the digital landscape. In1991, his efforts came to the attention of those in charge of parceling out thecoveted McArthur Fellowship "genius grants." The last time I saw him, Stallmanwas organizing a demonstration against the Lotus Development Corporation. Hisprotest regarded their software patents. He believed, and still does, that informationshould be free.Steven Levy August 1993

AcknowledgmentsI'm indebted to many people who assisted me in various ways while I was workingon Hackers. First, to the people who agreed to be interviewed for the book. Somewere veterans of this sort of journalistic exchange; others had only spoken tointerviewers on technical matters, and hadn't spoken of the personal orphilosophical nature of hacking before; others just hadn't spoken to people likeme. Almost all spoke freely and candidly; I think it not coincidental that hackersare as free in conversation, once they get started, as they are with sharingcomputer code. Many of the following consented to multiple interviews, and oftenfollow-up calls to verify facts or clarify technical details.My conversations with them were the backbone of the book, and I would like tothank, in alphabetical order, Arthur Abraham, Roe Adams, Bob Albrecht, DennisAJlison, Larry Bain, Alan Baum, Mike Beeler, Dorothy Bender, Bill Bennett,Chuck Benton, Bob and Carolyn Box, Keith Britton, Lois Britton, Bill Budge,Chuck Bueche, David Bunnell, Doug Carlston, Gary Carlston, Marie Cavin, MaryAnn Cleary, Bob Clements, Tracy Coats, David Crane, Edward Currie, RickDavidson, Bob Davis, Jack Dennis, Peter Deutsch, Steve Dompier, John Draper,Dan Drew, Mark Duchaineau, Les Earnest, Don Eastlake, Doug Englebart, ChrisEspinosa, Lee Felsenstein, LeRoy Finkel, Howard Franklin, Bob Frankston, EdFredkin, Gordon French, Martin Garetz, Harry Garland, Richard Garriott, LouGary, Bill Gates, Bill Godbout, Vincent Golden, Dave Gordon, Ralph Gorin, DanGorlin, Bill Gosper, Richard Greenblatt, Margaret Hamilton, Eric Hammond, JohnHarris, Brian Harvey, Ted Hoff, Kevin Hunt, Chris Iden, Jerry Jewell, RobertKahn, David Kidwell, Gary Kildall, Tom Knight, Joanne Koltnow, Alan Kotok,Marc LeBrun, Bob Leff, Mike Levitt, Efrem Lipkin, David Lubar, Olaf Lubeck,John McCarthy, John McKenzie, Robert Maas, Patricia Mariott, Bob Marsh,Roger Melen, Jude Milhon, Marvin Minsky, Fred Moore, Stewart Nelson, TedNelson, Jim Nitchak, Russ Noftsker, Kenneth Nussbacher, Rob O'Neal, PeterOlyphant, Adam Osborne, Bill Pearson, Tom Pittman, Larry Press, MalcolmRayfield, Robert Reiling, Randy Rissman, Ed Roberts, Steve Russell, PeterSamson, Bob Saunders, Warren Schwader, Gil Segal, Vie Sepulveda, DavidSilver, Dan Sokol, Les Solomon, Marty Spergel, Richard Stallman, JeffStephenson, Ivan Strand, Jay Sullivan, Dick Sunderland, Gerry Sussman, TomTatum, Dick Taylor, Robert Taylor, Dan Thompson, Al Tommervik, MargotTommervik, Mark Turmell, Robert Wagner, Jim Warren, Howard Warshaw,

Joseph We-izenbaum, Randy Wigginton, John Williams, Ken Williams, RobertaWilliams, Terry Winograd, Donald Woods, Steve Woz-niak, and Fred Wright.I would like to particularly thank those of the above who gave me extraordinaryamounts of attention, people who include (but are not limited to) Lee Felsenstein,Bill Gosper, Richard Greenblatt, Peter Samson, Ken Williams, and RobertaWilliams.During the course of my research I was benefited by the hospitality of institutionsthat included the MIT Computer Science Library, the Stanford Library, theComputer Museum, the Lawrence Hall of Science, and the University ofCalifornia Library.On my travels to California and Cambridge, I benefited from the hospitality ofPhyllis Coven, Art Kleiner, Bill Mandel, and John Williams. Lori Camey andothers typed up thousands of pages of transcripts. Viera Morse's exacting copyediting kept me linguistically honest. Magazine editors David Rosenthal and RichFried-man gave me work that kept me going. Good advice was given by fellowcomputer scribes Doug Garr, John Markoff, Deborah Wise, and members of theLunch Group. Support and cheerieading came from my parents, my sister DianeLevy, friends Larry Barth, Bruce Buschel, Ed Kaplan, William Mooney, RandallRothenberg, David Weinberg, and many others they know who they are who willhave to accept this insufficient mention.The book was also a product of the enthusiasm and patience of my agent, PatBerens, and my editor, James Raimes, who encouraged me mightily. Those termsalso apply to Teresa Carpenter, who coped magnificently with the book and itsauthor through the long process of research and writing.Finally, thanks to Steve Wozniak for designing that Apple II on which I wrote thebook. Had it not been for the revolution which I address in Hackers, my laborsmight have continued for another year, just to get a clean draft out of mytypewriter.

NotesThe main source of information for Hackers was over a hundred personalinterviews conducted in 1982 and 1983. Besides these, I refer to a number ofwritten sources.Part One* Some of the TMRC jargon was codified by Peter Samson in the unpublished "AnAbridged Dictionary of the TMRC Language," circa 1959. This was apparentlythe core of a hacker dictionary, kept on-line at MIT for years, which eventuallywas expanded to The Hacker Dictionary by Gus Steele et al. (New York: Harper& Row, 1983).* Samson's poem printed in F.O.B., the TMRC newsletter, Vol. VI, No. 1(Sept. 1960).* "...stories abounded..." See Philip J. Hilts' Scientific Temperaments: Three Livesin Contemporary Science (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1982).* For IBM background, see Katharine Davis Fishman's The ComputerEstablishment (New York: Harper & Row, 1981).* In addition to personal interviews, some information on Spacewar was gleanedfrom J. M. Garetz' article, "The Origin of Spacewar!" in Creative ComputingVideo and Arcade Games, as well as the same author's paper, "Spacewar: RealtimeCapability of the PDP-1," presented in 1962 before the Digital EquipmentComputer Users' Society, and Stewart Brand's "Spacewar: Fanatic Life andSymbolic Death Among the Computer Bums," in Rolling Stone, Dec. 7, 1972.* "What the user wants..." McCarthy quoted from his Time Sharing ComputerSystems (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1962).* How the Peg Solitaire game works is described in "Hakmem," by M. Beeler etal. (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, A.I. Lab Memo No. 239, Feb. 1972).

* Gosper's memo is part of "Hakmem," above.* Simon is quoted from Pamela McCorduck's Machines Who Think: A PersonalInquiry into the History and Prospects of Artificial Intelligence (San Francisco:W. H. Freeman & Co., 1979), a book I found extremely helpful for background onthe planners of the AI lab.* Donald Eastlake's report was "ITS Status Report" (Massachusetts Institute ofTechnology, A.I. Lab Memo No. 238, Apr. 1972).* Joseph Weizenbaum, Computer Power and Human Reason (San Francisco:W. H. Freeman & Co., 1976).* Bruce Buchanan quoted in the "Introduction to the Memo Series of the StanfordArtificial Intelligence Laboratory" (Stanford University Heuristic ProgrammingProject, Report No. HPP-83-25).* Besides the "Mathematical Games" column in the October 1970 and November1970 Scientific American, Martin Gardner writes at length on Conway's LIFE inhis Wheels, Life, and Other Mathematical Amusements (New York: W. H.Freeman & Co., 1983), which mentions Gosper prominently.Part Two* Benway's message and other electronic missives on the system were found inCommunity Memory's extensive scrapbooks kept on the project.* Felsenstein's quote from his four-page "Biographical Background Information,"dated Jan. 29, 1983.* Robert A. Heinlein, Revolt in 2100 (New York: Signet, 1954).* A first-person account of Albrecht 's activities in the early 1960s is found in "AModem-Day Medicine Show," Datamation, July 1963.* "...the possibility of millions..." See John Kemeny, Man and the Computer (NewYork: Scribners, 1972), quoted in Robert A. Kahn, "Creative Play with theComputer: A Course for Children," unpublished paper written for the LawrenceHall of Science, Berkeley, California.

* "...dymaxion..." See Hugh Kenner, Bucky: A Guided Tour of Buckminster Fuller(New York: Morrow, 1973).* Back issues of PCC, generously provided by Bob Albrecht, were particularlyhelpful for information about early seventies Bay Area hacking.* Ted Nelson, Computer Lib/Dream Machines (self-published, distributed by TheDistributors, South Bend, Ind., 1974).* Brautigan's poem is in The Pill Versus the Springhill Mine Disaster (New York:Dell, Laurel, 1973). Reprinted by permission.* "...a manipulator..." William Burroughs in Naked Lunch (New York: GrovePress, 1959).* Ivan Illich, Tools for Conviviality (New York: Harper Colophon Books, 1973).* "...in honor of the American folk hero..." See Felsenstein's paper, "The TomSwift Terminal, A Convivial Cybernetic Device," Journal of CommunityCommunications, June 1975.* For background on the evolution of the microchip and its effect on the SiliconValley, see Dirk Hansen's The New Alchemists (Boston: Little, Brown, 1982).* "Moore seemed to get the money..." See Thomas Al-bright and Charles Moore,"The Last Twelve Hours of the Whole Earth," Rolling Stone, July 8, 1971.Maureen Orth followed up the story for Rolling Stone in "Whole Earth $$$Demise Continues" (March 16, 1972).* The leaflet was reprinted in the first issue of Homebrew Computer ClubNewsletter (HBCCN), which I found invaluable for research in this section.* Pittman's article was published in The Second West Coast Computer FaireProceedings Jim Warren, ed., (Palo Alto: Computer Faire, 1978).* "When [Marsh] had little else..." Felsenstein's article, "Sol: The Inside Story,"appeared in the first issue (July 1977) of the short-lived ROM magazine.* The Esquire article, "Secrets of the Black Box," by Ron Rosenbaum, is reprintedin his Rebirth of the Salesman: Tales of the Song and Dance 70's (New York:

Delta, 1979).* "The winning isn't as important..." An unpublished interview with journalistDoug Garr.* Some of the Draper information was drawn from Donn Barker's FightingComputer Crime (New York: Scribners, 1983).* "Fidel Castro beard..." See Paul Ciotti, "Revenge of the Nerds," California,July 1982.* "Prepare for blastoff..." See Elizabeth Fairchild, "The First West Coast ComputerFaire," ROM, July 1977.* Nelson's speech is reprinted in The First West Coast Computer FaireProceedings, Jim Warren, ed. (Palo Alto: Computer Faire, 1977).Part Three* The Carpetbaggers (New York: Pocket Books, 1961).* The letter was printed in Purser's Magazine, Winter 1981.* "One participant later explained to a reporter..." The reporter was from Softline,another Tommervick publication, this one started with funds from the Williamses.Both Softline and Softalk provided considerable background information on theBrotherhood.* "...towel designers..." See John F. Hubner and William F. Kistner, "What WentWrong at Atari?" an article reprinted in InfoWorld. Nov. 28, 1983, and Dec. 5,1983. Other background on Atari from Steve Bloom's Video Invaders (New York:Arco, 1982).* "...interviewed in an article..." See Lee Gnomes, "Secrets of the SoftwarePirates," Esquire, January 1982.* "does not mean..." Stallman stored several "flames" (impassioned writings) onthe MIT computer system, including "Essay," "Gnuz," and "Wiezenbomb." Thequote is from his autobiographical "Essay."

* "that they give back all extensions..." From Stallman's "Essay."* "It is painful for me..." "Essay"

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