Hackers, Heroes of the Computer Revolution, by Steven Levy
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Steven Levy >> Hackers, Heroes of the Computer Revolution, by Steven Levy
Hackers, Heroes of the Computer Revolution, by Steven Levy
(C)1984 by Steven Levy
Chapters 1 and 2 of
Hackers, Heroes of the Computer Revolution
by Steven Levy
Who's Who
The Wizards and their Machines
Bob Albrecht
Found of People's Computer Company who took visceral pleasure
in exposing youngsters to computers.
Altair 8800
The pioneering microcomputer that galvanized hardware hackers.
Building this kit made you learn hacking. Then you tried to
figure out what to DO with it.
Apple II ][
Steve Wozniak's friendly, flaky, good-looking computer,
wildly successful and the spark and soul of a thriving industry.
Atari 800
This 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 Box
World-record-holding gold prospectors turned software stars,
working for Sierra On-Line.
Doug Carlston
Corporate lawyer who chucked it all to form the Broderbund
software company.
Bob Davis
Left job in liquor store to become best-selling author
of Sierra On-Line computer game "Ulysses and the Golden Fleece."
Success was his downfall.
Peter Deutsch
Bad in sports, brilliant at math, Peter was still in short pants
when he stubled on the TX-0 at MIT--and hacked it
along with the masters.
Steve Dompier
Homebrew member who first made the Altair sing,
and later wrote the "Targe" game on the Sol
which entranced Tom Snyder.
John Draper
The notorious "Captain Crunch" who fearlessly explored
the phone systems, got jailed, hacked microprocessors.
Cigarettes made his violent.
Mark Duchaineau
The young Dungeonmaster who copy-protected On-Lines disks
at his whim.
Chris Esponosa
Fourteen-year-old follower of Steve Wozniak
and early Apple employee.
Lee Felsenstein
Former "military editor" of Berkeley Barb,
and hero of an imaginary science-fiction novel,
he designed computers with "junkyard" approach
and was central figure in Bay Area hardware
hacking in the seventies.
Ed Fredkin
Gentle founder of Information International,
thought himself world's greates programmer
until he met Stew Nelson. Father figure to hackers.
Gordon French
Silver-haired hardware hacker whose garage held not cars
but his homebrewed Chicken Hawk comptuer, then held the
first Homebrew Computer Club meeting.
Richard Garriott
Astronaut's son who, as Lord British,
created Ultima world on computer disks.
Bill Gates
Cocky wizard, Harvard dropout who wrote Altair BASIC,
and complained when hackers copied it.
Bill Gosper
Horwitz of computer keyboards, master math and LIFE hacker
at MIT AI lab, guru of the Hacker Ethic and student of
Chinese restaurant menus.
Richard Greenblatt
Single-minded, unkempt, prolific, and canonical MIT hacker
who went into night phase so often that he zorched
his academic career. The hacker's hacker.
John Harris
The young Atari 800 game hacker who became Sierra On-Line's
star programmer, but yearned for female companionship.
IBM-PC
IBM's entry into the personal computer market
which amazingly included a bit of the Hacker Ethic,
and took over. [H.E. as open architecture.]
IBM 704
IBM was The Enemy, and this was its machine,
the Hulking Giant computer in MIT's Building 26.
Later modified into the IBM 709, then the IBM 7090.
Batch-processed and intolerable.
Jerry Jewell
Vietnam vet turned programmer who founded Sirius Software.
Steven Jobs
Visionary, beaded, non-hacking youngster who took
Wozniak's Apple II ][, made a lot of deals,
and formed a company that would make a billion dollars.
Tom Knight
At sixteen, an MIT hacker who would name the
Incompatible Time-sharing System. Later a
Greenblatt nemesis over the LISP machine schism.
Alan Kotok
The chubby MIT student from Jersey who worked
under the rail layout at TMRC, learned the phone system
at Western Electric, and became a legendary TX-0 and PDP-1 hacker.
Effrem Lipkin
Hacker-activist from New York who loved machines
but hated their uses. Co-Founded Community Memory;
friend of Felsenstein.
LISP Machine
The ultimate hacker computer, invented mosly by Greenblatt
and subject of a bitter dispute at MIT.
"Uncle" John McCarthy
Absent-minded but brilliant MIT [later Stanford] professor
who helped pioneer computer chess, artificial intelligence, LISP.
Bob Marsh
Berkeley-ite and Homebrewer who shared garage with Felsenstein
and founded Processor Technology, which made the Sol computer.
Roger Melen
Homebrewer who co-founded Cromemco company to make
circuit boards for Altair. His "Dazzler" played LIFE
programs on his kitchen table.
Louis Merton
Pseudonym for the AI chess hacker whose tendency
to go catatonic brought the hacker community together.
Jude Milhon
Met Lee Felsenstein through a classified ad in the
Berkeley Barb, and became more than a friend--
a member of the Community Memory collective.
Marvin Minsky
Playful and brilliant MIT prof who headed the AI lave
and allowed the hackers to run free.
Fred Moore
Vagabond pacifist who hated money, loved technology,
and co-founded Homebrew Club.
Stewart Nelson
Buck-toothed, diminutive, but fiery AI lab hacker
who connected the PDP-1 comptuer to hack the phone system.
Later co-founded the Systems Concepts company.
Ted Nelson
Self-described "innovator" and noted curmudgeon
who self-published the influential Computer Lib book.
Russel Noftsker
Harried administrator of MIT AI lab in the late sixties;
later president of Symbolics company.
Adam Osborne
Bangkok-born publisher-turned-computer-manufacturer
who considered himself a philsopher. Founded Osborne
Computer Company to make "adequate" machines.
PDP-1
Digital Equipment's first minicomputer, and in 1961
an interactive godsend to the MIT hackers and a
slap in the face to IBM fascism.
PDP-6
Designed in part by Kotok, this mainframe computer
was cornerstone of AI lab, with its gorgeious instruction set
and sixteen sexy registers.
Tom Pittman
The religious Homebrew hacker who lost his wife
but kept the faith with his Tiny Basic.
Ed Roberts
Enigmatic founder of MITS company who shook the world
with his Altair computer. He wanted to help people
build mental pyramids.
Steve [Slug] Russell
McCarthy's "coolie," who hacked the Spacewar program,
first videogame, on the PDP-1. Never made a dime from it.
Peter Samson
MIT hacker, one of the first, who loved systems, trains,
TX-0, music, parliamentary procedure, pranks, and hacking.
Bob Saunders
Jolly, balding TMRC hacker who married early,
hacked till late at night eating "lemon gunkies,"
and mastered the "CBS Strategy on Spacewar.
Warren Schwader
Big blond hacker from rural Wisconsin who went from
the assembly line to software stardom but couldn't
reconcile the shift with his devotion to Jehovah's Witnesses.
David Silver
Left school at fourteen to be mascot of AI lab;
maker of illicit keys and builder of a tiny robot
that did the impossible.
Dan Sokol
Long-haired prankster who reveled in revealing technological
secrets at Homebrew Club. Helped "liberate" Alair BASIC
on paper tape.
Les Solomon
Editor of Popular Electroics, the puller of strings
who set the computer revolution into motion.
Marty Spergel
The Junk Man, the Homebrew member who supplied circuits
and cables and could make you a deal for anything.
Richard Stallman
The Last of the Hackers, who vowed to defend
the principles of Hackerism to the bitter end.
Remained at MIT until there was no one to eat
Chinese food with.
Jeff Stephenson
Thirty-year-old martial arts veteran and hacker
who was astounded that joining Sierra On-Line
meant enrolling in Summer Camp.
Jay Sullivan
MAddeningly clam wizard-level programmer at Informatics who
impressed Ken Williams by knowing the meaning of the word "any."
Dick Sunderland
Chalk-complexioned MBA who believed that firm managerial
bureaucracy was a worth goal, but as president of Sierra On-Line
found that hackers didn'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 Tommervik
With her husband Al, long-haired Margot parlayed her
game show winnings into a magazine that deified the Apple Computer.
Tom Swift Terminal
Lee Felsenstein's legendary, never-to-be-built computer terminal
which would give the user ultimate leave to get his hands on the world.
TX-0
Filled a small room, but in the late fifties this $3 million machine
was the world's first personal computer--for the community of
MIT hackers that formed around it.
Jim Warren
Portly purveyor of "techno-gossip" at Homebrew,
he was first editor of hippie-styled Dr. Dobbs Journal,
later started the lucrative Computer Faire.
Randy Wigginton
Fifteen-year-old member of Steve Wozniak's kiddie corps,
he help Woz trundle the Apple II to Homebrew.
Still in high school when he became Apple's first software employee.
Ken Williams
Arrogant and brilliant young programmer who saw the writing on the CRT
and started Sierra On-Line to make a killing and improve society
by selling games for the Apple computer.
Roberta Williams
Ken Williams' timid wife who rediscovered her own creativity
by writing "Mystery House," the first of her many bestselling
computer games.
Steven "Woz" Wozniak
Openhearted, technologically daring hardware hacker
from San Jose suburbs. Woz built the Apple Computer
for the pleasure of himself and friends.
PART ONE True Hackers
CAMBRIDGE: The Fifties and Sixties
CHAPTER 1 THE TECH MODEL RAILROAD CLUB
Just why Peter Samson was wandering around in Building 26 in the
middle of the night 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 befriend in this,
his freshman year at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in
the winter of 1958-59, no explanation would be required.
Wandering around the labyrinth of laboratories and storerooms,
searching for the secrets of telephone switching in machine
rooms, tracing paths of wires or relays in subterranean steam
tunnels . . . for some, it was common behavior, and there was
no need to justify the impulse, when confronted with a closed
door with an unbearably intriguing noise behind it, to open the
door uninvited. And then, if there was no one to physically bar
access to whatever was making that intriguing noise, to touch the
machine, start flicking switches and noting responses, and
eventually to loosen a screw, unhook a template, jiggle some
diodes and tweak a few connections. Peter Samson and his friends
had grown up with a specific relationship to the world, wherein
things had meaning only if you found out how they worked. And
how would you go about that if not by getting your hands on them?
It was in the basement of Building 26 that Samson and his friends
discovered the EAM room. Building 26 was a long glass-and-steel
structure, one of MIT's newer buildings, contrasting with the
venerable pillared structures that fronted the Institute on
Massachusetts Avenue. In the basement of this building void of
personality, the EAM room. Electronic Accounting Machinery. A
room that housed machines 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 it would seem he was racing through
lists of possible meanings of statements in mid-word, had viewed
computers on his visits to MIT from his hometown of Lowell,
Massachusetts, less than thirty miles from campus. This made him
a "Cambridge urchin," one of dozens of science-crazy high
schoolers in the region who were drawn, as if by gravitational
pull, to the Cambridge campus. He had even tried to rig up his
own computer with discarded parts of old pinball machines: they
were the best source of logic elements he could find.
LOGIC ELEMENTS: the term seems to encapsulate what drew Peter
Samson, son of a mill machinery repairman, to electronics. The
subject made sense. When you grow up with an insatiable
curiosity as to how things work, the delight you find upon
discovering something as elegant as circuit logic, where all
connections have to complete their loops, is profoundly
thrilling. Peter Samson, who early on appreciated the
mathematical simplicity of these things, could recall seeing a
television show on Boston's public TV channel, WGBH, which gave a
rudimentary introduction to programming a computer in its own
language. It fired his imagination: 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, built
machines of his own, entered science project competitions and
contests, and went to the place that people of his ilk aspired
to: MIT. The repository of the very brightest of those weird
high school kids with owl-like glasses and underdeveloped
pectorals who dazzled math teachers and flunked PE, who dreamed
not of scoring on prom night, but of getting to the finals of the
General Electric Science Fair competition. MIT, where he would
wander the hallways at two o'clock in the morning, looking for
something interesting, and where he would indeed discover
something 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 envisioned only by a few
science-fiction writers of mild disrepute. He would discover a
computer that he could play with.
The EAM room which Samson had chanced on was loaded with large
keypunch machines the size of squat file cabinets. No one was
protecting them: the room was staffed only by day, when a select
group who had attained official clearance were privileged 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 ones wanted entered on the cards. A hole in the card
would represent some instruction to the computer, telling it to
put a piece of data somewhere, or perform a function on a piece
of data, or move a piece of data from one place to another. An
entire stack of these cards made one computer program, a program
being a series of instructions which yield some expected result,
just as the instructions in a recipe, when precisely followed,
lead to a cake. Those cards would be taken to yet another
operator upstairs who would feed the cards into a "reader" that
would note where the holes were and dispatch this information to
the IBM 704 computer on the first floor of Building 26. The
Hulking Giant.
The IBM 704 cost several million dollars, took up an entire room,
needed constant attention from a cadre of professional machine
operators, and required special air-conditioning so that the
glowing vacuum tubes inside it would not heat up to
data-destroying temperatures. When the air-conditioning broke
down--a fairly common occurrences--a loud gong would sound, and
three engineers would spring from a nearby 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, and pressing buttons and switches on the machine were
what was commonly called a Priesthood, and those privileged
enough to submit data to those most holy priests were the
official acolytes. It was an almost ritualistic exchange.
ACOLYTE: Oh machine, would you accept my offer of information so
you may run my program 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 direct access to the machine itself, and they would
not be able to see for hours, sometimes for 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 of Samson, who wanted to get at the damn machine. For
this was what life was all about.
What Samson did not know, and was delighted to discover, was that
the EAM room also had a particular keypunch machine called the
407. Not only could it punch cards, but it could also read
cards, sort them, and print them on listings. No one seemed to
be guarding these machines, which were computers, sort of. Of
course, using them would be no picnic: one needed to actually
wire up what was called 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 get
something that looked like a rat's nest but would fit into this
electromechanical machine 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 in model railroading. It
was a casual, unthinking step into a science-fiction future, but
that was typical of the way that an odd subculture was pulling
itself up by its bootstraps and growing to underground
prominence--to become a culture that would be the impolite,
unsanctioned soul of computerdom. It was among the first
computer hacker escapades of the Tech Model Railroad Club, or
TMRC.
* * *
Peter Samson had been a member of the Tech Model Railroad Club
since his first week at MIT in the fall of 1958. The first event
that entering MIT freshmen attended was a traditional welcoming
lecture, the same one that had been given for as long as anyone
at MIT could remember. LOOK AT THE PERSON TO YOUR LEFT . . .
LOOK AT THE 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 the collective
freshman throat that signaled unprecedented dread. All their
lives, these freshmen had been almost exempt from academic
pressure. The exemption had been earned by virtue of brilliance.
Now each of them had a person to the right and a 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, classmates were perceived in a sort of friendly haze:
maybe they would be of assistance in the consuming quest to find
out how things worked, and then to master them. There were
enough obstacles to learning already--why bother with stupid
things like brown-nosing teachers and striving for grades? To
students like Peter Samson, the quest meant more than the degree.
Sometime after the lecture came Freshman Midway. All the campus
organizations--special-interest groups, fraternities, and such--
set up booths in a large gymnasium to try to recruit new members.
The group that snagged Peter was the Tech Model Railroad Club.
Its members, bright-eyed and crew-cutted upperclassmen who spoke
with the spasmodic cadences of people who want words out of the
way in a hurry, boasted a spectacular display of HO gauge trains
they had in a permanent clubroom 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 shingle-clad
temporary 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 lit feel 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 little town, 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 crafted to resemble their full-scale
counterparts, and they chugged along the twists and turns of
track with picture-book perfection.
And then Peter Samson looked underneath the chest-high boards
which held the layout. It took his breath away. Underneath this
layout was a more massive matrix of wires and relays,and crossbar
switches than Peter Samson had ever dreamed existed. There were
neat regimental lines of switches, and achingly regular rows of
dull bronze relays, and a long, rambling tangle of red, blue, and
yellow wires--twisting and twirling like a rainbow-colored
explosion of Einstein's hair. It was an incredibly 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 after they logged forty hours of work on the layout.
Freshman Midway had been on a Friday. By Monday, Peter Samson
had his key.
* * *
There were two factions of TMRC. Some members loved the idea of
spending their time building and painting replicas of certain
trains with historical and emotional value, or creating realistic
scenery for the layout. This was the knife-and-paintbrush
contingent, and it subscribed to railroad magazines and booked
the club for trips on aging train lines. The other faction
centered on the Signals and Power Subcommittee of the club, and
it cared far more about what went on under the layout. This was
The System, which worked something like a collaboration between
Rube Goldberg and Wernher von Braun, and it was constantly being
improved, revamped, perfected, and sometimes "gronked"--in club
jargon, screwed up. S&P people were obsessed with the way The
System worked, its increasing complexities, how any change you
made would affect other parts, and how you could put those
relationships between the parts to optimal use.
Many of the parts for The System had been donated by the Western
Electric College Gift Plan, directly from the phone company. The
club's faculty advisor was also in charge of the campus phone
system, and had seen to it that sophisticated phone equipment was
available for the model railroaders. Using that equipment as a
starting point, the Railroaders had devised a scheme which
enabled several people to control trains at once, even if the
trains were at different parts of the same track. 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 crossbar executors and step switches which let
you actually hear the power being transferred from one block to
another by an other-worldly chunka-chunka-chunka sound.
It was the S&P group who devised this fiendishly ingenious
scheme, and it was the S&P group who harbored the kind of
restless curiosity which led them to root around campus buildings
in search of ways to get their hands on computers. They were
lifelong disciples of a Hands-On Imperative. Head of S&P was an
upperclassman named 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-frequency transformer for a high
school project; it was his six-foot-high version of a Tesla coil,
something devised by an engineer in the 1800s which was supposed
to send out furious waves of electrical power. Saunders said his
coil project managed to blow out television reception for blocks
around. Another person who gravitated to S&P was Alan Kotok, a
plump, chinless, thick-spectacled New Jerseyite in Samson's
class. Kotok's family could recall him, at age three, prying a
plug out of a wall with a screwdriver and causing a hissing
shower of sparks to erupt. When he was six, he was building and
wiring lamps. In high school he had once gone on a tour of the
Mobil Research Lab in nearby Haddonfield, and saw his first
computer--the exhilaration of that experience helped him decide
to enter MIT. In his freshman year, 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's junkyard in Somerville scrounging for parts, who would
spend hours on their backs resting on little rolling chairs they
called "bunkies" to get underneath tight spots in the switching
system, who would work through the night making the wholly
unauthorized 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 The System, arguing about what could be done next,
developing a jargon of their own that seemed incomprehensible to
outsiders who might chance on these teen-aged fanatics, with
their checked short-sleeve shirts, pencils in their pockets,
chino pants, and, always, a bottle of Coca-Cola by their side.
(TMRC purchased its own Coke 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
change machine for Coke buyers that was still in use a decade
later.) When a piece of equipment 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 corner of the room
were not called the office, but the "orifice"; one who insisted
on studying for courses was a "tool"; garbage was called "cruft";
and a project undertaken or a product built not solely to fulfill
some constructive goal, but with some wild pleasure taken in mere
involvement, was called a "hack."