by Steven Levy
Hackers
Steven Levy
Beijing • Cambridge • Farnham • Köln • Sebastopol • Tokyo
Preface
I was first drawn to writing about hackers—those computer programmers and designers who regard computing as the most important thing in the world—because they were such fascinating people. Though some in the field used the term “hacker” as a form of derision, implying that hackers were either nerdy social outcasts or “unprofessional” programmers who wrote dirty, “nonstandard” computer code, I found them quite different. Beneath their often unimposing exteriors, they were adventurers, visionaries, risk-takers, artists . . . and the ones who most clearly saw why the computer was a truly revolutionary tool. Among themselves, they knew how far one could go by immersion into the deep concentration of the hacking mind-set: one could go infinitely far. I came to understand why true hackers consider the term an appellation of honor rather than a pejorative.
As I talked to these digital explorers, ranging from those who tamed multimillion-dollar machines in the 1950s to contemporary young wizards who mastered computers in their suburban bedrooms, I found a common element, a common philosophy that seemed tied to the elegantly flowing logic of the computer itself. It was a philosophy of sharing, openness, decentralization, and getting your hands on machines at any cost to improve the machines and to improve the world. This Hacker Ethic is their gift to us: something with value even to those of us with no interest at all in computers.
It is an ethic seldom codified but embodied instead in the behavior of hackers themselves. I would like to introduce you to these people who not only saw, but lived the magic in the computer and worked to liberate the magic so it could benefit us all. These people include the true hackers of the MIT artificial intelligence lab in the fifties and sixties; the populist, less sequestered hardware hackers in California in the seventies; and the young game hackers who made their mark in the personal computer of the eighties.
This is in no way a formal history of the computer era, or of the particular arenas I focus upon. Indeed, many of the people you will meet here are not the most famous names (certainly not the most wealthy) in the annals of computing. Instead, these are the backroom geniuses who understood the machine at its most profound levels and presented us with a new kind of lifestyle and a new kind of hero.
Hackers like Richard Greenblatt, Bill Gosper, Lee Felsenstein, and John Harris are the spirit and soul of computing itself. I believe their story—their vision, their intimacy with the machine itself, their experiences inside their peculiar world, and their sometimes dramatic, sometimes absurd “interfaces” with the outside world—is the real story of the computer revolution.
Who’s Who: The Wizards and Their Machines
Bob Albrecht. Founder 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 Brøderbund software company.
Bob Davis. Left a job in a liquor store to become the bestselling author of the 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 stumbled on the TX-0 at MIT—and hacked it along with the masters.
Steve Dompier. Homebrew member who first made Altair sing, and later wrote the Target game on the Sol, which entranced Tom Snyder.
John Draper. The notorious “Captain Crunch” who fearlessly explored phone systems, was jailed, and later hacked microcomputers. Cigarettes made him violent.
Mark Duchaineau. The young Dungeonmaster who copy-protected On-Line’s disks at his whim.
Chris Espinosa. Fourteen-year-old follower of Steve Wozniak and early Apple employee.
Lee Felsenstein. Former “military editor” of the Berkeley Barb and hero of an imaginary science-fiction novel, he designed computers with a “junkyard” approach and was a central figure in Bay Area hardware hacking in the seventies.
Ed Fredkin. Gentle founder of Information International, he thought himself the world’s greatest 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 computer, then held the first Homebrew Computer Club meeting.
Richard Garriott. Astronaut’s son who, as Lord British, created the Ultima world on computer disks.
Bill Gates. Cocky wizard and Harvard dropout who wrote Altair BASIC, and complained when hackers copied it.
Bill Gosper. Horowitz 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.
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, nonhacking youngster who took Wozniak’s Apple II, made lots 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.
Efrem Lipkin. Hacker-activist from New York who loved machines but hated their uses. Cofounded Community Memory; friend of Felsenstein.
LISP Machine. The ultimate hacker computer, invented mostly by Greenblatt and subject of a bitter dispute at MIT.
“Uncle” John McCarthy. Absentminded 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 cofounded Cromemco company to make circuit boards for Altair. His “Dazzler” played LIFE program 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 professor who headed AI lab and allowed the hackers to run free.
Fred Moore. Vagabond pacifist who hated money, loved technology, and cofounded Homebrew Club.
Stewart Nelson. Buck-toothed, diminutive, but fiery AI lab hacker who connected the PDP-1 computer to hack the phone system. Later cofounded Syst
ems Concepts company.
Ted Nelson. Self-described “innovator” and noted curmudgeon who self-published the influential Computer Lib book.
Russell Noftsker. Harried administrator of MIT AI lab in late sixties; later president of Symbolics company.
Adam Osborne. Bangkok-born publisher-turned-computer-manufacturer who considered himself a philosopher. 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 the cornerstone of the AI lab, with its gorgeous 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 til 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” Altair BASIC program on paper tape.
Sol Computer. Lee Felsenstein’s terminal-and-computer, built in two frantic months, almost the computer that turned things around. Almost wasn’t enough.
Les Solomon. Editor of Popular Electronics, 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, he 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 calm 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 worthy 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 gameshow 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 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 helped 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.
Stephen “Woz” Wozniak. Openhearted, technologically daring hardware hacker from San Jose suburbs, Woz built the Apple Computer for the pleasure of himself and friends.
Part I. 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 that 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 lifestyle, and would pu
t him into the forefront of a society envisioned only by a few sciencefiction writers of mild disrepute. He would discover a computer that he could play with.
The EAM room that Samson had chanced upon 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 yielded 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 occurrence—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.