Hackers

by Steven Levy

  He did not radically change his lifestyle. He still lived in the spartan second-floor apartment renting for under two hundred a month. He still washed his clothes in dimly lit laundromats near Osborne’s offices in Hayward. The only concession was his driving a company car, a new BMW. But perhaps due to age, some therapy sessions, and maturity, as well as his tangible success, he had grown in other ways. In his late thirties, he described himself as “still catching up, undergoing experiences you typically undergo in your early twenties.” He had a steady girlfriend, a woman who worked at Osborne.

  Of the Osborne stock that Lee sold, almost all went to Community Memory. Which, in the middle of the microcomputer boom, was going through some rough times.

  Much of the collective’s energies were going toward developing software to sell to make 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 software to anyone who cared to use it, or restricting it so that it would not benefit any military efforts. It was not clear that the military were clamoring to buy this software, which included a database and communications applications more useful for small businesses than weapon-bearers. But these were hardened Berkeley radicals, and discussions like these were to be expected. The person worrying most about the military was Efrem Lipkin, the hacker blessed with computing wizardry and cursed with a loathing for the uses to which computers were put.

  Lee and Efrem were not getting along. Efrem was not charmed with the personal computer industry, which he considered “luxury toys for the middle class.” He considered the Osborne computer “disgusting.” He resented Lee’s working for Osborne while he and the others were working for slave stipends at CM. The fact that much of the money for CM came from Lee’s work on that machine bothered Lipkin 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 Community Memory—using computers to bring people together—he could not accept certain things. Efrem Lipkin told the group that one thing he could not accept was any sales of the software he’d written to the military.

  The problem ran deeper than that. Personal computers like the Apple and the Osborne, along with modems in the style of Lee’s Pennywhistle, had engendered other examples of the kind of thing Community Memory was attempting. People were using computers for communication. And the original mythos of Community Memory, the ideal of machines of loving grace in a field watching over us, had been largely fulfilled—in less than ten years, computers had been demystified. They were 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 the racks. Jude Milhon, close friend to both Lee and Efrem, a person who’d given a substantial portion of her life to Community Memory, could hardly get the words out when she discussed it, but she knew: they’d blown it. The Revolt in 2100 was over, and it wasn’t even 1984 yet. Computers were accepted as convivial tools, and the power of computers was accessible at thousands of retail stores, for those who could pay.

  Racked with frustration, Efrem Lipkin blew up during a meeting. He laid down what he considered the failure of the group. “Basically I thought the thing was falling apart,” he later said. He was particularly hard on the topic of Lee’s money financing the group.

  Lee told him that this tainted money was paying Efrem’s salary.

  “Not anymore,” said Efrem. And the hacker was gone.

  Less than a year later, there was no more Osborne Computer. Management bungling worse than at Processor Technology had made the firm the first of many major financial disasters in what would be called “The Great Computer Shakeout.” Lee’s paper millions would be gone.

  But he would still have his dreams. One great battle had been won. Now, perhaps two thirds into the epic science-fiction novel, it was time to gather forces for a final spin into greatness. Sometime before Osborne Computer went bankrupt, Lee had been lamenting the opaque nature of the most recent computers, the lack of necessity that would lead people to actually go inside the chips and circuit boards and wire them. Hardware construction, he was saying, is an objectified way of thinking. It would be a shame if that went by the wayside, were limited only to the few. He did not think it would be gone. “[The magic] will always be in there to a certain 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 there isn’t anything in the box. You put the god in the box.”

  Lee Felsenstein and the hardware hackers had helped make the transition from the world of the MIT hacker, where the Hacker Ethic could flourish only within the limited, monastic communities around the machine, to a world where the machines were everywhere. Now, millions of computers were being made, each one an invitation to program, to explore, to mythologize in machine language, to change the world. Computers were rolling off assembly lines as blank slates; a new generation of hackers would be seduced by the power to fill the slates; and the software they created would be presented to a world which saw computers in quite a different way than it had a decade before.

  Part III. Game Hackers: The Sierras: The Eighties

  Chapter 14. The Wizard and the Princess

  Driving northeast out of Fresno on Route 41 toward the South Gate of Yosemite, you climbed slowly at first, through low fields dotted with huge, pitted boulders. About forty miles out was the town of Coarsegold; soon after, the road rose steeply, topping a mountain called Deadwood. Only after beginning the descent from Deadwood did one see how Route 41 formed the center strip of Oakhurst. Population under six thousand. A modern poly-mart named Raley’s (everything from health foods to electric blankets). A few fast-food joints, several clusters of specialty stores, two motels, and a real-estate office with a faded brown fiberglass statue of a bear outside it. After a mile or 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, a pitch on the price of land. The bear did not mention the transformation of the town by the personal computer. Oakhurst had seen hard times, but in 1982 it boasted one major success story. A company built, in a sense, by the hacker dream, and made possible only by the wizardry of Steve Wozniak and his Apple Computer. A company that symbolized how the products of hacking—computer programs which are works of art—had been recognized as such in significant sectors of the real world. 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, had spawned a new industry.

  Not far from Talking Bear was an inconspicuous two-story building constructed for offices and shops. Except for a small beauty parlor, a lawyer’s office, and the tiny local office of Pacific Gas and Electric, the entire building was occupied by the Sierra On-Line company. Its main product was code, lines of assembly-language computer code written on floppy disks which, when inserted into personal 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; this company 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 quickly that on any given day it was difficult to give an exact figure, but this was over triple the employees it 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 make some history and have some fun. Ken’s office today was relatively neat; the piles of papers on the desk were only several inches high, the sofa and chairs f
acing the desk were clear of floppy disks and magazines. On the wall was a lithograph, homage to Rodin’s Thinker: instead of that noble human 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, with swollen features that overwhelmed his friendly blue eyes. There was a hole in his red T-shirt and a hole in his jeans. His shoulder-length, dark-blond hair covered his head in an uncombed matting. He sat draped over his tall, brown executive armchair like some post-counterculture King Cole. In a pleasant California cadence punctuated by self-effacing comments that wistfully tripped off his tongue, he was explaining his life to a reporter. He had covered the tremendous growth of his company, his pleasure in spreading the gospel of computers to the world through the software his company 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 world power 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 hackers had started were talking about this. Computers had become the jewel of the economy, the only area of real growth in a recessionary period. More and more people were seeing the magic first glimpsed in batch-processed monasteries by the hands-on visionaries; in the power harnessed by the PDP-1 artists; in the accessible mastery of information provided by Ed Roberts and proselytized by Lee Felsenstein. As a result, companies like Sierra On-Line, started on shoestrings, were now big enough to contemplate public share offerings. Ken Williams’ talk was reminiscent of that heard several years before, when, using the same self-consciously nonchalant cadences, people would speak of one day getting rolfed: in both circumstances, an act once approached with evangelistic gravity was now regarded as somewhat of a delicious inevitability. Going public was something you naturally considered, at least when you had gone from being an ambitious computer programmer to an 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 games industry, a crucial time for the computer industry as a whole, and a crucial time for America. The elements had conspired to put Ken Williams, a self-described former hacker, into the driver’s seat of more than a Porsche 928.

  Ken Williams left his office and went to a large room two doors down in the same building. There were two rows of cubicles in this plaster-walled, industrially carpeted room. In each cubicle were a small computer and a monitor. This was the programming office, and this was where a young hacker had come to show his game off to Ken Williams. The hacker was a cocky-looking kid; he was 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 up the tank with his excess adrenaline.

  On the monitor was a prototype of a game called Wall Wars, written in the past few months in intense bursts between midnight and eight in the morning. While the hacker had worked in a small apartment, 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 the screen were equally dazzling robot-like creatures. A player would control one of the robots, shoot through 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 as a programmer for Mattel and go independent, joining the ranks of an elite group who were already being referred to as Software Superstars. They were the apogee of a Third Generation of hackers who had learned their programming artistry on small computers, who had never bootstrapped themselves 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 young hacker, masking his nervousness, began to explain something about the game, but Ken didn’t seem to be listening.

  “This is all so far?” Ken said.

  The hacker nodded and started to explain how the game would eventually play. Ken interrupted him.

  “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 started walking 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. It was indicative of the massive change in the way people thought of computers, used computers, and interacted 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 into computing. Only incidentally did he develop a relationship with the machine, and it was not until he thought himself its master that he even began to appreciate what kinds of changes the computer could 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 books and (b) he was only sixteen, and it was close to home. His major was physics; he had trouble with classes. Though Ken had always slid by academically on high aptitude, things like trigonometry and calculus weren’t as easily mastered as the subjects in high school were. Now there was this computer 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 would almost compulsively read, everything from the Hardy Boys to what became his favorite genre, the rags-to-riches stories of Harold Robbins. He identified with the underdog. Williams’ father was a television repairman for Sears, a rugged man who had moved to California from Cumberland County, Kentucky; his coworkers nicknamed him “Country.” Ken grew up in a fairly tough neighborhood in Pomona, at times sharing a bedroom with his two brothers. He avoided fights assiduously, 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 loved the idea of some poor kid making a bundle and getting all the girls. He was susceptible to the hyperbolic charms of a life like that of Jonas Cord, the young, ruthless, Howard Hughes-like figure in The Carpetbaggers who built his inheritance into an aviation and filmmaking empire. “That’s where I got my role model,” Williams later explained. Maybe it was some of Jonas Cord’s kind of ambition 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 make money. (He would later boast that he won so many sales contests on his paper route that he was on a first-name basis with the ticket-takers at Disneyland.) Ken’s inclination toward self-deprecation and his seemingly casual independence masked a fierce determination that showed up even as he was backed 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: to simulate a little mouse running through a maze, following a wall, and getting out of the maze. (It called for a program sim
ilar to the old Mouse in the Maze program on the TX-0, where the little mouse tries to find the martini glasses.) With six weeks gone in the nine-week course, Ken was headed toward an F. And there was nothing that Ken Williams, even then, liked about failure. So he kept at it until one day he came to a sudden realization. The computer really wasn’t so smart at all. It was just some dumb beast, following orders, doing what you told it to in exactly the order you determined. You could control it. You could be God.

  Power, power, power! Up here where the world was like a toy beneath me. Where I held the stick like my cock in my hands and there was no one . . . to say me no!

  —Jonas Cord, in Harold Robbins’ The Carpetbaggers

  The mouse got through the maze. Ken Williams got through the course. It was as if a light had gone on 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 months after 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 go steady the first week [we went out].”

  Roberta had been seeing a boy who lived upstate. Ken tried to force her into choosing between them. Roberta might well have decided against this insecure, pushy boy, but one day Ken opened up to 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 permanent commitment. “I didn’t want to be alone,” he later reflected.