by Steven Levy
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 computer game 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 the Apple, the Atari Home Computer. Since its acquisition by the huge Warner Communications 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 of its programmers, so terrified was Atari that someone would raid its ranks. And the thought of programmers getting together and comparing notes was even more frightening. What if one of its programmers realized that he could do better somewhere else? No such secrets for the Brotherhood, who in 1981 most often paid their programmers on a thirty percent royalty basis, a rate well known to all three companies and all the programmers working in the field.
The cooperation went deeper than partying. Almost as if they had unconsciously pledged to adhere to at least part of the Hacker Ethic, there were no secrets between them. Almost every day, Ken, Doug, and Jerry would talk on the phone, sharing information about this distributor or that floppy disk manufacturer. If some retailer 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 later recalled. “We would let each other know what we were working on so we wouldn’t do 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 be an Old Age interpretation. This Brotherhood was no cartel banding together to the detriment of the user and the technology. The user benefited by getting a wider range of games. And if a programmer from one of the companies couldn’t figure out some assembly-language trick with zero page graphics, the fact that he could get in touch with a programmer at another company was only the application of the Hacker Ethic to commerce. Why hide helpful information? If neat tricks were widely disseminated, the quality of all the software would rise, and people would get more out of computers, and it would be good for all the companies in the long run.
Maybe it was time to scrap the divisive practices of corporate business and adopt a more 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 a Darwinian, litigious, MBA-dominated maelstrom. Substance might then prevail over cloudy “corporate image,” in a world free of the insane, anti-productive practice of owning concepts and trade secrets which could be distributed far and wide. A world without all that destructive, cutthroat seriousness. The attitude in the Apple World seemed to be “If it’s not fun, if it’s not creative or new, it’s not worth it.” That’s what you would hear from Ken and Roberta Williams, from Doug and Gary Carlston, from Jerry Jewell.
This spirit reached its peak during the summer of 1981 in a scene imbued with all the gusto of a cola commercial: a whitewater 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 of that statement underlined the difference between this industry and others. Instead of sabotaging competitors, Ken Williams would forge his way through fierce waters alongside them.
The river was idyllic, but one participant later explained to a reporter that even more idyllic than the isolated pine-treed and high-canyon-walled setting was the feeling among the adventurers, who of course swapped all sorts of product, technological, and financial information: “We all sort of feel like we beat the system: we got to microcomputers before IBM did. We’re all competitors but we like to cooperate.”
Even the boatmen had to tell the participants, which included the heads of over six software firms, like Ken and Roberta, or the Carlstons, or Steve Dompier (the Homebrew member who was independently writing software now that Processor Tech was out of business) to stop talking shop. Sometimes they did stop. They stopped at the end of the ride as they approached the last rapid. Not for the first time, Ken Williams rammed his raft into someone else’s. Some people on that raft tumbled onto another one, and people from all ten rafts used their paddles and buckets to splash one another, and the Brotherhood exploded in a mist of white water, laughter, and thrilling camaraderie.
Chapter 16. The Third Generation
There were still the born hackers, those blessed with the unrelenting curiosity, the Hands-On Imperative. The last chosen in basketball and the first in arithmetic class to divine the mysteries of fractions. The fifth-graders who would mumble, when adults pressed them for explanation, that they “like numbers.” The cowlicked kids in the back of the junior high classroom who got so far ahead of the class that the math teachers gave up on them, let them skip to future chapters in the text, and finally allowed them to leave the room and wander downstairs to discover, with much the same wonder as Peter Samson stumbling upon the EAM room 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 which held, wonder of wonders, games. You could play the games, but if you were hacker-born, that would not be enough. You would ask, “Why can’t the game do this?” “Why can’t it have that feature?” And since this was a computer, for the first time in your life you would have the power to change this into that. Someone would 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 not unattractive, a towheaded blond with a goofily appealing smile and the breathless verbal delivery of someone whose enthusiasm runs too high to acknowledge cycle-wasting grammatical interrupts, he was a social outcast. He would later admit cheerfully that he had been “the worst English student in school and the worst in P.E.” His roots were in the upper-middle class of San Diego. His father was a bank officer. His siblings, a younger brother and two older twin sisters, were uninterested in technical matters. “I was completely, a hundred percent technical,” John later said with endearing redundancy. It seemed he had no more intimate confidant than the remote computer—he did not even know its location—connected to his school’s time-sharing terminal.
John Harris was not one of those methodical, plodding geniuses who dazzled folks in science fairs. Impressing adults was not his 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 to find his way into a computer center like the MIT AI lab, where he would have loitered and learned until he got his chances at a terminal. It might have felt like delivery into heaven, as it had felt to fourteen-year-old David Silver when he was initiated 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 the Altair. John Harris’ generation was the first that did not have to beg, borrow, or steal computer time from a distant mainframe attached to teletype terminals. In the lush suburbs around San Diego, it was not uncommon for a high school kid in 1980 to cajole his parents, or even earn enough money from a part-time job, for a large purchase. Most kids wanted cars. But as the early computer store owners knew well, other kids were asking for computers.
When John Harris was in eleventh grade, a senior he knew let him use his Commodore PET computer. John later recalled: “I started playing games on his system and started programming on his system, a Star Trek game. And a couple of other things in BASIC that I had learned and that were a lot more fun than any of the time-sharing stuff was. It was quicker, was much more interactive, had graphics and sound effects . . . Teletypes were OK, but I hadn’t known anything else existed, and I went, ‘Wow, this is great . . .’”
For John Harris’ Third Generation, which followed the pioneering generation of mainframe hackers and the second generation of hardware hackers who liberated computers from the institutions, access to computers was easy. You could own one, or use a friend’s. The computers were not as powerful as those in institutions and there were no communities of wizards, no Greenblatts or Gospers to urge you to abandon loserdom and engage in The Right Thing until you could be called a winner. But those facts of life did not bother this Third Generation. They could get hands on computers now. In their bedrooms. And whatever they learned about hacking, and whatever elements of the Hacker Ethic they picked up, would be determined by a learning process that grew from the hacking itself.
John Harris was fascinated with the PET. You could do things so much more easily with a personal computer. John was particularly impressed with the full-screen editing capability, a great improvement on the teletype-style edit-one-line-at-a-time process he’d been stuck at before. But the best part of the PET and other personal computers were the games.
“I’m obsessed with all forms of games,” John Harris later said. “It’s just me. I guess!” It was only natural that a junior high school electronics junkie would be dazzled by the batch of space warfare arcade games appearing in the late seventies: Harris did not know that their inspiration was Slug Russell’s Spacewar hack. 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 you off. What impressed him about Crazy Climber was its groundbreaking creation of a 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 was similar to his attitude toward computer languages or his preference for a certain computer over another: an intense personal identification and a tendency to take offense at an inefficient, suboptimal way of doing things. John came to feel that games should have a certain degree of innovation, a certain degree of graphic razzle-dazzle, and a certain degree of challenge. His standards of “playability” were rigid. He took personal offense at cases where a programmer could have made the game better in some obvious (to John Harris) way, but did not, whether because 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 game author should include every possible frill to make the game more enjoyable. Not neglecting, of course, to perfect the basic structure of the game so that it was essentially bug-free.
To fulfill his own exacting standards, John needed his own computer. He began saving money. He even cut down on playing arcade games. John was out of high school by then, enrolled in a local college in electrical engineering, and working at a bank’s data processing center. One of his friends owned the hottest hacker home computer around, the Apple, but John did not like the machine’s editing capabilities or its quirky graphics.
With money in hand he went computer shopping, for a PET. The salesmen sneered at him. “The only person who buys a PET is a person down to his last penny,” they told him. “A person who can’t afford an Apple II.” But John Harris did not want Wozniak’s creation. He had seen more of his friend’s Apple and was convinced more than ever that the Apple was severely brain-damaged. His contempt for the Apple grew beyond all bounds. “Even the sight of that computer drives me up the wall,” he would later say. At the very mention of the machine, Harris would recoil and make the sign of the cross, as if warding off a vampire. He could explain at length just why he felt this way—no full-screen editor, the necessity of loading the machine up with more hardware before it really cooked, the limited keyboard . . . but this loathing went beyond reason. Somehow Harris felt the Apple stopped you from doing what you wanted to do. Whereas other hackers considered the Apple’s limitations as challenging hurdles to leap over or as a seductive whisper saying, “Take me further,” Harris deemed them ridiculous. So he asked the salesman at one 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-up game machine with a keyboard. In fact, it had a slot to put cartridges inside, a mark that the machine was geared at least in part for novices too befuddled to handle even a tape cassette, let alone a floppy disk. There wasn’t even a decent manual. John Harris played with an 800 in the store, and discovered that, like the PET and unlike the Apple, it had full-screen editing. But he wanted to know what was inside it, so he went to another store, where a salesman slipped him a piece of paper with some commands for this new computer. Like some secret code for use by the French Resistance. No code-breaker devoured a message as avidly as John Harris did these papers. He discovered that the Atari had a set of keystroke graphic symbols, 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 things he grudgingly considered worthwhile on the Apple. He bought an 800.
He began programming in BASIC, but very soon realized that he would have to learn assembly language to do the games he wanted to do. He quit working at the bank and got a job at a company called Gamma Scientific, which had needed a programmer to do assembly-language work on its system and was willing to train someone.
Transferring his new assembly-language skills to the Atari was difficult. The Atari was a “closed” machine. This meant that Atari sequestered the information concerning the specific results you got by using microprocessor assembly-language commands. It was as if Atari did not want you to be able to write on it. It was the antithesis to the Hacker Ethic. John would write Atari’s people and even call 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 any competition to its own software division. This was not a good reason at all to close your machine. (Say what you would about Apple, the machine was “open,” its secrets available to all and sundry.) So John was left to ponder the Atari’s mysteries, wondering why Atari technicians told him that the 800 gave you only four colors in the graphics mode, while on the software they released for it, games like Basketball and Super Breakout, there were clearly more than eight colors. He became determined to discover its secrets, the mysteries of its system, the better to extend it and control it.
For the quest, John enlisted a friend who knew assembly language. They got hold of a cassette-tape disassembler written in BASIC, something which broke down programs into their object code, and disassembled the software sold by Atari line by line. Then they would take these weird instructions, which accessed all sorts of oddball memory locations on the 6502 chip inside the Atari, and poke them into the machine to see what happened. They discovered things like "display list interrupts,” which enabled you to use a greater number of colors on the display screen; “user definable characters”; and, best of all, something that they would later know as "player-missile graphics,” which was no less than an assembly-language method of accessing a special Atari chip called "Antic" that handled graphics on its own, letting you run the rest of the program on the main chip. Since one of the more difficult aspects of programming games was parceling out the activities of the main chip between sound, graphics, and game logic, player-missile graphics gave you a huge advantage. How could a company that did something 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 their knowledge to liberate the machine, distribute the technical data, break the Atari marketplace wide open. But around that time some bootleg hardware manuals appeared. It seemed that some pirates inside Atari had procured copies of its internal hardware and reference manual and were distributing them for high prices to interested parties. The manual, however, was written in such a way that on
ly people 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 bootleg manual wasn’t much help except to those people who had integrated the workings of the Atari 800 into their own mental cosmology. People like John Harris.
Eighteen-year-old John Harris used this knowledge to write games. He wrote games that he would like to play, and his desire to make the games flashy enough and exciting enough to please him as a player incited him to learn more about the Atari system. As a science-fiction fan who often attended the “Cons”—the conclaves of sci-fi nuts, where people lost in technological fantasy were considered normal—he naturally gravitated to space warfare games. He would create spaceships, space stations, asteroids, and other extraterrestrial phenomena. From his imagination he would make these shapes appear on his display screen, and then he would control them. Putting them up on the screen and controlling them was much more important than the eventual fate of the game itself: John Harris could be careless, and he often lost entire programs by saving files on the wrong side of the cassette tape, or expanding the code so the program would crash—finding out only then that he had failed to make a backup tape. He would feel bad about it, but keep hacking.
Hacking was the best thing in his life. He had started working full-time at Gamma Scientific 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, he had his 800, now equipped with a disk drive for fancy assembly-language programming. But without a tightly knit community like the one the MIT hackers had, 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. He describes his father as less than enthusiastic about his mania for programming games on an Atari 800 computer. So Harris moved into a house with a few fellow sci-fi fans. He would attend the Cons with them, wild affairs where they could stay up for days at a stretch, prowling the hotel halls with plastic dart guns. But it often seemed to John that his friends were planning some neat excursion without inviting him. John Harris was a friendly, loping, puppy-dog youngster, and very sensitive to these apparent rejections.