by Steven Levy
John Harris guessed that it would be a quick-and-dirty three-week project (his original one-week boast had been an idle one) to do a perfectly admirable Atari version of Frogger. This was the kind of illusion with which hackers often begin projects. Working in the office he had set up in the smallest of three bedrooms in his rambling orange-wood house—a room cluttered with papers, discarded hardware, 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 been typing for more than a few hours.’ And of course it had already been through the night and that was the next morning.”
The work went swiftly, and the program was shaping up beautifully. A friend of John’s in San Diego had written some routines to generate continuous music, using the three-voice sound synthesizer chip in the Atari to mingle the strains of the original Frogger theme with Camptown Races, all with the gay contrapuntal upbeat of a calliope. Harris’ graphic shapes were never better—the leaping frog, the little hot rods and trucks on the highway, the diving turtles and the goofy-looking alligators in the water . . . every detail lovingly defined on shape tables, worked into assembly-language subroutines, and expertly integrated into game play. It was the kind of game, Harris believed, that only a person in love with gaming could implement. No one but a true hacker would approach it with the lunatic intensity and finicky artistic exactitude of John Harris.
It did not turn out to be a quick-and-dirty three-week project, but no one had really expected it to. Software always takes longer than you expect. Almost two months into the project, though, John was well over the hump. He decided to take off work for a couple of days to go back to San Diego for Software Expo, a charity benefit for muscular dystrophy. As a leading software artist, John was going to display his work, including the nearly completed Frogger. So John Harris packed the pre-release Frogger into his software collection, and took the whole box with him to Southern 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 John Harris had ever written (John had a backup copy, of course, but he brought that along in case the primary disk didn’t boot), John’s library included almost every disk 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-tape programs for the PDP-1 at MIT. One could not turn one’s back on a priceless collection like that; one held it in one’s hand almost every moment. Otherwise, in the single moment that one forgot to hold it in one’s hand and turned one’s back on it—for instance, during a moment of rapt conversation with an admirer—well, as Murphy’s Law holds (“Whatever can go wrong, will”), one’s valuable software library 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 his software collection was gone, he knew his soul had been wounded. Nothing was more important to John than the floppy disks in that box, and he felt the void deeply. It was not as if the computer had chomped up one disk and he could go into marathon 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 with which he had created the masterpiece were gone as well. There was no worse disaster imaginable.
John Harris went into a deep depression.
He was much too upset to boot up his Atari and begin the laborious task of rewriting Frogger when he returned to Oakhurst. For the next two months, he wrote no more than ten lines of source code. It was hard to even sit in front of the computer. He spent almost all day, every day, at Oakhurst’s single arcade, a small storefront in a tiny shopping center across the street from the two-story office building that On-Line was moving into. As arcades went, this was a hole, with dark 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 as cashier. He would exchange game tokens for quarters, and when he wasn’t on duty he 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 the biggest hill he could find, and try to drive to its crest. He would do anything, in fact, but program.
“I spent almost every hour of every day down at the arcade waiting for some girl to walk in there,” he later recalled. “I’d go home and play a game on my computer and then try to slip in the program disk and try to start programming as if I were playing the game.” None of it worked. “I could not motivate myself to write two lines of source code.”
Ken Williams’ heart was unmoved by John Harris’ loss. It was hard for Ken to have sympathy for a twenty-year-old boy to whom he was paying several thousand dollars a month in royalties. Ken felt a sense of friendship toward John, but Ken had also developed a theory about friends and business. “Everything is personal and good friends up to about ten thousand dollars,” Ken later explained. “Once past ten thousand dollars, friendship doesn’t matter.” The possible earnings of Frogger were worth many times that five-figure threshold.
Even before John had once again proved his idiocy to Ken Williams by his carelessness at the Software Expo, Ken had been impatient with his ace programmer. Ken thought John should have written Frogger in less than a month to 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 have stopped. He likes the ego satisfaction of having something out that’s better than anything else in the marketplace.” Bad enough, but the fact that John was not working at all now, just because he suffered a setback, drove Ken wild. “He would say 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 Frogger was. 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 not Ken’s employee, he was a freelance programmer. He had not guaranteed Ken any delivery date. John could do whatever he wanted. That was what he should have said. Instead, John Harris felt bad.
It was torture, but finally John dragged himself to the Atari and began to rewrite the program. Eventually he re-created his earlier work, with a few extra embellishments as well. Forty-four colors, the player-missile graphic routines fully redefined, and a couple of neat tricks that managed to make the eight bits of the Atari 6502 chip emulate ten bits. John’s friend in San Diego had even made some improvement on the three-voice concurrent sound track. All in all, John Harris’ version looked even better than the arcade game, an astounding feat since arcade games used custom-designed chips for high speed and solid-color graphics, and were almost never approximated by the less powerful (though more versatile) home computers. Even experienced programmers like Jeff Stephenson were impressed.
The dark period was over, but something had changed in the relationship between Ken and John. It was emblematic of the way that On-Line was changing, into more of a bureaucracy than a hacker Summer Camp. Whereas the procedure for releasing John’s previous games had been impromptu testing onsite (“Hey! We got a game to play today! If everyone likes it, let’s ship it”), now Ken had a separate department to test games before release. To John, it seemed that it now took about fifty exchanges of interoffice memos before anyone got around to saying that he liked a game. There were also logjams in packaging, marketing, and copy protection. No one quite knew how, but it took over two more months—two months after John had turned in his fully completed Frogger—for the game to be released.
When it was finally on the market, everyone recognized that Frogger was a terrific conversion from arcade to home computer. John’s check for the first month’s royalties was for thirty-six thousand dollars, and the program went to number one on 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 him during the depressed stage, when it looked like John would never deliver a working Frogger. And by the summer of 1982, Ken began to plan for the day that he would be free of all the John Harrises of the world. As far as Ken Williams was concerned, the age of the hacker had ended. And its end had come not a moment too soon.
• • • • • • • •
Like his early role model, Jonas Cord of The Carpetbaggers, Ken Williams loved making 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 make you rich?” He also liked dealing with executives from giant corporations on a peer basis. In 1982, one of the early boom years of the computer revolution, Ken Williams talked to many people, and the kinds of deals he made indicated what kind 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 either want to pretend to be IBM or not be here.”
He dreamed of making a national impact on the mass marketplace. In the summer of 1982, that meant the Atari VCS machine, the dedicated game machine for which bestselling games were not counted in tens of thousands, as Apple software was, but in millions.
Atari regarded the workings of its VCS machine as a secret guarded somewhat more closely than the formula for Coca-Cola. Had it been a formula for a soft drink, the schematic plan of the VCS—which memory location on the chip triggered color on the screen, and which hot spot would ignite sound—might well have remained within Atari’s vaults. But this was the computer industry, where code-breaking had been a hobby ever since the lock-hacking days at MIT. With the added incentive of heady profits obtainable by anyone who topped the rather mundane software offerings that complacent Atari sold for its machine, it was only a matter of time before the VCS secrets were broken (as were the Atari 800 secrets).
The first companies to challenge Atari on the VCS, in fact, were start-ups formed by the former Atari programmers who had been called “towel designers” by Atari’s president. 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 haiku composition. Yet the Atari programmers who left knew how to extend the machine far beyond its limitations; the games they wrote for their own companies made Atari’s look silly. The improved quality of the games extended the market life of the VCS for years. It was a stunning justification of the hacker insistence that when manuals and other “secrets” are freely disseminated the creators have more fun, the challenge is greater, the industry benefits, and the users get rewarded by much better products.
Meanwhile, other companies were “reverse engineering” the VCS, dissecting it with oscilloscopes and unspeakably high-tech devices until they understood its secrets. One such company was Tiger Toys, a Chicago-based company that contacted Ken Williams to set up an arrangement to share his programming talent.
Williams flew three hackers to Chicago, where Tiger Toys taught them what a bitch the VCS was to program. You had to be penurious with your code, you had to count cycles of the machine to space out the movements of things. John Harris in particular hated it, even though he and Roberta Williams had sat down one night and figured out a nifty new VCS layout for Jawbreaker 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.
He considered the VCS ridiculous. But John really wanted to do a program that would blow Atari’s VCS version of Pac-Man out of the water, and with the new Jawbreaker scheme he was able, in his opinion, to accomplish that task. Atari’s VCS 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 games were becoming as successful as the movies, he was able to pursue ties to that industry. The world-famous creator of the Muppets, Jim Henson, was coming out that Christmas with a $20 million movie called Dark Crystal that had the earmarks of a blockbuster. Ken and Henson made a deal.
While Ken guessed that the idea of tying a computer game to an unreleased movie was risky—what if the movie bombed?—Roberta Williams loved the idea of writing an adventure game based on Dark Crystal characters. She considered computer games as much a facet of the entertainment world as movies and television, and thought it natural that her genre should merge with those glamorous counterparts. Indeed, other videogame and computer companies were working on projects with movie tie-ins. There was Atari’s E.T., Fox Videogames’ M.A.S.H., and Parker Brothers’ The Empire Strikes Back. A computer game company named DataSoft was 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 with was creativity. Now he could work with a bankable property.
If Dark Crystal was not quite the big leagues, the next deal was. For this one, Ken Williams was dealing with the biggest company of all.
IBM.
International Business Machines, toe-to-toe with the Coarsegold, California, company that did not exist two years ago. White-shirted, dark-tied, batch-processed IBM’ers coming to Ken’s new corporate headquarters, which consisted of a series of offices in the same building that housed the little office where Oakhursters and Coarsegoldians paid their electric bills, a little furniture store on the ground floor, and a beauty parlor next to the office where Ken ran marketing and advertising.
To On-Liners, hackers, and Oakhurst natives dressed in Summer Camp shorts and T-shirts, IBM’s cloak-and-dagger behavior was absurd. Everything was so solemnly top secret. Before IBM would divulge even an inkling of its intentions, its poker-faced personnel insisted that everyone who might possibly know about the deal—and this was to be kept to the smallest number of people possible—sign lengthy and binding nondisclosure forms which mandated severe tortures and complete frontal lobotomies, almost, to anyone leaking the name of the three-initial company or its plans.
The predictions of Computer Lib author Ted Nelson and others that the personal computer revolution would put IBM “in disarray” had proven a pathetic underestimation of the monolithic firm. The Hulking Giant of computer companies had proven to be more nimble than anyone had expected. In 1981, it had announced its own computer, the IBM “PC,” and the very specter of this entry led many in the small computer industry to make preparations for rolling over and dropping dead for IBM, which they promptly did when the IBM’s PC machine was put on the marketplace. Even people who hated IBM and its batch-processed philosophy rolled over and dropped dead, because IBM had done something which represented a virtual turnaround from everything they had previously stood for: they opened their machine up. They encouraged outsiders to write software. They even enlisted outside firms to help design the thing, firms like Microsoft, headed by Bill Gates (the author of the original software piracy letter, directed at the Homebrew Altair BASIC copiers). Gates wrote the IBM operating system which almost instantly became a new industry standard. It was almost as if IBM had studied the Hacker Ethic and decided that, in this case, it was good business sense to apply it.
IBM did not plan to apply the Hacker Ethic too much, though. It still valued secrecy as a way of life. So IBM waited until all the nondisclosure forms were signed 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 playing games than the PC. It was code-named Peanut, but would eventually be known as PCjr. Would On-Line like to do a new kind of adventure interpreter, more sophisticated than anything that came before it? And also write an easy-to-use word processing program for the PCjr, Ken thought they could, no problem, and while Roberta began charting yet another adventure plot, Ken set about hiring a top 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-rolling ventures. But Ken Williams had taken care of that by the most significant deal of all. Venture capital. “I had never even heard of venture capital,” Ken Williams later said. “I had to be convinced to take it.” Still. On-Line was spending money very quickly, and the $1.2 million the company received from the Boston firm called TA Associates (plus two hundred thousand dollars for Ken and Roberta personally) was essential to maintain cash flow. In return, TA got twenty-four percent of the company and consultation rights on various aspects of the business.
The woman at TA who made the deal was vibrant, gray-haired Jacky Morby, with precise features, a studied intensity, and the ability to insinuate herself as a distant godmother to the company. Jacky Morby was very experienced in situations where brilliant entrepreneurs begin companies that grow so fast they threaten to get out of hand, and she immediately advised Ken Williams, in such a way that he knew this was not merely casual advice, to get some professional management. She recognized that Ken was not an MBA type—not one who would properly nurture his company to take its place in the traditional line of companies that make this country great and venture capital firms like TA very rich. If On-Line Systems were to go public and shift everybody into Croesus Mode, there would have to be a firm rudder to guide it in the waters ahead. Ken’s rudder was bent. He kept veering to wild schemes, crazy deals, and hacker Summer Camp blowouts. Someone would have to come in and supply a new rudder.