by Steven Levy
For instance, On-Line spent a lot of money for colorful new boxes in which to package their games—but did not see fit to include the name of the programmer on the package. Ken had thought it sufficient to give that credit only in the instruction manual stuffed inside the box. “The authors should realize that this will give us more money for advertising and royalties,” he said. It was indicative of a new “professionalism” in dealing with authors.
But to listen to the conversations at Danny’s during the fall of 1982, it was clear that an atmosphere conducive to hacking was far more important to those programmers than a mantle of “professionalism.” And the consensus was that almost every programmer was thinking of leaving.
Even if Ken Williams was aware of a potential programmer exodus, the problem seemed of little concern to the founder of the company. Williams was busy hiring a staff of programmers quite different from the potential defectors. Impatient with the hackers who had come to him with their assembly-language skills and uneven work habits fully formed, Ken decided to try an alternate source: he would utilize the messianic power of the computer to create programming gurus where none existed. After all, the now testy hackers who were complaining about the royalty cuts had come to him with, at most, the experience of a game or two. Now they felt he owed them the world. Why not find people before that first game, people who had some programming skills but were not yet assembly-language wizards, and let them develop under him? Surely they would not be so ungrateful as to leave him for some random offer from another firm. But more important, this daring kind of recruitment would be in keeping with the vision that Ken had for his company: the place where the computer future comes to the people, improving their lives.
He set up On-Line’s old office above the TV sales shop on Route 41 as an office especially for in-house programmers. Some of the people working there were royalty-basis programmers whom Ken had offered free living space to, like Chuck Bueche, a twenty-one-year-old programmer who drove to the Sierras from Texas in an old Jaguar XKE and who wrote under the nom de computer of “Chuckles.” Dick liked one specific part of Chuckles’ first game, a maze-chase called Creepy Corridors: the piercing, hideous scream heard when the little man you were moving through the maze got caught by the monster who chased him. Considering the relatively brain-damaged sound capabilities of the Apple, the scream was quite an achievement. Chuckles had screamed the most hideous scream he could into a tape recorder, and used a digital analyzer to print out five long pages of data that, when fed into the Apple, would exactingly POKE the memory location to duplicate the scream. It took almost a fifth of the available memory of the machine, but to Chuck it was worth it. The purer programmers at On-Line were appalled at the inefficiency.
A few of the newer programmers, though, were so far behind Chuck that issues like that were almost incomprehensible to them. The qualifications of these newcomers ranged from college degrees in computer science to a passion for getting stoned and playing videogames. Two were students of Japanese extraction whom Ken had hired because someone had told him that Orientals were fantastically devoted workers. Some were attracted because of the excellent skiing at nearby Badger Pass. Others hoped to convert On-Line games from one machine to another by day, and hack The Great American Computer Game by night. All in all, in the space of a few months Ken had hired almost a dozen inexperienced, nonhacker programmers for bargain-basement wages, in hopes that they would grow as quickly as the industry was growing.
Of all Ken’s new programmers, none exemplified his zeal for reforming lives by computer power as much as did Bob and Carolyn Box. Bob Box was in his fifties: they had lived in the area for well over a decade and worked at their ranch-style home five miles from Oakhurst, in the almost undetectable hamlet of Ahwahnee. Bob, who had dark hair, soulful eyes, and a nose of basset-hound proportions, was approximately four feet in height. He was a former New Yorker, a former engineer, a former race car driver, a former jockey, and a former Guinness Book of World Records champion in gold panning. Carolyn Box was slightly over five feet tall, had long brown hair and a world-weary attractiveness, and was the current Guinness Book of World Records champion in gold panning. They’d married twenty-six years ago, when Carolyn was fifteen. For the past few years, they’d been running a gold prospecting supply business and searching for gold in the Fresno River, which ran in their backyard. The Oakhurst-Coarsegold area was on the southern rim of the California mother lode, and the gold the Boxes dredged up from the river—one morning they came up with two thousand dollars’ worth in a half hour—financed their programming courses at a Fresno trade school.
They had realized that the gold of the 1980s would be software, and their goal was to work at On-Line. Though Carolyn Box had been apprehensive about dealing with a computer, she instantly understood the required concept, as if computers were a language she’d always been talking. It was almost supernatural. She was the first one in the history of the school to get a 4.0 average in her courses. Bob did well, too: programming was like gold panning, he realized—you proceeded in logical steps, and concentrated while you did it.
But when they presented themselves to Ken, he was skeptical. He told them that programmers usually peaked at nineteen and were over the hill at twenty—even Ken, at twenty-eight, was just about washed up. (Not that he believed it.) Ken wanted to give the Boxes a chance, though, because they fit right in with the dream he had about On-Line and the great computer future. So he told them to put up something on the screen using assembly language, in thirty days. The Boxes’ school had taught them programming in high-level languages on mainframe computers; they knew nothing about Apple assembly language. But working day and night, they came up with an 82-line program only five days later. It moved a dot around the screen. Ken asked them to try something else, and, again working almost every waking hour, the Boxes created a 282-line program with a little airplane moving around the high-resolution screen. Ken hired them, and set them to work programming a pet project of his, an educational game.
Soon the Boxes were hard at work getting a little dog, whom they named Dusty after their own dog, to walk across the screen. They would proudly explain to visitors that their hack used a sophisticated technique called exclusive-or-ing, which allowed for zero-flicker animation. They felt they’d given life to Dusty Dog. “This dog is like our pet,” Carolyn Box would say. When Ken first saw Dusty Dog move across the screen, the little basset legs moving with steady, nonflickering fluidity, he almost burst. “It’s days like this that make you proud to be in this business,” he told them. Even these middle-aged gold prospectors could be software superstars . . . and Ken was the Moses who led them to the promised Computer Land.
• • • • • • • •
To Roberta Williams, it all represented something: the rehabilitation of the Boxes, Ken’s community-minded efforts, her own ascension to the rank of bestselling game designer, the big Dark Crystal collaboration with Henson Associates, the artistic efforts of their software superstars, and above all the fantastic way that computers had nurtured what was a mom-and-pop bedroom operation to a $10-million-a-year company that would soon be employing over one hundred people. She considered their story inspiring. It said a lot about the power of the computer and the different, better lives that people would be leading with the computer. In the two years of On-Line’s growth, Roberta had shed some of her shyness, exchanging a bit of it for a fierce pride in their accomplishments. “Look at us,” she’d sometimes say in conversation, partially in disbelief and partially as an all-purpose trump card. “People ask me,” she said that fall of 1982, “‘Don’t you just sit around and say “Wow”? Doesn’t it do something for you?’ The answer is that we’re just so constantly amazed all the time that it’s almost a state of mind.”
Roberta wanted the message of On-Line spread to the world. She insisted that On-Line hire a New York public relations firm to promote not only the programs, but the people behind them. “Programmers, authors, are going to be the
future new entertainers,” she explained. “It might be presumptuous to say they might be new Robert Redfords . . . but to a certain extent [they will be] idolized. Tomorrow’s heroes.”
Dick Sunderland did not share Roberta’s enthusiasm for the New York public relations firm. He had come out of an industry where programmers were anonymous. He was worried about On-Line’s programmers getting big heads from all that attention. It’s tough enough to deal with a twenty-year-old who’s making a hundred thousand a year—can you imagine how tough it will be after he’s profiled in People magazine, as John Harris would be that winter?
The spotlight was beginning to find its way to the mysterious software company whose letterhead still carried the address of the Williamses’ A-frame wooden house from which they had run the company when it was a two-person operation. Mudge Ranch Road, Coarsegold, California. The world wanted to know: What kind of computer madness had taken hold out there in the sticks, and what sorts of millions were being made, there on Mudge Ranch Road? There was no subject in the media hotter than computers in the early 1980s, and with the New York public relations firm helping channel the dazzled inquisitors, a steady stream of long-distance phone calls and even long-distance visitors began to arrive in Oakhurst that autumn.
This included an “NBC Magazine” camera crew which flew to Oakhurst from New York City to document this thriving computer-age company for its video magazine show. NBC shot the requisite footage of Roberta mapping a new adventure game at her home, Ken going over his phone messages, Ken and Roberta touring the building site of their new home. But the NBC producer was particularly anxious to speak to the heart of the company: the young programmers. Whiz kids writing games and getting rich. The programmers, those in-house and those working for royalties, were duly assembled at the programming office.
The NBC producer, with his gray hair, bushy mustache, and twinkling eyes, resembled a carnival barker who knows the gruesome ropes, yet has maintained compassion. He urged the programmers to play at the terminals so his crew could shoot an establishing shot of a thriving factory that measured production by lines of computer code. One of the hackers immediately began concocting a program to create a twenty-one-sided flower on the screen—a program involving the retention of the value of pi to the sixth decimal place. Even after the NBC crew finished the establishing shot, the teen-age programmer felt compelled to finish the display hack.
The producer by then was interviewing one of Ken’s twenty-one-year-old whiz kids.
“Where is the industry going?” he asked him solemnly.
The whiz kid stared at the producer. “I have no idea,” he said.
Chapter 19. Applefest
The Third Generation lived with compromises in the Hacker Ethic that would have caused the likes of Greenblatt and Gosper to recoil in horror. It all stemmed from money. The bottom line of programming was ineluctably tied to the bottom line on a publisher’s ledger sheet. Elegance, innovation, and coding pyrotechnics were much admired, but a new criterion for hacker stardom had crept into the equation: awesome sales figures. Early hackers might have regarded this as heresy: all software—all information—should be free, they’d argue, and pride should be invested in how many people use your program and how much they are impressed with it. But the Third-Generation hackers never had the sense of community of their predecessors, and early on they came to see healthy sales figures as essential to becoming winners.
One of the more onerous of the compromises in the Ethic grew out of publishers’ desire to protect their sales figures. It involved intentional tampering with computer programs to prevent a program from being easily copied by users, perhaps for distribution without further payment to the publisher or author. The software publishers called this process “copy protection,” but a substantial percentage of true hackers called it war.
Crucial to the Hacker Ethic was the fact that computers, by nature, do not consider information proprietary. The architecture of a computer benefited from the easiest, most logical flow of information possible. Someone had to substantially alter a computer process to make data inaccessible to certain users. Using one short command, a user could duplicate an “unprotected” floppy disk down to the last byte in approximately thirty seconds. This ease was appalling to software publishers, who dealt with it by “copy-protecting” disks: altering the programs by special routines which prevented the computer from acting naturally when someone tried to copy a disk. A digital roadblock that did not enhance the program’s value to the user, but benefited the seller of the program.
The publishers had legitimate reason to resort to such unaesthetic measures. Their livelihood was invested in software. This was not MIT where software was subsidized by some institution. There was no ARPA footing the bill. Nor was this the Homebrew Computer Club, where everyone was trying to get his hardware built and where software was written by hobbyists, then freely swapped. This was an industry, and companies would go broke if no one bought software. If hackers wanted to write games free and hand them out to friends, that was their business. But the games published by On-Line and Brøderbund and Sirius were not merely paper airplanes of truth released into the wind to spread computer gospel. They were products. And if a person coveted a product of any sort in the United States of America, he or she had to reach into a pocket for folding green bills or a plastic credit card in order to own it.
It drove publishers crazy, but some people refused to recognize this simple fact. They found ways to copy the disks, and did. These people were most commonly hackers.
Users also benefited from breaking disks. Some of them could rattle off a list of rationalizations, and you would hear them recited like a litany in meetings of users’ groups, in computer stores, even in the letters column of Softalk. Software is too expensive. We only copy software we wouldn’t buy anyway. We only do it to try out programs. Some of the rationalizations were compelling—if a disk was copy-protected, a legitimate owner would be unable to make a backup copy in case the disk became damaged. Most software publishers offered a replacement disk if you sent them a mangled original, but that usually cost extra, and besides, who wanted to wait four weeks for something you already paid for?
But to hackers, breaking copy protection was as natural as breathing. Hackers hated the fact that copy-protected disks could not be altered. You couldn’t even look at the code, admire tricks and learn from them, modify a subroutine that offended you, insert your own subroutine . . . You couldn’t keep working on a program until it was perfect. This was unconscionable. To hackers, a program was an organic entity that had a life independent from that of its author. Anyone who could contribute to the betterment of that machine-language organism should be welcome to try. If you felt that the missiles in Threshold were too slow, you should be welcome to peruse the code and go deep into the system to improve on it. Copy protection was like some authority figure telling you not to go into a safe which contains machine-language goodies . . . things you absolutely need to improve your programs, your life, and the world at large. Copy-protect was a fascist goon saying, “Hands off.” As a matter of principle, if nothing else, copy-protected disks must therefore be “broken.” Just as the MIT hackers felt compelled to compromise “security” on the CTSS machine, or engaged in lock hacking to liberate tools. Obviously, defeating the fascist goon copy-protect was a sacred calling and would be lots of fun.
Early varieties of copy-protect involved “bit-shifting” routines that slightly changed the way the computer read information from the disk drive. Those were fairly simple to beat. The companies tried more complicated schemes, each one broken by hackers. One renegade software publisher began selling a program called Locksmith, specifically designed to allow users to duplicate copyprotected disks. You didn’t have to be a hacker, or even a programmer, to break copy protection anymore! The publisher of Locksmith assured the Apple World that his intent, of course, was only to allow users to make backup copies of programs they’d legally purchased. He insisted that
users were not necessarily abusing his program in such a way that publishers were losing sales. And Buckminster Fuller announced he was becoming a placekicker for the New York Jets.
With most publishers guessing that they lost more than half their business to software pirates (Ken Williams, with characteristic hyperbole, estimated that for every disk he sold, five or six were pirated from it), the copy-protection stakes were high. Oddly, most companies hired as copy-protect specialists the same kind of young hacker who commonly spent hours figuring out countermeasures to bust someone else’s protection routine. This was the case with Sierra On-Line. Its copy-protect person was Mark Duchaineau. He was twenty years old, and for some time during the big 1982 San Francisco Applefest, he single-handedly held this ten-million-dollar-a-year company hostage.
Mark Duchaineau was yet another Third-Generation hacker who had been seduced by computers. He had brown hair which flowed magnificently down his back. His blue eyes blazed with an intensity which hinted of raging fires beneath his almost orientally calm demeanor, fires which could easily lead him to inexplicable acts. He had merged his sensibilities with the computer at Castro Valley (California) Junior High School. “They had a teletype,” he would later explain. “After school I would stay many hours. They let me program away. I was never popular, just a loner. [Other] kids would get into baseball or whatever, I was into science and math. [I didn’t have] really close friends; I didn’t mind. It was really interesting being able to teach a machine how to do things. You communicate with the machine . . . it’s like dealing with another person. There’s this whole other universe you almost live in when you’re programming. And when you get into it young like I did, you feel a oneness with the computer, almost as if it’s an extension of yourself. When I print comments in my code, I say things like ‘We do this, we do that . . .’ It’s like Us.”