by Steven Levy
The company’s energy became focused into converting product into other product. It was an approach that shifted the hacker joy of creating new worlds. Rather than building on past successes in a quest for brilliant programs, On-Line was trying to maximize sales by duplicating even moderate successes, often on relatively limited machines on which the games looked worse than the originals. Nowhere in the flurry to convert was there provision for rewarding an effort like Harris’ Frogger, which was so artistically accomplished that it hit the market with the force of an original work.
Back at his unkempt electronic split-level, John Harris was philosophizing that “professional” programmers—any programmers who didn’t have a love for gaming in their hearts and hacker perfectionism in their souls—were destined to make soulless, imperfect games. But Ken Williams was not talking to John Harris, who after all was programming for Synapse now. Ken Williams was about to hold a meeting that would put On-Line in contact with a new enterprise—one that would deliver an entire assembly line of professional programmers to do conversions. At dirt-cheap prices!
It sounded too good to be true, and Ken entered into the meeting with suspicion. His contact in this new venture was a shoulder-length-haired, Peter Lorre-eyed businessman named Barry Friedman. Friedman’s fortunes had risen along with the crazily swelling tide of the home computer industry. Originally, he had represented artists who did illustrations for the advertisements and packaging of On-Line products, then had branched out to eventually handle all the art work for a few computer companies. From there, he began to service software companies with all sorts of needs. If you wanted to know where to find the best price for ROM cartridges, he could act as middleman to get you cheap ROMs, perhaps from some obscure Hong Kong supplier.
Lately, he had been hinting of access to tremendous sums of capital to those who needed it. The other day, Ken said, Barry had called him up and asked how much an outsider would need to buy On-Line. Ken pulled a $20 million figure out of the air and hung up. Barry called back that day saying $20 million was fine. Ken, still not taking it too seriously, said, “Well, I’d need control, too.” Barry called back not long after, saying that was OK, too. The crazy thing about it was that as dubious as Ken was about Barry Friedman and his growing stable of companies (you never could be sure which corporate name would be on the business card Barry or his colleagues handed you), he always seemed to deliver on his promises. It was as if Barry Friedman were the beneficiary of some Faustian bargain, Silicon Valley style.
This new deal sounded the most astonishing of all. Friedman was escorting to the meeting with Ken Williams the two founders of a start-up company he was representing. A company that did nothing but conversions. The rates seemed bargain-basement—a ten-thousand-dollar fee and a five percent royalty. The company was called “Rich and Rich Synergistic Enterprises,” Rich being the first name of both the founders.
Barry Friedman, wearing a yellow polo shirt, unbuttoned to reveal a gold chain that complemented his silver-and-diamond bracelet and gold watch, led both Riches and one of his partners, a short, blond, button-nosed man dressed in a somewhat punk suit. This was Tracy Coats, a former rock music manager who represented backers from “a very wealthy family.” This piece of information was conveyed sotto voce, with a knowing raise of the eyebrow.
With little further fanfare, they took seats around the long, wooden conference table in the boardroom which adjoined Ken’s office: a perfectly nondescript carpeted and white-walled room with wooden bookcases and a blackboard; a random, anonymous room that might exist in any small office complex in any kind of company.
“Rich and Rich . . .” said Ken, looking over the resumes of the two programmers. “I hope you’ll make me rich.”
Neither Rich laughed, and if their unwrinkled visages were any indication, laughing was not something in which the Riches indulged to excess. They were all business, and their resumes were even more no-nonsense than their appearance. Both had held responsible positions in the digital-intensive area of the recently completed Tokyo Disneyland (“The whole place is based on silicon,” said Rich One), but that authoritarian fun factory was the closest thing to frivolity in their resumes, which were crammed with phrases like snake circuit analysis, Jet Propulsion Lab, nuclear control, missile systems analyst, Hound Dog Missile flight internal guidance and control system. Both Riches wore sports jackets without ties, and the clothes had the well-maintained air that clothes take on when draped over compulsively maintained bodies. Both looked in their thirties, with well-cropped hair and attentive eyes, constantly scanning the room for indiscretions.
Rich Two spoke. “Our people are from more of a professional arena than others in the home computer field. People who have been in a more controlled environment than home computer types. People who know how to document and write code correctly.” Rich Two paused. “Not hacker types,” he added.
Their company would develop a set of tools and techniques for game conversion. The techniques, algorithms, and cross-assemblers would, of course, be proprietary. Because of that, Rich and Rich would routinely keep their source code. It would be sequestered at Rich and Rich’s offices in Southern California. No matter how brilliant the tricks were, no matter how elegant the bum, it would not be available for hacker reading pleasure. Only the product would be available. Opacity. People buying programs as product, with the programming deeply hidden, as unimportant as the machinery that makes grooves in records that play music. Likewise, the programmers at Rich and Rich would be anonymous. No hacker egos to cope with. Just submit a wish list of games and the assembly line would churn them out.
Ken loved the idea. “It will make them rich and make me money,” he said afterward. If the two trial projects he gave to Rich and Rich worked out, he said, “I could do all my conversions with them! This is much better than John Harris!”
Ken was feeling at the top of his game. Besides Rich and Rich, a reporter for The Wall Street Journal was in town, talking to him and Roberta for a piece about the company. As he often did in the middle of the day, he rewarded himself by leaving the office and heading out to the site of his new house. Today, they were lowering the seven twenty-five-foot-long roof beams which would go over the mammoth game room in the house, not far from the indoor racquetball court. He put a flannel shirt over his ragged, blue Apple T-shirt and he drove over to the muddy site and watched the hydraulic crane lift the beams, and the twelve-man work crew settle each one into its niche. It went smoothly, like a well-written subroutine that worked the first time the code was assembled, and Ken stared with a dazed pride at what he was building. “Isn’t it weird?” he kept asking. “Isn’t it weird?”
The house went on and on, rambling down the hill for a hundred and forty feet; the frame finally filling out, with stairs you could climb and doorways to peep through. Right now the house was open to the elements, for wind to blow through and rain to fall through, and no doors or walls prevented free movement. A perfect, endless hacker house. But the builders would soon put walls to keep the world from peering in the house, and doors to keep the people in the house from bursting in and violating a person’s privacy. No one in his right mind would want it any different.
The same with hackerism, perhaps . . . no one running a business could want it really run by the Hacker Ethic. Sooner or later you had to cope with reality; you would yearn for those old, familiar walls and doors which were always considered so natural that only madmen would eliminate them. Only in a computer simulation maybe, using the computer to hack Utopia, could you preserve that sort of idealism. Maybe that was the only place you could preserve a dream. In a computer.
Ken walked around the house a few times, talked to the builder, and then was reminded that he had to get back. He had to speak to the reporter from the Wall Street Journal about the strange little mom-and-pop software company that had started with an adventure game.
• • • • • • • •
Ken and Roberta Williams held the housewarmin
g party on Labor Day weekend, 1983. Over two hundred people wandered through the ten-thousand-square-foot cedarwood house, admired the stained-glass pictures, marveled at the fireplace of river rock, participated in a tournament on the racquetball court (which had a full-color Apple Computer logo embedded in the gleaming wood), sweated in the sauna, relaxed in the hot tub, played tug-of-war in the backyard Fresno River, spiked volleyballs on the court, watched video piped in from the satellite dish outside, laughed at the comedy troupe flown in from San Francisco, and played the six coin-op arcade games in the giant game room with the full-length wet bar.
It was a bittersweet occasion. Between the competition from big-money newcomers, the slump in the economy, the huge capital outlay for ROM cartridges fitting low-end machines like the VIC-20 (outlays which would never be recouped), and Sierra On-Line’s lack of a new, innovative, Third-Generation hacker-coded hit, the company was headed for a year with revenues lower than the previous year. Ken had been forced to seek more venture capital, three million dollars of it. A half million had gone directly to him, considerably less than the cost of the new house.
Earlier that summer, Ken had asked Dick Sunderland to meet him at the Broken Bit. Before they exchanged a word, Ken handed his former boss a note which read, “You are hereby terminated as president of Sierra On-Line.” Dick Sunderland was furious, and eventually filed a lawsuit against Ken and On-Line. “I’m mad,” he would explain. “I have my reputation. I’ve built him a company that can be run, and he wants to run it.” Other On-Liners, especially those who fondly remembered the Summer Camp days, rejoiced. They took Sunderland’s name plate from his parking space and stuck it on the door to the women’s lavatory. They took a pile of memos dating from the Sunderland regime, which was dubbed “The Age of Oppression,” and tossed them into an impromptu bonfire. For a fleeting moment it was as if the employees of a company could reduce the bureaucracy to ashes.
There were other optimistic notes. Ken had hopes that his new, low-cost word-processing program would bring in money, and that he would do well with a million-dollar deal to license the cartoon characters from B.C. and The Wizard of Id. He was negotiating with John Travolta for use of the actor’s name in a body fitness program. But despite these projects, the software business had turned out to be more precarious than it had first appeared.
One only had to talk to Jerry Jewell to find out why: Jewell of Sirius did come down from Sacramento, and he was lamenting the disastrous end to his Twentieth-Century Fox Games deal—the cartridge games that his company had written had been lost in the 1983 videogame glut, and he had received almost no money in exchange for focusing his entire market thrust on the Atari VCS machine. His company was hanging by a thread, and he doubted whether any of the Brotherhood would be able to survive in the next few years. His top programmers had left him, days before he was about to lay them off.
Ken Williams was still having programmer problems, too. There was the hacker who was running the IBM project, far behind schedule. There were some of the “professional” programmers who, not familiar with the pleasures of immersion into a computer-game universe, were unable to synthesize those pleasures themselves. There was even a dispute with Bob and Carolyn Box: the two gold-panners-turned-programmers had rejected Ken’s criticisms of the game they showed him, and had left the company to be independent software authors.
And then there was John Harris. Lately, he and Ken had been feuding over a royalty disagreement on Frogger, still On-Line’s bestselling program. Parker Brothers wanted to buy the program to convert to cartridge, and Ken offered John twenty percent of the two-hundred-thousand-dollar buyout. To John that was not enough. They discussed it in Ken’s office. It had ended with Ken Williams looking at his former software superstar and saying, “Get out of my office, John Harris. You’re wasting my time.”
That was the last time they had spoken before the housewarming, to which Ken had not invited John. Nonetheless, Harris had showed up with his girlfriend, who was wearing a large diamond engagement ring he had given her. Ken greeted the hacker cordially. It was not a day for animosity, it was a day for celebration. Ken and Roberta Williams had their new, eight-hundred-thousand-dollar house, and no dark clouds hung over the Sierras, at least. The computer had delivered them all to riches and fame they had never dared dream of, and as dusk peeked over Mount Deadwood, Ken Williams, dressed in shorts and a T-shirt, danced happily to the tunes of a bluegrass band he had shipped in from Southern California. Later on, just as he always dreamed, he sat in the hot tub with friends, a millionaire in his twenties with a hot tub in the mountains. As the friends sat in the hot tub, their arms ringing the side, they could hear the faint electronic sounds of the arcade games in the nearby game room, mingling incongruously with the rustling Sierra forest.
Part IV. The Last of the True Hackers: Cambridge: 1983
Appendix A. The Last of the True Hackers
Around the time of Ken Williams’ housewarming party, twenty-five years after the MIT Tech Model Railroad Club discovered the TX-0, a man who called himself the last true hacker sat in a room on the ninth floor of Tech Square—a room cluttered with printouts, manuals, a bedroll, and a blinking computer terminal connected to a direct descendant of the PDP-6, a DEC-20 computer. His name was Richard Stallman, and he spoke in a tense, high-pitched voice that did not attempt to veil the emotion with which he described, in his words, “the rape of the artificial intelligence lab.” He was thirty years old. His pale complexion and scraggly dark hair contrasted vividly with the intense luminescence of his deep green eyes. The eyes moistened as he described the decay of the Hacker Ethic at Tech Square.
Richard Stallman had come to MIT twelve years before, in 1971, and had experienced the epiphany that others had enjoyed when they discovered that pure hacker paradise, the Tech Square monastery where one lived to hack, and hacked to live. Stallman had been entranced with computers since high school. At camp one summer, he had amused himself with computer manuals borrowed from his counselors. In his native Manhattan, he found a computing center to exercise his new passion. By the time he entered Harvard he was an expert at assembly languages, operating systems, and text editors. He had also found that he had a deep affinity for the Hacker Ethic and was militant in his execution of its principles. It was a search for an atmosphere more compatible with hacking that brought him from Harvard’s relatively authoritarian computing center, down Massachusetts Avenue, to MIT.
The thing he liked about the AI lab at Tech Square was that “there were no artificial obstacles, things that are insisted upon that make it hard for people to get any work done—things like bureaucracy, security, refusals to share with other people.” He also loved being with people for whom hacking was a way of life. He recognized that his personality was unyielding to the give-and-take of common human interaction. On the ninth floor he could be appreciated for his hacking and be part of a community built around that magical pursuit.
His wizardry soon became apparent, and Russ Noftsker, the administrator of the AI lab who had taken the tough security measures during the Vietnam protests, hired Stallman as a systems programmer. Richard was often in night phase, and when the people in the lab discovered after the fact that he was simultaneously earning a magna cum laude degree in physics at Harvard, even those master hackers were astonished.
As he sat at the feet of such as Richard Greenblatt and Bill Gosper, whom he considered his mentor, Stallman’s view of the Hacker Ethic solidified. He came to see the lab as the embodiment of that philosophy; a constructive anarchism which, as Stallman wrote into a computer file once, “does not mean advocating a dog-eat-dog jungle. American society is already a dog-eat-dog jungle, and its rules maintain it that way. We [hackers] wish to replace those rules with a concern for constructive cooperation.”
Stallman, who liked to be called by his initials, RMS, in tribute to the way he logged on to the computer, used the Hacker Ethic as a guiding principle for his best-known work, an editing program called
EMACS which allowed users to limitlessly customize it—its wide-open architecture encouraged people to add to it, improve it endlessly. He distributed the program free to anyone who agreed to his one condition: “that they give back all extensions they made, so as to help EMACS improve. I called this arrangement ‘the EMACS commune,’” RMS wrote. “As I shared, it was their duty to share; to work with each other rather than against.”
EMACS became almost a standard text editor in university computer science departments. It was a shining example of what hacking could produce.
But as the seventies progressed, Richard Stallman began to see changes in his beloved preserve. The first incursion was when passwords were assigned to Officially Sanctioned Users, and unauthorized users were kept off the system. As a true hacker, RMS despised passwords and was proud of the fact that the computers he was paid to maintain did not use them. But the MIT computer science department (run by different people than the AI lab) decided to install security on its machine.
Stallman campaigned to eliminate the practice. He encouraged people to use the “Empty String” password—a carriage return instead of a word. So when the machine asked for your password, you would hit the RETURN key and be logged on. Stallman also broke the computer’s encryption code and was able to get to the protected file which held people’s passwords. He started sending people messages which would appear on screen when they logged onto the system:
I see you chose the password [such and such]. I suggest that you switch to the password “carriage return.” It’s much easier to type, and also it stands up to the principle that there should be no passwords.