Hackers, Heroes of the Computer Revolution by Steven Levy (red novels .txt) đź“–
- Author: Steven Levy
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IBM 704
IBM was The Enemy, and this was its machine, the Hulking Giant computer in MIT’s Building 26.
Later modified into the IBM 709, then the IBM 7090.
Batch-processed and intolerable.
Jerry Jewell
Vietnam vet turned programmer who founded Sirius Software.
Steven Jobs
Visionary, beaded, non-hacking youngster who took Wozniak’s Apple II ][, made a lot of deals, and formed a company that would make a billion dollars.
Tom Knight
At sixteen, an MIT hacker who would name the Incompatible Time-sharing System. Later a Greenblatt nemesis over the LISP machine schism.
Alan Kotok
The chubby MIT student from Jersey who worked under the rail layout at TMRC, learned the phone system at Western Electric, and became a legendary TX-0 and PDP-1 hacker.
Effrem Lipkin
Hacker-activist from New York who loved machines but hated their uses. Co-Founded Community Memory; friend of Felsenstein.
LISP Machine
The ultimate hacker computer, invented mosly by Greenblatt and subject of a bitter dispute at MIT.
“Uncle” John McCarthy
Absent-minded but brilliant MIT [later Stanford] professor who helped pioneer computer chess, artificial intelligence, LISP.
Bob Marsh
Berkeley-ite and Homebrewer who shared garage with Felsenstein and founded Processor Technology, which made the Sol computer.
Roger Melen
Homebrewer who co-founded Cromemco company to make circuit boards for Altair. His “Dazzler” played LIFE
programs on his kitchen table.
Louis Merton
Pseudonym for the AI chess hacker whose tendency to go catatonic brought the hacker community together.
Jude Milhon
Met Lee Felsenstein through a classified ad in the Berkeley Barb, and became more than a friend—
a member of the Community Memory collective.
Marvin Minsky
Playful and brilliant MIT prof who headed the AI lave and allowed the hackers to run free.
Fred Moore
Vagabond pacifist who hated money, loved technology, and co-founded Homebrew Club.
Stewart Nelson
Buck-toothed, diminutive, but fiery AI lab hacker who connected the PDP-1 comptuer to hack the phone system.
Later co-founded the Systems Concepts company.
Ted Nelson
Self-described “innovator” and noted curmudgeon who self-published the influential Computer Lib book.
Russel Noftsker
Harried administrator of MIT AI lab in the late sixties; later president of Symbolics company.
Adam Osborne
Bangkok-born publisher-turned-computer-manufacturer who considered himself a philsopher. Founded Osborne Computer Company to make “adequate” machines.
PDP-1
Digital Equipment’s first minicomputer, and in 1961
an interactive godsend to the MIT hackers and a slap in the face to IBM fascism.
PDP-6
Designed in part by Kotok, this mainframe computer was cornerstone of AI lab, with its gorgeious instruction set and sixteen sexy registers.
Tom Pittman
The religious Homebrew hacker who lost his wife but kept the faith with his Tiny Basic.
Ed Roberts
Enigmatic founder of MITS company who shook the world with his Altair computer. He wanted to help people build mental pyramids.
Steve [Slug] Russell
McCarthy’s “coolie,” who hacked the Spacewar program, first videogame, on the PDP-1. Never made a dime from it.
Peter Samson
MIT hacker, one of the first, who loved systems, trains, TX-0, music, parliamentary procedure, pranks, and hacking.
Bob Saunders
Jolly, balding TMRC hacker who married early, hacked till late at night eating “lemon gunkies,”
and mastered the “CBS Strategy on Spacewar.
Warren Schwader
Big blond hacker from rural Wisconsin who went from the assembly line to software stardom but couldn’t reconcile the shift with his devotion to Jehovah’s Witnesses.
David Silver
Left school at fourteen to be mascot of AI lab; maker of illicit keys and builder of a tiny robot that did the impossible.
Dan Sokol
Long-haired prankster who reveled in revealing technological secrets at Homebrew Club. Helped “liberate” Alair BASIC
on paper tape.
Les Solomon
Editor of Popular Electroics, the puller of strings who set the computer revolution into motion.
Marty Spergel
The Junk Man, the Homebrew member who supplied circuits and cables and could make you a deal for anything.
Richard Stallman
The Last of the Hackers, who vowed to defend the principles of Hackerism to the bitter end.
Remained at MIT until there was no one to eat Chinese food with.
Jeff Stephenson
Thirty-year-old martial arts veteran and hacker who was astounded that joining Sierra On-Line meant enrolling in Summer Camp.
Jay Sullivan
MAddeningly clam wizard-level programmer at Informatics who impressed Ken Williams by knowing the meaning of the word “any.”
Dick Sunderland
Chalk-complexioned MBA who believed that firm managerial bureaucracy was a worth goal, but as president of Sierra On-Line found that hackers didn’t think that way.
Gerry Sussman
Young MIT hacker branded “loser” because he smoked a pipe and “munged” his programs; later became “winner” by algorithmic magic.
Margot Tommervik
With her husband Al, long-haired Margot parlayed her game show winnings into a magazine that deified the Apple Computer.
Tom Swift Terminal
Lee Felsenstein’s legendary, never-to-be-built computer terminal which would give the user ultimate leave to get his hands on the world.
TX-0
Filled a small room, but in the late fifties this $3 million machine was the world’s first personal computer—for the community of MIT hackers that formed around it.
Jim Warren
Portly purveyor of “techno-gossip” at Homebrew, he was first editor of hippie-styled Dr. Dobbs Journal, later started the lucrative Computer Faire.
Randy Wigginton
Fifteen-year-old member of Steve Wozniak’s kiddie corps, he help Woz trundle the Apple II to Homebrew.
Still in high school when he became Apple’s first software employee.
Ken Williams
Arrogant and brilliant young programmer who saw the writing on the CRT
and started Sierra On-Line to make a killing and improve society by selling games for the Apple computer.
Roberta Williams
Ken Williams’ timid wife who rediscovered her own creativity by writing “Mystery House,” the first of her many bestselling computer games.
Steven “Woz” Wozniak
Openhearted, technologically daring hardware hacker from San Jose suburbs. Woz built the Apple Computer for the pleasure of himself and friends.
CHAPTER 1 THE TECH MODEL RAILROAD CLUB
Just why Peter Samson was wandering around in Building 26 in the middle of the night is a matter that he would find difficult to explain. Some things are not spoken. If you were like the people whom Peter Samson was coming to know and befriend in this, his freshman year at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the winter of 1958-59, no explanation would be required.
Wandering around the labyrinth of laboratories and storerooms, searching for the secrets of telephone switching in machine rooms, tracing paths of wires or relays in subterranean steam tunnels … for some, it was common behavior, and there was no need to justify the impulse, when confronted with a closed door with an unbearably intriguing noise behind it, to open the door uninvited. And then, if there was no one to physically bar access to whatever was making that intriguing noise, to touch the machine, start flicking switches and noting responses, and eventually to loosen a screw, unhook a template, jiggle some diodes and tweak a few connections. Peter Samson and his friends had grown up with a specific relationship to the world, wherein things had meaning only if you found out how they worked. And how would you go about that if not by getting your hands on them?
It was in the basement of Building 26 that Samson and his friends discovered the EAM room. Building 26 was a long glass-and-steel structure, one of MIT’s newer buildings, contrasting with the venerable pillared structures that fronted the Institute on Massachusetts Avenue. In the basement of this building void of personality, the EAM room. Electronic Accounting Machinery. A room that housed machines which ran like computers.
Not many people in 1959 had even seen a computer, let alone touched one. Samson, a wiry, curly-haired redhead with a way of extending his vowels so that it would seem he was racing through lists of possible meanings of statements in mid-word, had viewed computers on his visits to MIT from his hometown of Lowell, Massachusetts, less than thirty miles from campus. This made him a “Cambridge urchin,” one of dozens of science-crazy high schoolers in the region who were drawn, as if by gravitational pull, to the Cambridge campus. He had even tried to rig up his own computer with discarded parts of old pinball machines: they were the best source of logic elements he could find.
LOGIC ELEMENTS: the term seems to encapsulate what drew Peter Samson, son of a mill machinery repairman, to electronics. The subject made sense. When you grow up with an insatiable curiosity as to how things work, the delight you find upon discovering something as elegant as circuit logic, where all connections have to complete their loops, is profoundly thrilling. Peter Samson, who early on appreciated the mathematical simplicity of these things, could recall seeing a television show on Boston’s public TV channel, WGBH, which gave a rudimentary introduction to programming a computer in its own language. It fired his imagination: to Peter Samson, a computer was surely like Aladdin’s lamp—rub it, and it would do your bidding. So he tried to learn more about the field, built machines of his own, entered science project competitions and contests, and went to the place that people of his ilk aspired to: MIT. The repository of the very brightest of those weird high school kids with owl-like glasses and underdeveloped pectorals who dazzled math teachers and flunked PE, who dreamed not of scoring on prom night, but of getting to the finals of the General Electric Science Fair competition. MIT, where he would wander the hallways at two o’clock in the morning, looking for something interesting, and where he would indeed discover something that would help draw him deeply into a new form of creative process, and a new life-style, and would put him into the forefront of a society envisioned only by a few science-fiction writers of mild disrepute. He would discover a computer that he could play with.
The EAM room which Samson had chanced on was loaded with large keypunch machines the size of squat file cabinets. No one was protecting them: the room was staffed only by day, when a select group who had attained official clearance were privileged enough to submit long manila cards to operators who would then use these machines to punch holes in them according to what data the privileged ones wanted entered on the cards. A hole in the card would represent some instruction to the computer, telling it to put a piece of data somewhere, or perform a function on a piece of data, or move a piece of data from one place to another. An entire stack of these cards made one computer program, a program being a series of instructions which yield some expected result, just as the instructions in a recipe, when precisely followed, lead to a cake. Those cards would be taken to yet another operator upstairs who would feed the cards into a “reader” that would note where the holes were and dispatch this information to the IBM 704 computer on the first floor of Building 26. The Hulking Giant.
The IBM 704 cost several million dollars, took up an entire room, needed constant attention from a cadre of professional machine operators, and required special air-conditioning so that the glowing vacuum tubes inside it would not heat up to data-destroying temperatures. When the air-conditioning broke down—a fairly common occurrences—a loud gong would sound, and three engineers would spring from a nearby office to frantically take covers off the machine so its innards wouldn’t melt. All these people in charge of punching cards, feeding them into readers, and pressing buttons
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