Hackers, Heroes of the Computer Revolution | Page 4

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.

PART ONE True Hackers CAMBRIDGE: The Fifties and Sixties

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