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A beautiful obsession with the binary world
By Steven Levy
She can kill all your files;
She can freeze with a frown.
And a wave of her hand brings the
whole system down.
And she works on her code until ten
after three.
She lives like a bat but she’s always a
hacker to me.
- from the LOTS Hacker songbook
THE LOW OVERHEAD Time-Sharing (LOTS) facility at Stanford University is blanketed with an eerie calm. There are more than a hundred students here, but they speak in whispers, as though they were in the presence of something godlike. The cavernous main lobby, which reaches up to a fourth-floor skylight (the building is the architectural soul mate of the recently collapsed Kansas City Hyatt), holds a lounge in which a dozen or so students are scattered, some pacing impatiently, others snoozing, their heads resting on textbooks. The names of these students are on a computer queue; they are waiting for a free computer terminal at the north end of the lobby, where each of perhaps fifty cubicles is equipped with a keyboard and display screen. Staring at each of these terminals is a Stanford student, or someone posing as a Stanford student in order to use the computer. In an adjoining room, there are approximately sixty more terminals, also in use. The hushed voices give the occasional beeps of the computer an odd prominence, and you can often hear the methodical, somewhat screechy churn of the computer’s printer in the other room. But most of the noise is lost because of the enormity of the lobby. To the ear, this is an electronic cathedral.
It’s well past midnight.
Most of the students are under the whip of academic discipline. Siting in a rather formal posture, they tentatively key in data and watch for the results on the display screen with skeptical frowns. They often consult their books before making another move. These are the users. For them, computers are functional, if overly complex, tools: necessary evils.
But to a small society that convenes here at LOTS, computers are much more. The big, orange-topped, million-dollar DECSYSTEM-20 (DEC-20) computer, visible behind a glass partition, looks no more spectacular than a line of file cabinets, but it is the dominant icon of these devotees’ existence, the secret sharer of their dreams, their instrument of power and creativity, their medium of communication, their companion in merrymaking. This is the society of hackers.
Hackers are the mutant offspring of the eggheads who once prowled through engineering buildings with slide rules attached to their belts. The computer’s power has made the hackers a subculture to be reckoned with. Their fellow students may consider them creepy, but among themselves they are risk takers, explorers, artists. They communicate with one another by intricate computer networks, speak in their own jargon and qualify for lucrative jobs in which they will create the complex programs essential for the everyday functioning of our nation, our world. They have the potential to be supercriminals, to use digital skeleton keys to electronic vaults holding money, confidential personal data and national security secrets. But the power is not without a price: an addiction to computing, a compulsion to program. And they think it’s fun.
Though some are no grungier than the average student, hackers – most of them male – usually look rumpled. They wear jeans and sneakers, and their T-shirts bear obscure messages like, I DON’T CARE WHAT THE PEOPLE SAY, 36 BITS ARE HERE TO STAY. Extending from the T-shirts are plump arms, fattened by a diet of candy bars and Coca-Cola dispensed by nearby vending machines. (One Stanford vending machine is wired directly to the computer, which compiles monthly charges.) Their skin is sallow in a climate where bronze is taken for granted. Their eyes are glazed over with a phosphorescent moistness.
The hackers sit loosely, draped over their chairs like overcoats. It almost seems as though they are wired to the DEC-20. They don’t refer to textbooks; instead, it’s a free-style give and take with the machine. A sensuous poke at the keyboard yields instant responses. Sometimes the computer’s replies will evoke looks of wonder; other times, a grimace. This interplay – called interfacing – can go on for hours, even days.
ERNEST ADAMS HOVERS over one of the lobby terminals, demonstrating a game he’s been designing. Adams, a twenty-one-year-old Stanford junior, has a neatly trimmed beard, bib overalls, and the hacker’s trademark pudginess. He’s been programming this game, Road Race, or some variation thereof, on and off since he was twelve years old.
“Here you choose your car,” he says, pointing to the display that describes four kinds of cars according to gas flow, acceleration, general efficiency and braking abilities. “You can start up the program, but it isn’t really finished yet. I’m still adding on a lot of features.” I try it, and after a promising start, I spin out – too much speed on the curve. Adams shrugs. “What I’d like to do is give each driver of the computer-run cars a specific personality. Given conditions on the track, his behavior changes. Each driver will have an aggressiveness quota, and if things don’t go his way, he’ll get angrier and drive differently. Or if a driver loses a lot, he will change his behavior to try and win, learn how to improve. The program will be self-modifying.”
This sounds like an odd fantasy. But computers, to those who program them obsessively, are instruments that give substance to fantasies. Dream machines. Hackers are the programmers with the wildest dreams, the ones who make the computer perform somersaults of logic. Most of it is done at night, when demand for computer time (the load) is low and the machine can respond as fast as possible. Typically, a hacker will wonder whether a program can accommodate a nifty feature, or will see something in a stray program that needs adjustment, or will speculate whether a computer can perform a task that its designers have officially deemed beyond its capabilities – hackers call this black magic. Once a hacker makes up his mind to proceed, such minor distractions as hunger, sleep, and sociology finals are put aside. The hack is the thing.
I stroll away from Adams, who is printing out a thirty-one-foot-long hacker colloquy that he has edited and stored in the computer’s memory. I wander down a row of students who are interfacing. No one notices me. I stop for a while and chat with a woman called Stacia Snapp, who modestly says she has yet to develop sufficient wizardry to be called a hacker. But she’s trying. Right now, though, she is carrying on a conversation via computer with a friend who has a terminal in his dorm room. As we talk, lines of his conversation appear on her screen. Snapp excuses herself, types back a reply and continues speaking. “I don’t think it’s inherently good to spend twenty-four hours a day in the computer facility,” she says, “but I think it’s fun.” The computer beeps to indicate that the fellow in the dorm has finished another remark. She reads it and laughs. “He says hello to you,” she tells me. This conversation has been going on for more than two hours.
I walk into the LOTS management office where a radio is playing Eric Clapton. At one of the terminals, Stanford senior Benjy Levy is bent over, concentrating. On the other terminal is Dan Newell, a soft-spoken, mustachioed hacker who smiles wearily. Earlier in the day he’d been showing me his favorite games. Once, he had said, takes more than forty hours to complete. He’d explained how he’d spent his entire spring quarter tracking down a bug in the DEC’s operating system. “If there’s something wrong, you can find it,” he says. “The computer does exactly what you say. Any ambiguity is on your part. It’s so… logical.”
“I’ve been spending some time tonight trying to learn PCL better,” he says, finally looking up. So far, “some time” has been six hours, and now at 3:11 a.m. it’s safe to bet that the sun will be out before Newell is. “PCL,” he continues, “is a sophisticated computer language.” Newell aspires to writing his own computer language, which, of course, will render most of its predecessors obsolete.
Even as he speaks, Newell gazes at the terminal from the corner of his eye. You can’t talk seriously to a hacker when he’s so close to the computer. He gets itchy, gets tired of the illogical bumps and tangents of human conversation. There’s almost a physical yearning for the machine.
I leave Newell to his PCL. There are about forty people still using the computer. Each seems to be a self-sufficient system of man and machine. It is almost four a.m. – the hour of the hacker.
“WITHIN THE NEXT twenty years, culture will be divided between those who know something about the computer and those who don’t. It’s like knowing how to read when the printing press was invented,” says James Milojkovic, a Stanford psychologist working toward a doctorate. Milojkovic, a cheery Australian who studies “psychological issues in computer interaction,” has been watching hackers closely. He thinks it’s essential that we study them. “They are looked upon as sick and strange; they see themselves as doing what everyone will be doing in the future. There’s a real mystery to them, because they know things that we don’t. They believe they have total control of what’s going on, because when you understand what the computer does, you can have it do almost anything. Once you learn how, you’re part of the priesthood. It’s a priesthood of the young. I’ve heard stories of elementary school kids breaking into schools at night so they can use the computer.”
Ernest Adams never figured to be a hacker. True, he liked computing, which he’d been doing since he was twelve; then he experienced his first epiphany: “Here I was typing things, and the machine was typing things back at me, and we’re imagining we’re playing a space war!” Adams had a natural talent for computers, but he thought he got it all out of his system in high school, when he hung out with a group who would stay late tapping into the computer at the nearby University of Kentucky. He came to Stanford to major in physics – until sometime in his first quarter, when he wandered into LOTS.
Low Overhead Time-Sharing began at Stanford five years ago as a twenty-four-hour self-service operation designed to encourage student computer use. It was too successful. “The first student coordinator dropped out of school because he got too involved with the computer,” says LOTS programmer J.Q. Johnson, “and several more got pretty close.”
The Stanford community has witnessed previous generations of hackers, mostly in the Artificial Intelligence Lab. But that group was unique and pioneering. LOTS hackers are indicative of a new wave haunting computing centers in colleges throughout the country. In many cases, these new hackers, like Adams, have been raised on computers. They have little experience with anything but computers. They often don’t care to learn about anything else. They associate only with other hackers, speaking in the own strange jargon, always complaining about some “bagbiting kluge,” whistling in awe over some “winner’s cuspy, yet nontrivial” program. These words are delivered in a high-pitched, goofy burst of verbiage that assumes the listener is inputting data as quickly as a PDP-11. Uninformed non-hackers (called users, often modified to lusers) have a word for these creatures: nerd. But their attitude is also touched with a trace of envy, since hackers know something the users don’t.
Five weeks away from home, Ernest Adams was unhappy. He disliked dorm life. He was also suffering through the tortuous throes of unrequited love known only to seventeen-year-old males. Physics was not going to solve his problems, so he came to LOTS. He sat down at a terminal, opened an account, and for the next few hours, had a long talk with the computer about its operating system. He’d found a friend.
“I became involved with LOTS to the exclusion of other things,” Ernest says. “I would come to drown my sorrows.” His expertise grew, and his programming ideas became grandiose. You could do anything with a program. As Ralph Gorin, the director of LOTS, puts it: “Who else do you know who will do whatever you tell it to?” Adams has his own explanation: “It’s knowing you can start from scratch, create an object called a program, hand it to the computer and have the computer start plotting beautiful graphs across the screen – and you are personally responsible!” He smiles demonically beneath his beard. “It’s a little like playing God.”
The world that Adams has entered is based entirely on the computer. In this world, participants are asked to choose a new name, and they often identify themselves with such fantasy monikers as Gandalf or Bombadil. With its multimillion-character memory, the DEC-20 is sort of a home, an office, a babysitter and a best friend. It will handle the most elaborate programs you can conceive of. It will play checkers and robot war with you, and it will remind you, with an accompanying bell, when it’s time for dinner. (Somewhere in the computer memory is a list of pizzerias that deliver.) It will tell you when your friends have logged into the system, and allow you to send messages to them without leaving your terminal. It will entertain you with lewd limericks stored in its core. It will type your paper for you, help you with homework and, with its electronic bulletin board, help you sell your roller skates. If you get restless, you can go exploring in the nooks and crannies of the DEC-20’s labyrinthine operating system, looking for stray bugs.
The computer generates a closely knit community of disciples. Hackers hang out with fellow hackers, meeting one another in late-night sessions where they may crowd around the terminal of someone who is preparing a hack that will, upon reaching “winnitude,” be placed in the computer’s operating system. On six a.m. excursions to breakfast, the talk is of the machine’s new PASCAL language compiler, or the upcoming trade of a program written at SCORE (another computer facility at Stanford) for a digital electronic memory cache. Violent arguments erupt over the relative virtues of LISP programming language and PCL. The arguments are fought in the weird, coldly logical syntax that comes from working in the rigid linear protocol of programming.
Though some hackers won’t socialize at all, most love to talk computers. On slight provocation they will overwhelm users with arcanely detailed explanations of computer protocol. But inevitably, they return to their terminals. Only rarely does the hacker community gather together for special occasions, such as the recent fifth anniversary of LOTS, when hackers faced the glass window of the computer room and sang “Happy Birthday” to the DEC-20. Otherwise, the most social moments at LOTS come toward the end of each quarter, when the lobby is packed with students waiting their turns at the computer. Those waiting for terminals swill beer to the accompaniment of a guitar-toting crooner singing hacker lyrics to the tunes of popular songs. Sing-along selections include “Fifty Ways to Write Your Program,” “LOTS Is Painless,” “I Wonder How the System Is Doing Tonight,” “I Don’t Know How to Log In” and “Fun Fun Fun Till Her Daddy Took the Keyboard Away.”
To understand what hackers really do when they sit at terminals until rough stubble emerges on their chins, you must understand something about high-level computer programming. You must also set aside suspicions that computers are vile, impersonal manipulators of numbers, and enemies of individuality. To hackers, programming is the mental equivalent of supersonic test piloting, and the computer is a bottomless font of spirituality.
A program is a set of instructions to the computer. It consists of lines of code usually written in a specific language that the computer, equipped with suitable microprocessing translators, can understand. By telling the computer how to rearrange and access its binary contents, each program allows the computer to perform a set of functions, and the results might be anything from a Space Invaders game to a mailing list.
A program must be scrupulously constructed to perform its function. Former IBM software manager Frederick Brooks wrote in The Mythical Man-Month: “If one character, one pause of the incantation is not in strictly proper form, the magic doesn’t work.” But even after it seems to work, there might be bugs in the program that will affect performance. A maniacal perfectionism is called for in debugging. While it may seem workaday, hackers think otherwise.
“Debugging is like laying a long railroad track,” says John Levy, a software manager for Apple Computers. “There’s a little piece you want to test, so you back up the locomotive five miles down the road and at ninety miles an hour, you bring it across the track you’re testing. If everything is perfect, it flies right over, but if there’s one flaw, the engine rolls off, flying and crashing until it comes to rest a mile down the track. Only at that point do you get to see the pieces.”
The ones who take the greatest programming challenges, who fearlessly construct miles of fragile track and race the hugest engines across them, are hackers. Just as the early astronauts achieved legendary status, there is a hacker elite whose wizardry has set them apart as digital daredevils.
Don Woods is acknowledged to have the Right Stuff. With long, stringy black hair and a bearish grin, he looks somewhat older than his twenty-nine years. He works at Xerox and wears a dark GAMES T-shirt that contrasts with his almost chalk-colored skin. Pinned next to the Xerox employee badge on his shirt is a button that reads question authority. Wood is known as a classic, or canonical, hacker. “Here’s a quick hack I’ve been working on,” he says. He types a few characters on his keyboard, and from the computer come the calliopelike sounds of a rousing, Sousa-style marching song. “I put it together in a couple of days,” he says.
One of the results of Woods’ epic hacks is Adventure, a collaboration with Will Crowther. Ostensibly a game, Adventure is a metaphor for hacking. When you begin Adventure, the computer tells you your location: at a stream, near a forest, within sight of a small brick building. From there you embark on a Tolkeinesque journey through the caverns and glens of a medieval land, encountering murderous midgets, poisonous snakes, treacherous rapids, thieving pirates and magazines written in dwarf language. By telling the computer the direction you wish to move (typing n for north or u for up, for example), the computer calculates where, on the unseen map created in Woods’ imagination, you will wind up next, and displays a written description of your next location. You go deeper and deeper into this netherworld, hoping to emerge by the same path with treasure in hand. There are almost 200 rooms you pass through on your way to the treasure, many dotted with hazards, and the path crosses and intertwines in ways impossible to divine without hours of exploration. Adventure is the most popular game at LOTS, and indeed it is a national craze among those with access to computers. “I would show it to people on a Friday afternoon,” Woods says, “and they wouldn’t leave their terminals until they finished it, maybe on Monday.”
Adventure is a kind of litmus test for hackers: if you can lose yourself in the gullies and misty caverns, you might be susceptible to computer addiction. Just as the plot of Adventure is a world unto itself, the vast memory and operating system of a mainframe computer is a gigantic landscape, seeming impenetrable but eventually accessible to the most devoted seekers. Just as everything in the physical world is constructed of atoms, everything a computer processes or reads is ultimately reduced to bits of either one or zero. Like treasure seekers in the subterranean Adventure world, hackers are electronic spelunkers who have developed the skill to burrow down from the more superficial programming languages to the bedrock machine language of digits. Woods call this “going down and doing the grudgies.” To get involved this deeply, you must be able to think in dizzyingly abstract terms. Your mental concentration is so intense that your consciousness is subsumed by the computer.
When a hacker programs, he creates worlds. A well-crafted program – a good hack – is elegant, doing the most work in the fewest lines of code. If it displays wizardry and is fairly sophisticated, hackers call it a nontrivial program, even though what the program does might be absurdly frivolous. Hackers judge themselves not on criteria of compassion, wit, altruism or even the results of their programs. If your program cures cancer, fine. If it helps a credit bureau track down your uncle, tough. What’s important is the brilliance of the program itself.
“My level of judgment is technically oriented, one that would disqualify many who consider themselves hackers,” says Mark Crispin, a systems programmer at SCORE. “That is, what nontrivial program have you written? As opposed to logging in and sending bug reports and flaming [translation: bullshitting] on the bulletin board. I consider a nontrivial program to be something above a hundred lines of text, and it depends on what language it is. It requires some design, a user interface, a significant amount of time to develop. It doesn’t matter if the program itself is a great idea.”
Crispin has been holding court for me in the living room of his condominium, which is decorated in middle-period graduate student and distinguished only by a half-dozen hand-held computer games and a terminal hooked up to the telephone. Crispin is tall, pale, and though he looks like he’s never shaved, he’s twenty-five. He shares the condo with his fiancée, who had been a member of a hacking club at Columbia University when she spotted a bug in one of Crispin’s programs she was using. She sent him transcontinental computer mail, he replied, and the digital correspondence led to a meeting and eventually a proposal. She listens approvingly as he speaks in a nasal voice that grows louder when he has a particular point to make.
Crispin wants to show me something. He bounds out of his chair, heads for his terminal and calls the LOTS computer. He types in his password, ignores the computer message that tells him he has electronic mail and demonstrates a program that generates sexual quips. Typing its name, Tingle, brings this to the screen:
“I’m back in the saddle again, again!...” shrieked the quadriplegic as the lurid sabra savagely tossed away his well-cut pants and munched on his spunk-filled pepperoni.
Crispin admires the hell out of this hack. “Tingle is definitely a nontrivial program,” he says. “It has its own concept of structured English sentences. It is completely computer-generated. Everything Tingle points out makes literal sense. Tingle builds scripts of what it’s going to do; it remembers male and female characteristics. Only then does it randomly choose from vocabulary columns.”
With all this hoopla, you’d think the program was perfect. But no program is. “The program can always work, but you can always make it better,” says Crispin. “You can always have it do something new, make it perform faster, give it more structure, make it do more!” Crispin’s voice is a high whine, and he’s almost out of his chair. “You can always think of ways to make it better! You’re never at the point where you stop. Just when you say, ‘It’s totally perfect,’ you say, ‘Gee, but I can make it do this!’”
Is a computer program a work of art? Mark Crispin thinks so, and other hackers agree. Hackers insist that each programmer writes code in an individual, recognizable style. Programmers work at a level of creativity, they say, that is comparable to writing poetry, composing, painting. “You can express yourself by writing code,” says Marc LeBrun, a twenty-nine year-old hacker who never attended college but spent his teen years at Stanford’s Artificial Intelligence Lab. “And you begin to judge programs on high-level things like style. You say, is this a flavorful way to do this? And people will often get into huge arguments about something that will ultimately make a difference of a small microsecond but will have profound stylistic implications.”
Hackers as artists! Can it happen? Will hackers give dramatic renditions of their latest COBOL hacks? Will we curl up on the beach with a good, long word-processing program? It seems impossible, because the programmer’s art is so self-contained, esoterically personal, aggressively elitist and void of the stuff of human experience. “People don’t read programs like novels, that’s true,” says Stanford computer scientist Dennis Allison. “And it’s a shame.”
DONN PARKER IS NO FAN of hackers. Author of Crime by Computer, resident expert of computer abuse at the Stanford Research Institute (SRI) and a lanky, three-piece-suited man who resembles an elongated Donald Pleasance, Parker thinks that hackers promote an attitude that could lead to disastrous results.
Computers are highly prone to being tampered with by knowledgeable intruders. When a large computer is used in a time-sharing system, safeguards are installed to prevent users from getting access to the digital files of other users. If a troublemaker succeeds in getting these files, he not only can read the private notes but can change and even erase them. Parker fears hackers because they not only have the know-how to crack security, but they regard these safeguards as mountaineers regard Mount McKinley. “The more barriers you put up, the more compelling the incentive is to break them down,” Parker says. Marc LeBrun agrees: “I think the hacker viewpoint is that the world exists to hack,” he says, “and there aren’t any angels with flaming swords standing over the world saying, ‘Thou shalt not push these buttons.’”
If those angels existed, hackers would finds programs to dull their swords. Despite the best efforts of the business and military establishment, the hacker-proof security system has yet to be devised. When SRI gathered a team of crack programmers to test the inviolability of military defense computers, the programmers were shocked to find that it took them only one telephone call and a few minutes to break into files containing top-secret information.
“What we have to do is change the cultural values in this [hacker] subculture,” says Parker. “there are instructors in high school and universities who encourage people to attack security systems as a means to learn more about computers. There are people who think of this as a matter of fun and games, a stimulating thing to do.”
One idle form of hacker amusement is causing the computer to crash, or temporarily break down. I’ve asked at least six hackers to explain the thrill of this, and I’ve received only inarticulate sentence fragments to the effect of, well, it’s there. Maybe they do it to show the computer who’s boss. One hacker bragged how he set a few hundred programs into motion that constantly forked into other programs, which begat even more programs, growing at a logarithmic rate until the overloaded DEC-20 was brought to its knees. “I guess it’s a phase everyone goes through,” explains another hacker.
Hackers everywhere delight in these tricks, the more harrowing the better. Take Julius Smith’s Seppuku program. Smith is a grad student who hacks at Stanford’s Computer Music Center; he has long been engaged in a search for the algorithm of the violin. Smith knows the old hacker trick of giving an enticing name to a rogue program: when a user peruses a system’s menu and sees something call Seppuku, he’ll access it. (All hackers have insatiable curiosity about other programs.) On the screen the user sees:
Seppuku is not a program for honorable users. Do not run Seppuku unless you can live with your shame. Type y if you must run it.
As soon as the poor sucker types y, the screen becomes ablaze with six-inch letters shouting, “GOMEN NASAI!!” This is approximate Japanese for “Now you’ve done it.” The screen immediately begins to list the titles of every file the user has ever stored in the computer memory. These files represent years of work. “Do you really want to delete all your files?” the computer asks. Delete? Before the stunned user can fully comprehend the catastrophic implications of this message, the computer answers with a yes. One by one the files are wiped off the screen.
“Your every file directory has been deleted,” says the computer. “Goodbye – have a good life.” Then the user is logged out. Screen blank.
“Seppuku doesn’t really delete the files,” says Smith. “It just looks like it does. You see, hackers really don’t hurt anyone.”
But once a hacker has the knowledge to crack security, he simply has to be trusted.
At a terminal sits a hacker and a wheel by his prompt
And his screen shows the reminders
Of every bug that broke his code or
halted
Till he cried out, in his anger and his shame
I am leaving, logout, killjob, but the hacker still
remains....
After a few quarters at Stanford, Ernest Adams began to reassess hacking: what had it done for him? What had it done to him? He had learned an incredible amount about computers but felt cut off from the mainstream. He had top grades in this programming courses but had failed calculus because he spent too much time at LOTS. He looked at some of his fellow hackers and decided that their devotion to computers was eroding their humanity. Was he turning into a machine himself?
Stored within the LOTS computer memory is a computer bulletin board that is open to comment and response from any user in the system. Items on B-Board range from lonely-hearts messages to offers to sell bicycles, to long-winded debates about issues of school politics, world affairs and computing (“If a computer had a voice, which sex would it be?”).
One intense B-Board exchange dealt with the concerns Adams had about excessive hacking. The opening salvo was launched by a disgruntled hacker who flamed about the narrowness, inhumanity and addictiveness of hacking – he called LOTS an “alien culture” whose inhabitants’ personalities are irreversibly shaped by machine. This kicked off a running debate between those like Adams who agreed with the gist of the attack, and hackers who defended their long hours of interfacing with “the infinite tool.”
A Stanford psychology professor named Philip Zimbardo acquired a printout of this debate and sent it to Psychology Today, which presented it as “The Hacker Papers,” accompanied by Zimbardo’s commentary. He suggested, basically, that hackers would be well advised to join the human race. The article made many of the LOTS hackers self-conscious. “I sometimes try to hide the fact that I’m a hacker,” says Dan Newell. Others are now defensive at the least sign of disapproval, charging their critics with “computerphobia.” “Why single us out?” says one. “Why not talk about how much time the Stanford marching band practices?”
All hackers, though, have a hedge against insecurity: they are needed. “The computer field is growing at a tremendous rate,” says Dennis Allison, “and it’s going to take a concentrated amount of wizardry to bring it about.” As our dependence on computers increases, it will be the hackers who can best create the supersoftware that will keep society from imploding into a mass of jumbled bits. An industry study showed that one good programmer is as productive a ten merely competent ones; a wizard-level programmer can almost name his price. The viciously competitive computer firms are desperate for hackers, who ask only for flexible working hours, no dress or etiquette requirements, and, above all, nontrivial, trailblazing tasks. Then the hackers proceed to work sixteen-hour days until the project is completed. “There’re lots of opportunities to make an obscene amount of money,” says LOTS staffer Bob Knight.
Such “real world” pursuits (along with other distractions like marriage and family) have the potential of eventually turning a hacker from his computer extremism. So, many of the LOTS hackers see Stanford - and possibly graduate school - as a last chance to run amok with the DEC-20. As Julius Smith puts it: “My [student] funding runs out in a year. This is my last chance to do something pure in my life.”
Some hackers find ways of remaining “pure”: taking on temporary programming stints at Silicon Valley’s high-tech operations, keeping a connection with other hackers by illegal accounts on university computers.
But Ernest Adams prefers a more conventional existence. He wants to be counted among those who have hacked intensely for a year or two, then managed to grow out of it. He took off a quarter of his sophomore year to work computers for the Viking Mars Landing Project, and later took off more time to do some professional programming. He made a conscious effort to pay more attention to his other studies and get back into the mainstream of users, nonwinners, and even people who don’t know a byte form an escape key. He once was convinced that hacking was transitory, that society need not worry about it proliferation. Now he sees more hackers than ever, and he’s not so sure. Still, he believes he has freed himself from computer addiction.
But old obsessions die hard. Recently, at six in the morning, Adams was at LOTS working at a terminal. “Just editing a paper” was his excuse. But he offered no apologies for speaking in rapturous tones about his planned thesis for a computer doctorate.
“I would like to write a program that reproduces, that reacts negatively or positively to its environment and, most important of all, could be mutated by its environment. I would like to see if I could start several of these programs running, and start some sort of superior program that watches them mutating, and see if they evolve. That’s the God program. It invents the environment, creates the data that the programs read, and will mutate the programs....”
Adams flames on rabidly, his face lit up like a display for a well-hacked game. The God program will create hot spots to control the motions of the one-celled programs. A maturation factor will control the growth and adolescence of the one-cells. The program might well duplicate the theory of natural selection, and be a kind of vindication of Darwinian theory .... I am leaving, logout, killjob, but the hacker still remains.
© 1982 by Straight Arrow Publishers, Inc.
Originally published in Rolling Stone, April 15th, 1982, issue no. 367. pp.42-51