THE Hacker Ethic was changing, even as it spread throughout the country. Its emissaries were the small, low-cost computers sold by Apple, Radio Shack, Commodore (the PET), and Atari. Each was a real computer; the sheer proliferation created a demand for more innovative programs that previous distribution methods could not address. A hacker could no longer distribute clever programs by leaving them in a drawer, as he had at MIT, nor could he rely on a Homebrew Computer Club system of swapping programs at club meetings. Many people who bought these new computers never bothered to join clubs. Instead they relied on computer stores, where they happily paid for programs. When you were desperate for something to fulfill the promise of this thrilling new machine, spending twenty-five dollars for Mystery House seemed almost a privilege. These pioneering computer owners in the early eighties might learn enough about their machines to appreciate the beauty of an unencumbered flow of information, but the Hacker Ethic, microcomputer-style, no longer necessarily implied that information was free.
As companies like On-Line wrote and sold more programs, people who had no desire to become programmers, let alone hackers, began to buy computers, intending only to run packaged software on them. In a way, this represented a fulfillment of the hacker dream computers for the masses, computers like record players: you'd go to the software store, choose the latest releases, and spin away. But did you really benefit from your computer if you did not program it?
Still, in the early eighties, everyone with a computer had to delve into the hacker mentality to some degree. Doing the simplest things on your machine required a learning process, a search for gurus who could tell you how to copy a disk or find the proper connecting cables to hook up the printer. Even the process of buying ready-to-run software had a funky, hacker feel to it. The programs were packaged in Ziploc bags, the graphics on the so-called documentation were mostly on the level of Roberta Williams' stick-figure primitives, and more often than not the labels on the disk would be typewritten and stuck on by hand ... there was an aura of the illegitimate about the product, only slightly more respectable than hard-core porno books.
An excursion to the local computer store was a journey to the unknown. The salesman, more often than not some kid working at minimum wage, would take your measure, as if you were a potential obstacle in an Adventure game, testing you by tossing off the jargon of Ks, bytes, nibbles, and RAM cards. You would try to get him to explain, say, why this accounting package ran better than that one, and he would come back with some gibberish about protocols and macros. Finally you'd ask him the question that almost every Apple owner asked in 1980 or 1981: "What's the hot new game?" Games were the programs which took greatest advantage of the machine's power put the user in control of the machine, made him the god of the bits and bytes inside the box (even if he wasn't sure of the difference between a bit and a byte). The kid would sigh, nod, reach under the counter for the current Ziploc-bag phenomenon, and, if you were lucky, boot it on the screen and race through a few rounds, so you could see what you were buying. Then you would plunk down your twenty or twenty-five or even thirty-five dollars and go home for what was the essential interface with the Apple. Playing games.
In early 1980, the Hot New Game would most likely be written in deadly-slow BASIC. Most of the Apples at that time used cassette recorders; the difficulty of using an assembler with a cassette recorder made it nearly impossible to go down into the deepest recess of the machine, the 6502 chip, to speak in the Apple's assembly language.
This was changing: Steve Wozniak had recently hacked a brilliant design for a disk-drive interface for the Apple, and the company was able to offer low-cost floppy-disk drives which accessed thousands of bytes a second, making assembling easy for those few who knew how to program on that difficult level. Those infected with the Hands-On Imperative, of course, would soon join that elite in learning the system at its most primal level. Programmers, would-be programmers, and even users buying Apples would invariably purchase disk drives along with them. Since Steve Wozniak's Apple adhered to the Hacker Ethic in that it was a totally "open" machine, with an easily available reference guide that told you where everything was on the chip and the motherboard, the Apple was an open invitation to roll your sleeves up and get down to the hexadecimal code of machine level. To hack away.
So Ken Williams was not the only one catching the glory train by hacking Apple machine language in the spring of 1980. Technological pioneers all over the country were sensing what hackers had known all along: computers could change your life. In Sacramento, a Vietnam vet named Jerry Jewell, who had sandy hair, a matching moustache, and a perpetually addled, slightly pissed-off look about him, had bought an Apple to see if he could switch from the insurance business to something more lucrative. Two weeks after he got the machine, he enrolled in an assembly-language class at Lawrence Hall of Science taught by Andy Herzfeld, one of Apple's top programmers. Jewell had no disk drive and could not run the sample programs that were distributed each week. For eight weeks, he didn't have the slightest idea what Herzfeld was talking about, and not even brief tutorials from the assistant instructor John Draper, alias Captain Crunch could crack the code. Eventually, after Jewell got a disk drive and listened to the tapes he'd made of the class, he caught on.
Jewell got a job managing a local computer store. All kinds of people came into computer stores those days. It was almost like a statement in BASIC: IF you own a computer THEN you're probably a little crazy. Because even then, four years after the Altair, you still couldn't do many useful tasks with a personal computer. There was a simple word-processing program called "Easy Writer" written by John Draper (Jewell bought one of the first copies at the 1980 Computer Faire), and some accounting stuff. But mostly people hacked Tools to Make Tools. Or games. And they would come into computer stores to show off their hacks.
So it was not surprising when an Arabic-looking college student named Nasir Gebelli strode up to Jewell in the store and booted a slide-show program he'd written. Jewell liked it, and worked with Gebelli to make a spin-off, a graphics-drawing program they called "E-Z-Draw." Jewell began making the rounds of computer stores in L.A. and the Bay Area to sell it.
Then Nasir, a computer science major who was doing poorly in his classes, began to write games. Nasir's use of color and a technique called "Page Flipping" made the current crop of games look sick. Page Flipping used a duplicate screen ("page") for everything that was displayed on the Apple; using machine-language instructions, you were flipping between the two pages thousands of times each second, in order to eliminate the flickering that made microcomputer graphics look so unappealing. Nasir was also unafraid to enlist everything and anything as "invader" in his games, which almost always used one basic scenario: you've got to shoot lots of stuff before some of it shoots back at you. It re-created the addictive, pyrotechnic state of siege that was hugely popular in coin-operated games, which had special microchips to create spectacular graphic effects, and only when Nasir showed them did people realize that some of these effects could be achieved on the Apple.
Nasir wrote twelve games that year. Jewell and the owner of the computer store formed a company called Sinus Software to sell the games. Jewell would look at Nasir's preliminary version of a game and suggest outlandish changes. One game that Nasir wrote was quite similar to "Space Invaders," a popular coin-operated arcade game where aliens irrevocably inch down the screen in waves to attack the player's little tank. Jewell suggested that weapons fired by the invaders should not be shells, but eggs and the invaders should be, in turn, monsters, space wolves, giant-bomb-throwing lips, and the most dangerous of all, killer fuzz balls. Killer fuzz balls that bounce and shake and move toward you with frantic inevitability. "Space Eggs" was a runaway bestseller for Sinus Software.
Another company breaking into the market then was the brainchild of a former corporate lawyer from Wisconsin. Doug Carlston had been unhappy working for a big law firm on the eighty-second floor of the Sears Building in Chicago; he missed his college hacking days, when he and his friends would stuff chewing gum in the lock of the computer room door so the staff couldn't keep them out; at night fifteen of them would sneak in and hack. Even after he'd set up a small law practice in rural Maine, his heart remained in computing. Then the soft-spoken, contemplative Carlston heard that Radio Shack was selling a computer for under two thousand dollars. He bought one on a Friday and didn't come up for air, he remembers, until that Sunday night. Eventually he began writing a gigantic strategy game on the TRS-80, one which involved an entire imaginary universe. Your mission was to protect the interstellar good guys: the Br0derbund. (This was Scandinavian for "Brotherhood.")
It was early 1980, and Carlston, like Williams and Jewell, saw his life in software. He enlisted his brother Gary, who had been working in a job so desirable that grown men gasped when he mentioned it coach of a Scandinavian women's basketball team. Together they set up Br0derbund Software to sell Galactic Saga. The idea was to translate the Saga from TRS-80 to the Apple.
The Saga did not fare too well at first. The seven thousand dollars that Doug and Gary began with was down to around thirty-two dollars at one point. They were living on Gary's VISA card. It wasn't until Doug drove across the country, stopping at every computer store he found and showing them the game, letting them soak in some of the program's fine points, and calling in seventeen thousand dollars' worth of business in his nightly calls back to Gary that things picked up.
But the really big break came at the 1980 Computer Faire, where the Carlstons had scraped the money together to show the Saga in a low-cost "microbooth," an innovation of Jim Warren's to allow small, often nonprofit companies to display without shelling out the spiraling exhibitor's fees on the main floor. A conservative Japanese businessman took a liking to these clean-living, religious Carlstons, and allowed them to distribute the work of some Japanese programmers he handled. The games were faithful copies of current coin-operated arcade games. And the very first Apple program he gave them, a brilliant rip-off of the arcade game "Galax-ian" they named it, unapologetically, "Apple Galaxian" became a top hit, selling tens of thousands of disks. And though Br0derbund began to recruit programmers in the United States to write games, for months the Japanese product accounted for most of its business.
On-Line, Br0derbund, and Sinus were the fastest risers of dozens of companies springing up to cater to new computer users, particularly those in what came to be known as the Apple World. The formerly dominant Programma had overextended itself and eventually was folded into a bigger company, which was not as much of a market force. But newer firms with names like Continental and Stoneware and Southwestern Data were out of the gate like wild quarter horses, too. The distinguishing characteristic of these companies was that, like the hardware firms forming out of the Homebrew Computer Club, the impetus seemed to be as much to get software out there as it was to cash in on a budding trend. Hitting the marketplace seemed to be the best way to show off one's hacks.
Significantly, a new magazine which became closely identified with the brash new wave of Apple World software companies, was started by people who were not terribly experienced in publishing, but were fanatic proselytizers of the Apple computer.
Margot Tommervik, a Los Angeles free-lance textbook editor with brown hair worn long and straight in true sixties-refugee style, had loved games long before she touched her first computer. In early 1980, she appeared on the television game show "Password," and despite being paired with a couple of soap opera personalities who, she later recalled, "had no idea that Virginia was south and New Hampshire was north," she came out of a deftly played "lightning round" with fifteen thousand dollars. She and her husband Al, a copy editor at Variety, made a list of things to do with the money, and it turned out they needed twice as much as that to make a dent in the list. So they said to hell with it and went out to buy a computer.
The best-known home computer those days was the TRS-80. But while Margot and Al were waiting for a salesman in the local Radio Shack, a store employee a kid who was standing near Al said, "What's that smell?" Al was a stumpy, redheaded, long-bearded man who resembled a toll-taker at a bridge in Middle Earth, and it was unimaginable to picture him without his briar pipe. The kid, perhaps with an MIT-style smoke aversion in his hacker blood, said to Al Tommervik, "Mister, you shouldn't smoke that pipe, it's making me sick." The Tommerviks walked out of Radio Shack, and a week later bought an Apple.
Margot and Al, in her words, "became addicted" to the Apple. She enjoyed the games it played, but her satisfaction went deeper. Without any technical background, Margot Tommervik was able to extract the Hacker Ethic from this sleek piece of machinery in her home. She believed that her Apple had its own personality, life-loving and kind of daffy, in a positive way. She later explained:
"The very idea of naming it Apple it's wonderful. It's much better than [giving it a name like] 72497 or 9R. It says, 'Hey, this is more than just a piece of machinery. You can get more out of it.' Even the little beep it emits when you turn it on shows a special enthusiasm."
Margot Tommervik learned the story of how Apple Computer began, and she marveled at how the machine conveyed Steve Wozniak's "life-loving spirit into the computer. He had that ability to bite all the big pieces of life and chew it up and savor every bit. He put the spirit into it as he built. He made the machine do as many things as he could think of it to do ..." Margot believed that if you spent enough time with your Apple, you would realize that you could also do anything you could think of. To her, the Apple embodied the essence of pioneering, of doing something brand new, having the courage and the willingness to take risks, doing what's not been done before, trying the impossible and pulling it off with joy. The joy of making things work. In short, the joy of hackerism, for the first time transparent to those not born with the Hands-On Imperative.
Margot saw it in everyone who used the Apple. They just fell in love with it. Her plumber, for example, got an Apple, and as Margot watched the plumber's wife playing a game on it, Margot swore she was actually seeing a mind expanding. You could get some of this excitement even just setting up an Apple, when you got your first disk to boot, and the disk drive came on, whirring happily, with the little red "in use" light glowing. By God, you did it! You caused something to happen. You caused the disk drive to run, you caused this to happen, and then as you started to set real tasks for your Apple and construct your tiny universes, you started to solve things. You saw your power tremendously increased. All the people she talked to in the Apple world, and certainly Margot herself, showed that joy. She believed it was no less than the joy in one's own humanity.
Margot Tommervik loved the new kinds of software coming out, and though she and Al did some BASIC programming, the machine was mostly used to play these new games she would buy. One day she dropped by Rainbow Computing and saw a notice that a new Adventure-style program was coming out, and would be put on sale at ten o'clock on a certain Friday; the first one who solved it would win a prize. Margot was there with $32.95 that Friday, and by noon Saturday she was back at the store with the solution. The game was Mystery House.
Sometime later Margot stumbled across a publishing house which had started a magazine about software, and was looking for a partner. Margot and Al said they'd put up some money and do the magazine if they were promised full control. So the remains of the "Password" money went into this new incarnation of the magazine, a magazine devoted to the world of the Apple computer. It would be called Softalk.
When Margot started drumming up advertisers she called up On-Line and told Roberta, who was still handling corporate business from her Simi Valley kitchen, about wanting a completely professional magazine that would reflect the spirit of the Apple computer. Margot's enthusiasm was obvious. And when Margot mentioned that it was she who had won that contest to solve Mystery House, Roberta howled, "You're the one! We thought it would take months to do it." Roberta talked to Ken, and On-Line decided to take out four quarter-page ads in the first issue. They called up other companies and urged them to take out ads, too.
Softalk came out in September 1980 at thirty-two pages, including the covers. Eventually the people in the cottage industry of supplying products for the Apple began to realize the value of a magazine whose readers were their direct target audience. By the end of 1981, there were well over a hundred advertising pages in an issue.
These pioneering Apple World companies were bound by an unspoken spiritual bond. They all loved the Apple computer, and the idea of mass computing in general. Somehow, they all believed that the world would be better when people got their hands on computers, learned the lessons that computers had to teach, and especially got software that would help expedite this process.
In pursuit of this common goal, On-Line, Sirius, and Br0derbund became almost a Brotherhood of their own. Jewell and the Williamses and the Carlstons got to know each other very well, not only at computer shows and trade events, but at each other's parties, where the three staffs gathered, along with people from other Apple-oriented firms in California.
This was in high contrast to some not-so-old but already moribund companies. Particularly Atari, the company which started as the first purveyor of the computer game and sold millions of dollars of software for the Atari "VCS" game machine (which could not be programmed like a computer) and its own competitor to the Apple, the Atari Home Computer. Since its acquisition by the huge Wamer Communications conglomerate. Atari had shorn itself of the hacker-like openness of its founders. You almost had to be a KGB agent to find out the name of one of its programmers, so terrified was Atari that someone would raid its ranks. And the thought of programmers getting together and comparing notes was even more frightening. What if one of its programmers realized that he could do better somewhere else? No such secrets for the Brotherhood, who in 1981 most often paid their programmers on a 30 percent royalty basis, a rate well known to all three companies and all the programmers working in the field.
The cooperation went deeper than partying. Almost as if they had unconsciously pledged to adhere to at least part of the Hacker Ethic, there were no secrets between them. Almost every day. Ken, Doug, and Jerry would talk on the phone, sharing information about this distributor or that floppy disk manufacturer. If some retailer didn't pay off one of the companies, the others would know immediately, and not deliver to that retailer. "We had this unwritten code," Jerry Jewell later recalled. "We would let each other know what we were working on so we wouldn't do the same projects. If I was working on a racing car game, we would tell them, so they wouldn't start one."
Some might look at this interaction and call it restraint of trade, but that would be an Old Age interpretation. This Brotherhood was no cartel banding together to the detriment of the user and the technology. The user benefited by getting a wider range of games. And if a programmer from one of the companies couldn't figure out some assembly-language trick with zero page graphics, the fact that he could get in touch with a programmer at another company was only the application of the Hacker Ethic to commerce. Why hide helpful information? If neat tricks were widely disseminated, the quality of all the software would rise, and people would get more out of computers, and it would be good for all the companies in the long run.
Maybe it was time to scrap the divisive practices of corporate business and adopt a more hacker-like approach, one which might, by its successes in the software field, spread through all of America and revitalize the entire country, long spinning in a Darwinian, litigious, MBA-dominated maelstrom. Substance might then prevail over cloudy "corporate image," in a world free of the insane, anti-productive practice of owning concepts and trade secrets which could be distributed far and wide. A world without all that destructive, cutthroat seriousness. The attitude in the Apple World seemed to be "If it's not fun, if it's not creative or new, it's not worth it." That's what you would hear from Ken and Roberta Williams, from Doug and Gary Carlston, from Jerry Jewell.
This spirit reached its peak during the summer of 1981 in a scene imbued with all the gusto of a cola commercial: a white-water raft trip down the Stanislaus River. It was Ken Williams' idea, a joint vacation trip for the whole industry. Ken joked that he did it only to put leaks into his competitors' boats; but the very absurdity of that statement underlined the difference between this industry and others. Instead of sabotaging competitors. Ken Williams would forge his way through fierce waters alongside them.
The river was idyllic, but one participant later explained to a reporter that even more idyllic than the isolated pine-treed and high-canyon-walled setting was the feeling among the adventurers, who of course swapped all sorts of product, technological, and financial information: "We all sort of feel like we beat the system: we got to microcomputers before IBM did. We're all competitors but we like to cooperate."
Even the boatmen had to tell the participants, which included the heads of over six software firms, like Ken and Roberta, or the Carlstons, or Steve Dompier (the Homebrew member who was independently writing software now that Processor Tech was out of business) to stop talking shop. Sometimes they did stop. They stopped at the end of the ride as they approached the last rapid. Not for the first time, Ken Williams rammed his raft into someone else's. Some people on that raft tumbled onto another one, and people from all ten rafts used their paddles and buckets to splash one another, and the Brotherhood exploded in a mist of white water, laughter, and thrilling camaraderie.