KEN Williams came to rely on people like John Harris, Third Generation hackers influenced not so much by Robert Heinlein or Doc Smith as by Galaxian, Dungeons and Dragons, and Star Wars. A whole subculture of creative, game-designing hacker-programmers was blooming, beyond the reach of executive headhunters. They were mostly still in high school.
To lure young programmers to Coarsegold, Williams took out ads in the Los Angeles Times tempting programmers to "Boot into Yosemite." Typical of the replies was a man who told Ken, "My son's a great Apple programmer and would like working with you." "Why don't you let me talk to your son?" Ken asked. The man told him that his son didn't come across well on the phone. At the job interview at Oakhurst, the man insisted on answering all the questions for his son, a small, round-eyed, sixteen-year-old blond who had peach-fuzz on his cheeks and seemed intimidated by the entire situation. None of this mattered when Ken discovered the kid was capable of grasping the intricacies of Apple assembly language. Ken hired him for three dollars an hour.
Slowly, Ken Williams began to fill up the house he bought in the Sierra Sky Ranch area, just beyond Oakhurst where Route 41 starts climbing to elevations of over five thousand feet. Besides free rent, there were Ken's impromptu graphics tutorials. Ken was now known as a certified Apple wizard. He could turn on his hacker inquisitiveness almost on whim. He refused to accept what others considered generic limitations on the Apple. He would use page-flipping, exclusive-or-ing, masking technique ... anything to get something up on the screen. When looking at someone else's program, he could smell a problem, circle around it, get to the heart of the matter, and come up with a solution.
On-Line's corporate headquarters in 1981 was the second floor of a dark brown wood-frame structure on Route 41 whose ground floor housed a stationery store and a little print shop. You entered the office after climbing a flight of stairs on the outside of the building; you had to go outside past the staircase to go to the bathroom. Inside the office were a group of desks, fewer desks than there were employees. People played a continuous game of musical chairs to claim desk space and use of one of the several Apples. Boxes of disks, discarded computer monitors, and stacks of correspondence were piled on the floor. The disarray was mind-boggling. The noise level, routinely intolerable. The dress code, nonexistent. It was productive anarchy, reminiscent of the nonstructured atmosphere of the AI lab or the Homebrew Club. But since it was also a prosperous business, and the participants so young, the On-Line office resembled a weird combination of Animal House and The Millionaire.
It was indicative of Ken Williams' priorities. He was involved in a new type of business in a brand-new industry, and was not about to establish the same hateful, claustrophobic, secretive, bureaucratic environment that he despised so much at almost every company he had worked for. He was the boss, but he would not be the kind of boss Dick Sunderland at Informatics was, obsessed with detail. He was in control of the bigger picture. Besides getting rich, something that seemed to be falling neatly into place as his programs regularly placed in the top ten or fifteen of the "Top 30 Bestsellers" list published by Softalk each month, Ken felt that he had a dual mission to fulfill at On-Line.
The first was to have fun, an element he felt had been lamentably lacking in the decorum-bound establishments of the Old Age. Ken Williams became, in efiect, the head counselor in a high-tech Summer Camp. There was Summer Camp fun and rowdiness and drinking and dope-smoking. Stoned or not, everyone was on a high, working in a field that felt good, politically and morally. The extended party was fueled regularly by an influx of envelopes of money.
Packages would also arrive containing new games whether games from friendly competitors like Sirius or Br0derbund, games from would-be software superstars looking to get published, or games from one of On-Line's outside authors working under Ken's supervision. No matter. Everything stopped for new games. Someone would run off copies and everyone would take to the Apples, playing the game, making fun of its bugs, admiring its features, and seeing who could get the highest score. As long as the money kept coming in, and it certainly did, who cared about a little disorganization, or an excessive tendency to shift into party mode?
Outsiders would visit the office and not believe what they saw. Jeff Stephenson, for instance. At thirty, he was an experienced programmer who had recently worked for Software Arts, the Cambridge, Massachusetts, company that had written the bestselling Apple program of all time, the financial "spreadsheet" VisiCalc. That company was also headed by programmers Jeff could recall the two presidents, one of them a former MIT hacker and the other a meticulous young Orthodox Jew, arguing for half an hour about where a comma should go on some report. Jeff, a quiet, unassuming vegetarian who held a black belt in Korean sword-fighting, had moved to the mountains with his wife recently, and called On-Line to see if the closest company to his new home needed a programmer. He put on cord jeans and a sport shirt for the interview; his wife suggested he dress up more. "This is the mountains," Jeff reminded her, and drove down Deadwood Mountain to On-Line Systems. When he arrived, Ken told him, "I don't know if you're going to fit in here you look kind of conservative." He hired Jeff anyway, for eighteen thousand dollars a year eleven thousand less than he'd been making at Software Arts.
At the time, the most ambitious project On-Line had ever attempted was bogged down in an organizational disaster. "Time Zone," the adventure game Roberta had been working on for almost a year, was a program out of control, gripped by a literary equivalent to the Creeping Feature Creature. Almost drunk with the giddy ambition of creating on the computer, Roberta was hatching a scenario which not only would re-create scenes from all over the world but would take in the breadth of recorded history, from the dawn of man to the year 4081. When Roberta played a good adventure game she always wished it would never end this game, she decided, would have so many plots and rooms that it would take even an experienced adventurer a year to solve. You would see the fall of Caesar, suffer the Napoleonic wars, fight Samurai warriors, rap with prehistoric Australian aborigines, sail with Columbus, visit hundreds of places, and witness the entire panorama of the human experience, eventually winding up on the planet Neburon, where the evil leader Ramadu is planning to destroy Earth. A microcomputer epic, conceived by a housewife in central California.
Programming this monster was grinding the business of On-Line to a halt. One staff programmer was working on a routine to triple the speed with which the program would fill in colors for the hi-res pictures. The young programmer whose father had arranged his employment tried to cope with the game logic, while a former alcoholic who had bootstrapped his way to the title of programmer keyed in the Adventure Development Language messages. A local teen-ager was painstakingly drawing the fourteen hundred pictures, first on graph paper, then retracing on an Apple graphics tablet.
Jeff Stephenson was asked to somehow tie the program together. He was dismayed at the disorganization, and appalled at the deadline: autumn, so the game would be on sale for Christmas. (He was later to conclude that any deadline Ken gave was usually overop-timistic by a factor of three.)
Despite the project being so far behind schedule, the company was still run like Summer Camp. Tuesday night was "Men's Night," with Ken out on a drinking excursion. Every Wednesday, most of the staff would take the day off to go skiing at Badger Pass in Yosemite. On Fridays at noon, On-Line would enact a ritual entitled "Breaking Out the Steel." "Steel" was the clear but potent Steel's peppermint schnapps which was On-Line Systems' beverage of choice. In the company vernacular, a lot of steel would get you "sledged." Once they broke out the steel on Fridays, it could be reasonably assumed that work on Time Zone would be halted while the staff, Ken leading the way, would explore the hazy, timeless zone of sledgedom.
Christmas came and went, and Time Zone did not ship until February. Twelve times the size of Wizard and the Princess, filling both sides of six floppy disks, it retailed for one hundred dollars. The first person to solve it, a jovial, adventure-game fanatic named Roe Adams (who was also the chief reviewer for Softalk), went virtually without sleep for a week until he vanquished Ramadu and declared Roberta's creation one of the greatest gaming feats in history.
Time Zone, though, did not earn nearly the notoriety of another On-Line adventure which was well in keeping with the spirit of the company. The game was called "Softpom." In the Spring of 1981, Ken had met a programmer who had been talking to publishers about an adventure game he had written and was trying, with little success, to market himself. This game was not your usual adventure where you quest for jewels, or try to solve a murder, or try to overthrow some evil Emperor Nyquill from the Planet Yvonne. In this game, you were a bachelor whose quest was to find and seduce three women. The programmer had written the program as a training exercise to help teach himself about data bases, using the sexual theme to make it interesting. It was the kind of thing that hackers, at least the ones who were aware that a thing called sex existed, had been doing for years, and it was rare to find a computer center without its own particular sexual specialty, be it an obscene-joke generator or a program to print out a display of a naked woman. The difference was that in 1981, all sorts of things that hackers had been doing as cosmic technical goofs had a sudden market value in home computer translations.
The program in question was a cleaned-up variation of the original. It would get vile only if you used obscenity in your command. Still, in order to win the game you needed to have sex with a prostitute, buy a condom to avoid venereal disease, and engage in sadomasochism with a blonde who insisted on marrying you before you could bed her. If you wanted to do well in this adventure, the replies you typed into the computer had to be imaginatively seductive. But there were perils: if you came across the "voluptuous blonde" and typed in EAT BLONDE, the computer would type out a passage intimating that the blonde was leaning over and performing oral sex on you. But then she'd flash her gleaming choppers and bite it off!
To those with a sense of humor about that sort of thing, Softporn was a uniquely desirable Apple game. Most software publishers wanted nothing to do with the game; they considered themselves "family" businesses. But Ken Williams thought the game was a riot: he had a great time solving the adventure in three or four hours. He thought the controversy would be fun. He agreed to market Softporn.
One day not long afterward. Ken walked into the office and said, "Who wants to come over my house and take pictures in the hot tub naked?"
The idea was to get three women to pose topless in Ken's hot tub for the Softporn advertisement. Somewhere in the picture would be an Apple computer, and in the tub with the three naked women would be a male waiter serving them drinks. They borrowed a waiter from The Broken Bit, a Coarsegold steak house which was about the only decent place to eat in town. The three women, all On-Liners, who took their blouses off were the company bookkeeper, the wife of Ken's assistant, and Roberta Williams.
The full-color ad, with the women holding wineglasses (the water in the hot tub tactfully covering their nipples), the fully clothed male waiter holding a tray of more wineglasses, and an Apple computer standing rather forlomly in the background, caused a sensation. On-Line got its share of hate mail, some of it full of Bible scripture and prophecy of the damnation ahead. The story of the game and the ad caught the imagination of the news services, and the picture ran in Time and over the UPI wire.
Ken Williams loved the free publicity. Softpom became one of On-Line's biggest sellers. Computer stores that wanted it would be reluctant to order just that one program. So, like the teenager who goes to the drugstore and says, "I'd like a comb, toothpaste, aspirin, suntan oil, stationery, and, oh, while I'm here I might as well pick up this Playboy, " the store owners would order a whole sampling of On-Line products ... and some Softporn too. Ken guessed that Softpom and its ripple effect just about doubled his revenue.
Having fun, getting rich, becoming famous, and hosting a never-ending party were only part of Ken's mission; there was a more serious component as well. He was developing a philosophy about the personal computer and its ability to transform people's lives. The Apple, and the group of computers like it, were amazing not only for what they did, but also for their accessibility. Ken had seen people totally ignorant about computers work with them and gain in confidence, so that their whole outlook in life had changed. By manipulating a world inside a computer, people realized that they were capable of making things happen by their own creativity. Once you had that power, you could do anything.
Ken Williams realized that he was able to expose people to that sort of transformation, and he set about using the company he and Roberta had founded as a sort of rehabilitation project on some of the underutilized people around Oakhurst and Coarsegold.
The area had been suffering from the recession, especially in the industrial-mining realm which once supported it. There hadn't been any boom since the Gold Rush. On-Line Systems quickly became the largest employer around. Despite Ken's unorthodox management style, the appearance of a high-tech firm in town was a godsend they were, like it or not, part of a community. Ken enjoyed his role as nouveau riche town father, dispatching his civic responsibilities with his usual bent for excess huge donations to the local fire department, for example. But the close friends Ken and Roberta would make did not seem to come from the upper reaches of Oakhurst society. They were, instead, the people Ken lifted from obscurity by the power of the computer.
Rick Davidson's job was sanding boats, and his wife Sharon was working as a motel maid. Ken hired them both; Rick eventually became vice-president in charge of product development, and Sharon headed the accounting department. Larry Bain was an unemployed plumber who became Ken's head of product acquisition.
A particularly dramatic transformation occurred in the person of Bob Davis. He was the prime specimen in Ken's On-Line Systems human laboratory, a missionary venture using computers to transmogrify life's has-beens and never-weres into masters of technology. At twenty-seven, Davis was a former musician and short-order cook with long red hair and an unkempt beard. In 1981, he was working in a liquor store. He was delighted at the chance to reform his life by computers, and Ken was even more delighted at the transformation. Also, the wild streak in Bob Davis seemed to match a similar kink in Ken's personality.
Whenever Ken Williams went into the liquor store to buy his booze, Bob Davis would beg him for a job. Davis had heard of this new kind of company and was curious about computers. Ken finally gave him work copying disks at night. Davis began coming in during the day to leam programming. Though he was a high school dropout, he seemed to have an affinity for BASIC and he sought extra help from Ken's crew of young hackers. Street-smart Davis saw that a hell of a lot of money was coming in to On-Line from those games, and vowed to write one himself.
Bob and his wife began hanging out with the Williamses. On-Line Systems was a loose enough company to accommodate an arrangement that flouted traditional taboos between owners and employees. They went on trips together, to places like Lake Tahoe. Bob's status at the company rose. He got appointed to programmer, and was project director of the Time Zone venture. Mostly, he typed in ADL code, not knowing much about assembly language. It bothered a few people even amiable Jeff Stephenson, who liked Bob a lot that Bob Davis was going around calling himself a programmer, when a real programmer, anyone with hacker credentials, should have been able to perform a lot more concentrated wizardry than Davis had.
Once Davis learned Ken's ADL tools, though, he had the key to writing a professional-level Adventure game. He'd always been interested in mythology, and he read up on some Greek classics, particularly those dealing with Jason, and worked the ancient tales into an adventure game. He programmed the game, he claimed, in his spare time (though some at On-Line thought that he neglected his Time Zone duties for his own project) and with some help from Ken, he finished it. Less than a year after being rescued from clerkdom in a liquor store he was a software star. On-Line's lawyer guessed there might be a problem in calling the game "Jason and the Golden Fleece" because that was a movie title which might be copyrighted, so On-Line released the game as "Ulysses and the Golden Fleece."
It was an instant hit, placing comfortably in Softalk's Top Thirty. Videogame Illustrated magazine called it "one of the most important and challenging videogames ever created," though it really did not represent any significant advance over previous hi-res adventures except that it was longer and its graphics looked considerably more artful than the Mystery House pictures with their stick-figure look. The magazine also interviewed Davis, who sounded quite the pundit, talking about what gaming consumers might expect in the next five years ("computers hooked up to every phone and every television ... voice synthesis ... voice recognition ... special effects generated by videodisks..."). A Utopian scenario, and why not? Look what computers had done for Bob Davis.
The changes that personal computers were making in people's lives were by no means limited to California. All over the country, the computer was opening up new areas of creativity. Part of the hacker dream was that people who had unfulfilled creative tendencies would be liberated by the computer. They might even ascend to a level of wizardry where they might earn the appellation of hacker. Ken Williams now could see this happening. Almost as if predestined, some of his programmers, once immersed in communion with the machine, had confidently blossomed. No transformation was more dramatic than that of Warren Schwader.
Perhaps the most significant event in Wan-en Schwader's life occurred in 1977, when Warren was eighteen: his brother purchased one of the first Apple II computers. His brother had been paralyzed in a car accident, and wanted the Apple to relieve his boredom. It was up to tall, blond, thick-featured and slow-talking Warren to help his brother key commands into the Apple. And it was Warren who became the hacker.
At that time Warren was working at the Parker Pen Company in his hometown in rural Wisconsin. Though Warren had a talent for math, he stopped his schooling after high school. His job at Parker was running an injection molding machine, which consisted of a big mold and a tube where plastic was heated. The hot plastic would be injected into the mold, and after twenty seconds of cooling Warren would open the door and take out the newly formed pen parts. Then he would shut the door again. Warren Schwader considered the job a challenge. He wanted the pen parts to be perfect. He would constantly be adjusting the loader, or twisting the key, or tightening the nuts and bolts on the molder. He loved that machine. Years after leaving Parker, he said with pride that the pen parts from his molder were indeed perfect.
He approached programming with the same meticulous compul-siveness. Every day he would try a different graphics demo. In the morning he would decide what he wanted to try. During the twenty-second intervals that his molding machine allowed him, he would use pencil and paper to flowchart a program for the demo. At night, he would sit down at the Apple and debug the program until his intended effect filled the screen. He was particularly fond of kaleidoscopic, multicolored displays.
One of the graphics demos Warren tried appealed to him so much that he decided to try to expand it into a game. Ever since he first played Pong in arcades. Warren had been a videogame fan. He tried to copy a game he'd seen in an arcade: it had a paddle on the bottom of the screen and little bricks at the top of the screen. You would hit a blip with the paddle and it would bounce like a pinball machine. That took Warren a month of twenty-second intervals and nighttime debugging, and though it was written in lo-res graphics, which weren't as sharp as the things you could do in assembly language and hi-res, the game he turned out was good, too.
Up until this time Warren had been working on the Apple solely to discover what he could do on it. He had been absorbed in pure process. But seeing these games on the screen, games he had created from thin air, games which might have been the most creative things that he had ever accomplished, Warren Schwader began to realize that his computing could actually yield a tangible result. Like a game that others might enjoy.
This epiphany drove Warren deeper into the machine. He resolved to do an assembly-language game, even if it took him months. There were no books on the subject, and certainly no one Warren knew in Wisconsin could tell him anything about it. Also, the only assembler Warren had was the simple and slow miniassembler that was built into the Apple. None of this stopped Warren Schwader, who in personality and outlook is much like the fabled turtle who eventually outraces the rabbit.
Warren did an assembly-language game called "Smash-Up," in which the player, controlling a little car, tries to avoid head-on collisions with other cars. He considered it good enough to sell. Warren didn't have enough money for a magazine ad, so he just made as many copies as he could on cassette tapes, and sent them to computer stores. This was 1980, when the newly minted Apple game market was switching from cassette to the faster and more versatile floppy disks. Warren sold only about two thousand dollars' worth of Smash-Up games, spending out almost twice that in expenses.
Parker Pen company closed down the factory, so Warren had a lot more time to work on his next game. "I had just learned [the card game] Cribbage and I really loved it," Schwader would later recall. "There was nobody that knew how to play it [with me] so I said, 'Why don't I write a program that plays Cribbage?' " He worked perhaps a total of eight hundred hours on it, often wrapping around until the Wisconsin dawn. He was attempting graphics tricks he didn't quite understand, things he would later know as indirect addressing, and zero-page graphics. He worked so hard at the game that "the whole time I felt that I was inside the computer. People would talk to me, but I couldn't interact," he later said. His native tongue was no longer English, but the hexadecimal hieroglyphics of LDX #$0, LDA STRING,X, JSR $FDFO, BYT $0, BNE LOOP.
The finished program was superb. Wan-en had developed some inspired algorithms that allowed the computer to evaluate its hand by twelve major rules. He considered the program flawless in its choosing of cards to throw in the crib. It was only because Warren was familiar with the program's traits he knew it like an old-time card partner that he could beat it around 60 percent of the time.
Warren Schwader sent the game to Ken Williams, who was impressed with the logic and with the graphics, which gave a clear, sharp picture of each card dealt. What was even more amazing was that Schwader had done this on the limited Apple mini-assembler.
It was as if someone had sent Ken a beautifully crafted rocking chair, and then had told him that the craftsman had used no saw, lathe, or other conventional tools, but had built the chair with a penknife. Ken asked Warren if he wanted to work for On-Line. Live in the woods. Boot into Yosemite. Join the wild, crazy Summer Camp of a new-age company.
Warren had been subsisting on the couple-hundred dollars a month he received from the state for taking care of his brother. Warren was worried about leaving him to day nurses, but his brother told Warren that this On-Line thing was a big opportunity and he should take it. And it appealed to Warren, this idea of going off and making money programming games and living in the woods. So he decided to do it. But there was one part of the package that did not appeal to him. The Summer Camp fun and rowdi-ness and drinking and dope-smoking that were common practices at On-Line Systems. Warren was a Jehovah's Witness.
Around the time Warren was working on Cribbage, his mother had died. Warren got to thinking about where he was headed, and what his purpose was in life. He found that computers were the main thing he was living for. He felt there had to be more, and turned to his late mother's religion. He began intense study of the Bible. And he vowed that his new life in California would be characterized by adherence to the precepts of Jehovah.
At first this did not interfere much with his life at On-Line. Warren Schwader did not criticize la doice vita at On-Line Systems. But because of the godless habits of his colleagues, he generally limited his transactions with them to business or technical discussions. He preferred to stick with people of his faith so he would be protected from temptation.
He was living alone, free of charge, in one of Ken's houses, a small two-bedroom. His social life was confined to a hall of the Kingdom of Jehovah's Witnesses in Ahwahnee, five miles west of Oakhurst. The very first time he went to a service there, he felt he had made more friends than he ever had before. They approved of computers, telling him that they could do much good for man, though one must beware that much can be done through computers to do harm. Warren became aware that the love he had for hacking was a threat to his devotion to God, and though he still loved programming he tried to moderate his hacking sessions so that he was not diverted from his true purpose. So while he kept programming at night, he would also maintain his Bible studies, and during afternoons and weekends he would travel through the area, knocking on doors and going into people's houses, bearing copies of Awake! and The Watchtower, and preaching the faith of Jehovah.
Meanwhile, he was working on a game based on some of Ken's fastest, most spectacular assembly-language subroutines yet. It was a game like Space Invaders, where you had a rocketship and had to fight off waves of invaders. But the waves were full of weird shapes, and moved in all kinds of directions, and if the player tried to send a constant stream of bullets off to fight them, his "laser gun" would overheat and he would face almost certain death. It was the kind of game designed to spur cardiac arrest in the feeble-hearted, so fierce were the attackers and so violent were the explosions. It was not exactly a landmark in Apple gaming, since it was so derivative of the Space Invaders school ofshoot-'em-ups, but it did represent an escalation in graphic pyrotechnics and game-playing intensity. The name of this computer program was "Threshold," and it made Warren Schwader almost one hundred thousand dollars in royalties, a significant percentage of which was tithed to the Kingdom Hall in Ahwahnee.
But as Warren drew closer to the community of the Kingdom, he began to question deeply the kinds of things he had been doing for On-Line. He wondered if his very joy in programming wasn't some kind of sin. The act of programming the game had been carnal Warren had worked through the night with his stereo blaring Led Zeppelin (Satan's rock band). Worse, the shooting nature of the game left no doubt that it glorified war. Warren's study of scripture convinced him one should not learn war any more. He felt ashamed that a war game he had programmed would be played by kids.
So he was not surprised to see an Awake! article about vide-ogames which compared them to drugs, and said that the warlike games "promote aggression without mercy." Warren decided to stop programming violent games, and he vowed that if Watchtower were to come out strongly against all games, he would have to stop programming and find something else to do with his life.
He began work on a nonviolent game with a circus theme. The work went slowly because he tried not to lose himself in programming to the point that he would be a zombie who had lost contact with God. He got rid of all his hard rock albums and played music like Cat Stevens, Toto, and the Beatles. He even began to like music he once would have considered sappy, like Olivia Newton-John (though when he played her record he always had to remember to lift the needle when the sinful song "Physical" played).
Still, when Warren talked about his new game, how he was using dual-page animation with twelve different patterns to control the rolling barrels that the character must leap over, or how it would have zero-flicker and be "100 percent playable," it was clear that despite his asetic efforts he took a sensual pride in the hack. Programming meant a lot to him. It had changed his life, giving him power, made him someone.
As much as John Harris loved living away from San Diego in the Sierra foothills, as much as he appreciated the footloose Summer Camp atmosphere, and as happy as he was that his programs were recognized as colorful, creative efforts, one crucial part of his life was totally unsatisfactory. It was a common disease of Third Generation hackers, to whom hacking was important, but not everything, as it was to the MIT hackers. John Harris hungered for a girlfriend.
Ken Williams took the concerns of his young programmers seriously. A happy John Harris would be a John Harris writing hit games. Roberta Williams also felt affection for the ingenuous twenty-year-old, and was touched by what she believed was a secret crush he harbored for her. "He would look at me with those puppy-dog eyes," she later recalled. The Williamses resolved to clear up John's problem, and for a considerable length of time an unofficial corporate goal of On-Line Systems was Getting John Harris Laid. It was not so easy. Though John Harris could conceivably be called "cute" by women his age, though he could be verbally clever and was certainly making enough money to please all but the most exacting of gold diggers, women did not seem to react to him sexually.
Around Oakhurst, of course, even finding women was a problem. John Harris had taken a part-time job in the local arcade, figuring that any girl who liked games would have something in common with him; he made it a point to stay around almost all the hours the arcade was open. But the girls who spent time at the arcade were still in high school. Any local girl with much in the way of brains would go away to college; the ones that stayed were into motorcycle types, and didn't relate to gentle guys who were nervous around women, as John Harris was. John asked a lot of girls out, and they usually said no, probably making him feel as he did when people would choose sides for basketball games and he'd be standing there unchosen.
Ken vowed to change all that. "I'm going to get you laid, John Harris," he would always say, and though John was embarrassed and urged Ken to stop saying those things, he secretly hoped that Ken would keep his promise. But the mishaps continued.
Every time John went out, there were calamities. First the teenage girl he met in a fast-food restaurant who accompanied him for pizza and would not go out with him again. Then a woman who packaged disks for On-Line, a date arranged by Ken. John embarrassed himself by locking his keys in his new four-wheel-drive, had trouble getting into the saloon where they all went, and was mortified when Ken, in front of the woman, began making crude remarks about how homy John was "That really embarrassed me," John Harris later said. When everybody went back to the Williamses' house to get in the hot tub, John's four-wheel-drive got stuck in the snow; and finally, the girl met up with her old boyfriend and left with him. That was the end of a typical John Harris date.
Ken Williams did not give up that easily. The Williamses took John Harris to the Club Med in Haiti. How can a guy not get laid at Club Med? When a woman wearing no bikini top vow could see her breasts right there in front of you asked John if he'd like to go snorkeling, Ken just laughed. Pay dirt! The woman was around ten years older, but perhaps an experienced woman was what John Harris needed. The snorkeling trip was lots of fun, and on the way back all the girls were fooling around, putting their tops on the guys. Roberta grabbed John's arm and whispered, "If you don't do something with this girl, I'll never talk to you again!"
John Harris suppressed his shyness at that point. "I finally put my arm around the girl," he later recalled. "She said 'Can I talk to you?' We sat down and she brought up our age difference." It was clear that there was no romance in the offing. "I'd planned to take her sailing, but I was too embarrassed after that," John later said.
Ken got even bolder after Haiti. "He did quite a few things [to find me a woman]," John Harris later said. At one point, Williams asked a waitress at Lake Tahoe, "How would you like to sleep with a rich twenty-year-old?"
Probably the worst of all happened at a bachelor party they threw for an On-Line employee. Ken had hired two strippers. The party was held at the office, and it was indicative of the freewheeling, anything-goes spirit in Ken's company. People imbibed heavily; somebody started a game where you would try to look the other way and throw beer bottles into a far cubicle. The office became covered with broken glass, and the next day almost everyone at the party woke up with cuts and bruises.
John liked the looks of one of the strippers. "She was unbelievably gorgeous," he recalled. She seemed shy to John, and confessed to him that until a couple of weeks back she'd been a secretary, and was doing this because the money was so good. She danced right around John Harris, at one point taking her bra off and draping it around his head.
"I want to talk to you," Ken said, taking John aside. "I'm being perfectly honest. This is what she said 'He's really cute.'"
John just listened.
"I told her you make three hundred thousand dollars a year. She asked if you were married."
Ken was not being totally forthright. He had made a deal with the woman to have sex with John Harris. Ken arranged it all, telling John she would be at the Chez Paree in Fresno, and John got all dressed up to see her. Ken went along. John and the woman retreated to a rear table. Ken told John he'd buy them drinks, but all she wanted was Seven-Up. Ken bought the couple a bottle of Seven-Up. "The bottles were expensive," John later recalled. "Twenty dollars a bottle." It was the first of many bottles of twenty-dollar Seven-Ups. "I was totally entranced by this girl. She was really easy to talk to. We talked about things she did before, why she decided to be a stripper. She didn't seem like the stripper type." By then Ken was gone and John was buying the twenty-dollar bottles of Seven-Up. The place was closing down. It was the moment of truth. The girl was acting like it was natural for her to go her way, and John to go his. So John went home. When Ken called later and asked if he'd "scored," John later recalled, "I didn't have much to say in my defense."
It looked like a permanent plight. Success on the Atari, but no luck with women.
Despite John Harris' female troubles, he was a new role model for a new age: the hacker superstar. He would sit for magazine interviews and gab about the virtues of the Atari 800. The articles would often mention his six-figure income from his 30 percent royalty deal. It was an enviable, suddenly hip position. All over America, young, self-described hackers were working on their masterpieces: it was the new-age equivalent to all those young men in the forties trying to write the Great American Novel. The chances that a bestselling game might come in over On-Line's transom, while not great, were somewhat better than those of an unsolicited bestselling novel.
Ken realized that he was in competition with other companies of the Brotherhood for these programmers. As more people learned the Apple and Atari assembly-language wizardry that was unique when Ken Williams started out, the home computer consumer was becoming more discerning about what he or she bought. Companies besides On-Line were now publishing graphic adventures, having figured out their own tricks to put dozens of pictures with text on Apple disks. Also, a new company in Cambridge called In-focom, using text only, had developed an advanced interpreter that would accept large vocabularies of words in complete sentences. The company was begun by MIT hackers. Their first microcomputer game, lifted straight from the game they'd written for fun on one of the Tech Square computers, was "Zork," a supercharged elaboration on the original Adventure dungeon tale written by Crowther and Woods at Stanford. It was selling like crazy.
It was indicative of how fast the computer game market was moving. What was brilliant one year looked dated the next. The Apple and Atari hackers had taken the machines far beyond their limits. It had only been a few months, for example, since its introduction that On-Line's "Skeet Shoot" program looked so crude it was embarrassing, and Ken dropped it from the product line. Threshold, for instance, blew that previous standard away. And a hacker named Bill Budge wrote a program that simulated a pinball machine, "Raster Blaster," that blew away almost anything On-Line had to offer on the Apple.
Ken Williams knew On-Line had to present itself as a desirable place to work. He and his staff put together a printed package full of promises and dreams to prospective software superstars. Oddly, the enticements that On-Line offered had little to do with the Hacker Ethic. The package did not emphasize the happy Summer Camp community around On-Line. Instead, it seemed almost a paean to Mammon.
One part of the package was titled "Questions and Answers."
Also in the package was a letter from Ken Williams ("Chairman of the Board") explaining why On-Line Systems was the most professional and effective marketing operation around. He cited the ace programming staff of Schwader, Davis, and Stephenson, and trumpeted his own technical expertise. There was also a letter from On-Line's sales manager: "We are the best and want only the best to be on our team. If you fit this simple description, come breathe the rarified air with us at the top. Success is heady. Can you stand it?" A note from the Software Acquisitions Department summed up the message to prospective programmers: "We're interested in you because you are the life blood of our business. Programming has become a premium commodity."
It was quite a transformation from the days when a hacker would be more than satisfied to see someone appreciate the artistry in his software. Now that there was a marketplace, the Real World had changed hackerism. It was perhaps a necessary trade-off for the benefits of widespread computer availability. Look at all the wonderful transformations computers had made in the lives of the people in the On-Line community.
Ken was hugely proud of these transformations. They seemed to bear out the brilliant promise of the hacker dream. Not only was he prospering, but he and the other companies in the Brotherhood were doing it in an unselfish, new-age mind-frame ... they were the pioneers of the New America! And what was more, as the months rolled by it became clearer and clearer that computers were a boom industry the likes of which no one had seen since the auto industry. Everybody wanted a piece of it. Apple Computer, which seemed like some questionable venture when Ken first saw the Apple II, was on its way to becoming a Fortune 500 company, more quickly than any company in history had ever done. Venture capitalists were focusing on the computer field, and seemed to identify software things to make these computers work as the hottest speculative investment in the land. Since games were, by sheer volume of floppy disks sold, the bestselling computer applications, and the Brotherhood companies between them had a sizable percentage of the computer game market, offers for investment and buy-outs came in as often as packages of new games. Though Ken loved to talk to these wealthy suitors, whose names often appeared in The Wall Street Journal, he held on to his company. The phones of the Brotherhood would often ring with the last report of a buy-out offer "He said he would pay ten million!" "Well, I just got offered ten for Ao//the company!" "Oh, and I turned down so-and-so for that much!" Ken would meet these suitors at airport breakfast meetings, but the respective executives would jet off to their final destinations without buy-out agreements. Ken Williams was having too much fun changing people's lives and driving to work in his new, fire-engine-red Porsche 928 to consider giving it up.