THE Third Generation lived with compromises in the Hacker Ethic that would have caused the likes of Greenblatt and Gosper to recoil in horror. It all stemmed from money. The bottom line of programming was ineluctably tied to the bottom line on a publisher's ledger sheet. Elegance, innovation, and coding pyrotechnics were much admired, but a new criterion for hacker stardom had crept into the equation: awesome sales figures. Early hackers might have regarded this as heresy: all software all information should be free, they'd argue, and pride should be invested in how many people use your program and how much they are impressed with it. But the Third Generation hackers never had the sense of community of their predecessors, and early on they came to see healthy sales figures as essential to becoming winners.
One of the more onerous of the compromises in the Ethic grew out of publishers' desire to protect their sales figures. It involved intentional tampering with computer programs to prevent a program from being easily copied by users, perhaps for distribution without further payment to the publisher or author. The software publishers called this process "copy protection," but a substantial percentage of true hackers called it war.
Crucial to the Hacker Ethic was the fact that computers, by nature, do not consider information proprietary. The architecture of a computer benefited from the easiest, most logical flow of information possible. Someone had to substantially alter a computer process to make data inaccessible to certain users. Using one short command, a user could duplicate an "unprotected" floppy disk down to the last byte in approximately thirty seconds. This ease was appalling to software publishers, who dealt with it by "copy-protecting" disks: altering the programs by special routines which prevented the computer from acting naturally when someone tried to copy a disk. A digital roadblock which did not enhance the program's value to the user, but benefited the seller of the program.
The publishers had legitimate reason to resort to such unesthetic measures. Their livelihood was invested in software. This was not MIT, where software was subsidized by some institution. There was no ARPA footing the bill. Nor was this the Homebrew Computer Club, where everyone was trying to get his hardware built and where software was written by hobbyists, then freely swapped. This was an industry, and companies would go broke if no one bought software. If hackers wanted to write games free and hand them out to friends, that was their business. But the games published by On-Line and Br0derbund and Sirius were not merely paper airplanes of truth released into the wind to spread computer gospel. They were products. And if a person coveted a product of any sort in the United States of America, he or she had to reach into a pocket for folding green bills or a plastic credit card in order to own it.
It drove publishers crazy, but some people refused to recognize this simple fact. They found ways to copy the disks, and did. These people were most commonly hackers.
Users also benefited from breaking disks. Some of them could rattle off a list of rationalizations, and you would hear them recited like a litany in meetings of users' groups, in computer stores, even in the letters column of Softalk. Software is too expensive. We only copy software we wouldn't buy anyway. We only do it to try out programs. Some of the rationalizations were compelling if a disk was copy-protected, a legitimate owner would be unable to make a backup copy in case the disk became damaged. Most software publishers offered a replacement disk if you sent them a mangled original, but that usually cost extra, and besides, who wanted to wait four weeks for something you already paid for?
But to hackers, breaking copy protection was as natural as breathing. Hackers hated the fact that copy-protected disks could not be altered. You couldn't even look at the code, admire tricks and learn from them, modify a subroutine that offended you, insert your own subroutine... You couldn't keep working on a program until it was perfect. This was unconscionable. To hackers, a program was an organic entity that had a life independent from that of its author. Anyone who could contribute to the betterment of that machine-language organism should be welcome to try. If you felt that the missiles in Threshold were too slow, you should be welcome to peruse the code, and go deep into the system to improve on it. Copy protection was like some authority figure telling you not to go into a safe which contains machine-language goodies ... things you absolutely need to improve your programs, your life, and the world at large. Copy-protect was a fascist goon saying Hands Off. As a matter of principle, if nothing else, copy-protected disks must therefore be "broken." Just as the MIT hackers felt compelled to compromise "security" on the CTSS machine, or engaged in lock hacking to liberate tools. Obviously, defeating the fascist goon copy-protect was a sacred calling, and would be lots of fun.
Early varieties of copy-protect involved "bit-shifting" routines that slightly changed the way the computer read information from the disk drive. Those were fairly simple to beat. The companies tried more complicated schemes, each one broken by hackers. One renegade software publisher began selling a program called "Locksmith," specifically designed to allow users to duplicate copy-protected disks. You didn't have to be a hacker, or even a programmer, to break copy protection anymore! The publisher of Locksmith assured the Apple World that his intent, of course, was only to allow users to make backup copies of programs they'd legally purchased. He insisted that users were not necessarily abusing his program in such a way that publishers were losing sales. And Buckminster Fuller announced he was becoming a placekicker for the New York Jets.
With most publishers guessing that they lost more than half their business to software pirates (Ken Williams, with characteristic hyperbole, estimated that for every disk he sold, five or six were pirated from it), the copy-protection stakes were high. Oddly, most companies hired as copy-protect specialists the same kind of young hacker who commonly spent hours figuring out countermeasures to bust someone else's protection routine. This was the case with Sierra On-Line. Its copy-protect person was Mark Duchaineau. He was twenty years old, and for some time during the big 1982 San Francisco Applefest, he single-handedly held this ten-million-dol-lar-a-year company hostage. Mark Duchaineau was yet another Third Generation hacker who had been seduced by computers. He had brown hair which flowed magnificently down his back. His blue eyes blazed with an intensity which hinted of raging fires beneath his almost orientally calm demeanor, fires which could easily lead him to inexplicable acts. He had merged his sensibilities with the computer at Castro Valley (California) Junior High School. "They had a teletype," he would later explain. "After school I would stay many hours. They let me program away. I was never popular, just a loner. [Other] kids would get into baseball or whatever, I was into science and math. [I didn't have] really close friends; I didn't mind. It was really interesting being able to teach a machine how to do things. You communicate with the machine ... it's like dealing with another person. There's this whole other universe you almost live in when you're programming. And when you get into it young like I did, you feel a oneness with the computer, almost as if it's an extension of yourself. When I print comments in my code, I say things like 'We do this, we do that...' It's like Us."
Without computer access. Mark Duchaineau later said, "there would have been this big void ... it would be like you didn't have your sight, or hearing. The computer is like another sense or part of your being."
Coming to this discovery in the late seventies, Mark was able to get access to computers for his personal use, and become a hacker of the Third Generation. While still in high school, he landed a job at the Byte Shop in Hayward. He loved working at the computer shop. He'd do some of everything repairs, sales, and programming for the store owner as well as the customers who needed custom programs. The fact that he was getting no more than three dollars an hour didn't bother him: working with computers was pay enough. He kept working at the shop while he attended Cal State at Hayward, where he zipped effortlessly through math and computer courses. He transferred to Berkeley, and was shocked at the rigorousness of the computer science curriculum there. He had developed a hacker attitude: he could work intensely for long periods of time on things that interested him, but had little patience for the things that didn't. In fact, he found it virtually impossible to retain what he called "the little nitpicking things that I knew I'd never need" that were unfortunately essential for success in Berkeley's computer science department. So like many Third Generation hackers, he did not get the benefit of the high-level hacking that took place in universities. He dropped out for the freedom that personal computers would provide, and went back to the Byte Shop.
An intense circle of pirates hung out at the shop. Some of them had even been interviewed in an article about software piracy in Esquire that made them seem like heroes. Actually, Mark considered them kind of random hackers. Mark, however, was interested in the kinds of discoveries that it took to break down copy protection, and was fairly proficient at breaking copy-protected disks, though he really had no need for the programs on the disks. A student of the Hacker Ethic, he didn't think too much of the idea of being a person who writes copy-protection schemes.
But one day Mark was playing around with the Apple operating system. He often did this the common hacker pursuit of wandering around within a system. "My big thing is discovery," he explained later. Working with computers, he could always unearth something new, and got incredible satisfaction from these finds. Mark was trying to figure out what turned the disk drive on and off in the operating system, and soon knew what triggered it, spun it, worked the head, moved the motor. As he experimented with variations on the usual ways to work the disk drive, he realized that he was on to a very big discovery: a new way to put information on a disk.
Mark's scheme involved arranging data in spiraling paths on the disk, so information could not be accessed concentrically, like a needle following a record, but in several spiraling paths. That was why Mark called the scheme "Spiradisk." The different arrangement would thwart programs which broke copy protection and allowed pirates to copy disks. While not being totally pirate-proof (nothing is), Mark's scheme would defy Locksmith, and any other commercial scheme. And would take a hell of a long time for even a devoted hacker to crack.
Through a friend who was working on a game for On-Line, Mark met Ken Williams. Ken expressed only vague interest in Mark's scheme, and over the next few months they talked about it over the phone. Ken always seemed to pick out faults in Mark's system. For one thing, Mark's scheme consumed too much space on a floppy disk. Spiradisk only allowed you to put in half the information you could normally fit on a disk.
While fixing that, Duchaineau came up with another revelation, which allowed him not only to store the full amount of information on a disk but also to speed up the process by which the computer and the disk drive swapped information. At first, Duchaineau doubted it could be done. But like any good hacker, he tried, and after some intense hours of hacking he looked up, flabbergasted, and said, "Gee, this works."
According to Duchaineau's calculations, the Spiradisk process worked twenty times faster than the normal Apple operating system. That meant that you could load the information from a disk into the computer memory in a fraction of the time. It was revolutionary, truly amazing. Mark Duchaineau did not understand why Ken Williams was so reluctant to use it.
Ken saw some value in Duchaineau's system but did not want to risk his whole company on an untried scheme concocted by some random kid genius. In his two years as head of On-Line, Ken had seen plenty of them by now true wizards who were brilliant con-ceptualists, but hackers in the worst sense, people who couldn't finish. What insurance did he have that Duchaineau could or would fix any dire bugs that would inevitably appear in such a revolutionary scheme? He was impressed enough with Duchaineau, though, to ask him to come to Oakhurst to do more conventional copy protection. Mark, miffed at Ken's rejection of Spiradisk, said he didn't think so.
"What do you want to get paid?" Ken asked him.
Mark Duchaineau had been living at home and working in the computer store for three dollars an hour. He took a shot and said, "Ten bucks an hour," mainly because, he later said, "that sounded like a neat number to me."
"Well," said Ken, "what if I let you live in one of my houses and give you $8.65 an hour?"
Deal.
Ken basically wanted a fairly reliable copy-protect system to work with the Form Master, a big disk-copying machine On-Line had bought to chum out products. Could Mark come up with a program that could do that? Yes. In half an hour, Duchaineau conceived of a plan, and set about writing code for the next twenty-four hours, finishing with a complete protection scheme that he says "wasn't incredibly reliable, wasn't very high-quality, but it did work, if you [had] clean disk drives and normal disk speeds." Over the next few months, Mark used it to protect about twenty-five products.
He also became the official Dungeonmaster for a running Dungeons and Dragons game at Hexagon House. Built as a traditional suburban family home, the house was beginning to show some wear from neglect by a shifting roster of hacker-boarders. The walls, the wooden banisters, and the kitchen cabinets all had a battered, war-pocked look. No one had bothered to get furniture, and the main room had only a Formica dining table and cheap kitchen chairs, a six-foot-tall sword-dueling arcade game, and a large color TV without a stand, connected to a Betamax that seemed to constantly play Conan the Barbarian. On D&D nights, a few of the programmers would gather around the table, while Mark sat cross-legged on the soiled wall-to-wall carpet surrounded by hardbound D&D guides for running games. He would roll dice, ominously predicting that this person ... or troll, as the case might be ... had a 40 percent chance of getting hit by a lightning bolt cast by a wizard named Zwemif. He'd roll an eighteen-sided die, peer down at it, and look up with those disconcertingly intense eyes and say, already eager for the next crisis, "You're still alive." Then he'd thumb through the book for another life-and-death confrontation for the role players. Running a D&D game was a great exercise in control, just as computers were.
Mark kept lobbying for Spiradisk. His eagerness to implement the hard-to-crack scheme was not due to a desire to thwart would-be pirates; Duchaineau considered it a sacrifice to bring about his more altruistic master plan. He hoped Spiradisk would generate enough royalties for him to begin his own company, one which would be guided not by the unproductive standards of commercialism, but by the forward-thinking goals of research and development. Duchaineau's company would be a hacker paradise, with programmers having every conceivable tool at their disposal to create awesome software. If a programmer felt the company needed a piece of equipment, say some supercalibrated oscilloscope, he would not have to get permission from unconnected management channels ... he and his fellow hackers would have a large say in the process. Initially, Mark's company would write state-of-the-art software Mark himself dreamed of writing the ultimate computer version of Dungeons and Dragons.
But software was only the beginning. Once revenues could support it, Mark's company would get into hardware. The ultimate goal would be to create a computer good enough to handle an arcade game as good as the most sophisticated coin-operated games. It would have a built-in music synthesizer better than the most advanced current models; it would have more than enough power to run Mark's dream software "environment" called SORDMASTER (Screen Oriented Data Manipulation System), which would be like taking the best program running today and extending its value to the tenth power ... a computer, in Mark's words, that would "do anything you want."
Finally, Ken Williams agreed to allow the Dungeonmaster to copy-protect On-Line's programs with Spiradisk. Mark would get forty dollars an hour for setting things up, five thousand dollars a month to maintain the system, and a 1 percent royalty on all disks which used his system. Mark also fixed it so that the first thing a user would see when he booted up a Spiradisk was the name of Mark's "company," Bit Works.
As Ken suspected, there were problems with the scheme. The disks often had to be rebooted once or twice before the program would properly load. Williams began to get disenchanted with Duchaineau. In Ken's view, Mark was one of those brilliant but unfocused hacker prima donnas. Ken believed that Mark was capable of pulling off a coup that could prove critical for the whole industry: creating a disk format that would support Apple, Atari, and IBM on the same disk, instead of the current system, which required a separate disk to run on each machine. "Mark knows how to do it," Ken complained. "He could do it in six weeks. He doesn't want to make the effort. It's work. He sat down, worked for a week, lost interest in the project. He can do it, but it doesn't excite him. It's not fun." According to Ken Williams, "You'd have to be suicidal to let your company depend on a guy like Duchaineau." When it was pointed out to Ken that his company did depend on that Third Generation hacker, Ken Williams admitted that that was the case.
This came into sharp focus at the annual Applefest in San Francisco. One of the highlights of that big weekend event, a bazaar in which all the companies selling products for the Apple would display and sell their wares, was to be the introduction of a long-awaited and ornately augmented sequel to one of the best-loved Apple games of all time, "Ultima." In a tremendous coup, On-Line Systems had landed the game and its mercurial author, who wrote under the pseudonym of Lord British.
The original Ultima was a fantasy role-playing game where the player created a character, assigned certain "attribute points" in areas of durability, wisdom, intelligence, dexterity, and strength, and, traveling about a mysterious planet, searched dungeons and towers, went to villages for supplies and helpful gossip, and fought elves, warriors, and wizards. Even though the game was written in BASIC and ran rather slowly, it was a masterful feat of imagination, and was an Apple bestseller. But when Lord British prepared his sequel, he let it be known that he wished to leave his current publisher who, he said, was not paying him all his royalties.
He was deluged with offers from software houses. Though he was only twenty at the time, Lord British was no stranger to pressure situations: his real name was Richard Garriott, and he was the son of Skylab astronaut Owen K. Garriott. He'd known and enjoyed the reflected limelight of his father's fame, especially when his Skylab 2 was aloft and the family seemed the focus of the world's attention. Richard had grown up in the engineering-intensive Nassau Bay area of Houston, and had gotten into computers in high school, where he convinced his teachers to allow him to take private classes in programming. His curriculum was writing games.
In many respects, he was a well-adjusted all-American boy. On the other hand, he would stay up all night on the Apple Computer in his bedroom. "Once the sun came up I'd realize how late it was and crash right there on the spot," he later explained. He had long held an interest in fantasy role-playing games, and was particularly fascinated by medieval culture, belonging to a club called the Society of Creative Anachronisms. While a freshman at the University of Texas, he joined the fencing team, but was really much more into swashbuckling free-swinging, climbing-on-table, Errol Flynn-style sword-fighting. He wanted to merge his two interests, and attempted to make a computer game that would do it. After writing for months, he completed his twenty-eighth game and named it "Alkabeth," and was astounded when a publisher who happened to see one of the copies that Richard sent to friends for free offered to publish it and send him money. Why not? He requested the pseudonym Lord British because some kids at a computer camp once teased him that he sounded as if he'd come from England (he didn't).
Alkabeth made enough money for several college educations. His next game, Ultima, was more ambitious, and with his six-figure royalties he bought a car, established fat Keogh and IRA accounts, and invested in a Houston restaurant. Now he was considering real estate.
Garriott saw his follow-up as something special. He had learned machine language especially to write it, and was dizzy with the new power it gave him: he felt that it enabled him to see the memory, the microprocessor, the video circuitry ... you understood what each bit did and where the data lines went. And the speed it gave you was incredible. Only with this power could he bring Ultima 2 to fruition. Because, in Ultima 2, Richard Garriott was writing a true epic, one that enabled the player to do more than any player of a computer game had ever done before. He insisted that some of these abilities be listed in the box in which the program was sold:
Garriott had embodied the metaphor of the computer creating and populating a private universe into a game which allowed the player to live in the world of Lord British's imagination. Moving the character that you created by designating personality traits, you gained powers, tools, transportation craft, weapons ... and among the murderous Ores and evil wizards, you might also chance upon characters based on real people, many of them friends of Richard Garriott's characters who, in keeping with their real personalities, would give you cryptic information that helped to solve the riddle.
Richard Garriott might have displayed Joycean ambition and intricacy, but he admittedly lacked literary skills: "I can't spell, have no grammar techniques, and have read less than twenty-five books in my life." This embarrassed him at first, but now he told himself that the computer was a viable artistic form. And in peddling Ultima 2 to a new publisher, his prime concern, besides a nonnegotiable 30 percent royalty rate, was that the package and marketing be artistically consistent with the virtuoso computer program contained therein. This would require a large, professionally illustrated box, a cloth map of the universe with lines designating time warps, special cardboard cards holding the dozens of commands available to players, and an elaborate, oversized manual in which each of the sixteen pages resembled a faded sheepskin document.
None of these demands discouraged software publishers from attempting to sign this most bankable of hackers. Ken Williams pursued him relentlessly, smelling bestseller. After flying the young author to Oakhurst, he agreed to all of Lord British's demands, even the 30 percent royalty. Ken Williams wanted him to sign then and there, and, Garriott later said, "got all huffy at the fact that I wasn't going to sign anything [that day]." But after he returned to Texas, Garriott did sign. "I couldn't see a reason not to."
Now, after months of delay, some due to an unexpectedly long debugging period (there has never been an unexpectedly short debugging period in the history of computers), some due to the fact that the cloth maps were ordered from a firm in Iran, which was suddenly closed off to American commerce after the hostage crisis, the program was complete.
Garriott had the game in hand at Applefest; festooned in gold chains and a suede-and-leather tunic, the tall, brown-haired, angular-featured Texan drew crowds to the On-Line booth as he unveiled his masterpiece. The people could not believe their good fortune as they gathered around the twenty-one-year-old Garriott, who was casually demonstrating how they might find occasion in Ultima 2 to travel to Pluto. This is the guy who wrote Ultima! Back orders for the $59.95 program numbered in the tens of thousands;
Richard Garriott expected the first royalty check for Ultima 2 to be bigger than the sum of checks he had previously collected for game authorship. He would have been a very happy young man, except for this one problem that was preventing Ultima 2 from being released that very weekend. The problem was Mark Duchaineau. He had not copy-protected the program, and it was not clear that he would.
The Dungeonmaster had insisted to Dick Sunderland that his Spiradisk system would work perfectly on Ultima 2, speeding up the loading time, and substantially slowing down the pirate network eagerly awaiting the challenge of breaking it. He dismissed On-Line's previous Spiradisk problems as insignificant. He hinted that there might be some problems copy-protecting the program without Spiradisk. Dick suspected that Mark's arguments were motivated by his eagerness to promote Spiradisk and to collect the royalty which would be worth over ten thousand dollars on a best-seller like Ultima 2.
Richard Garriott, his friend and fellow programmer Chuck Bueche, and On-Line's product manager jointly concluded that Spiradisk would be too risky. Dick Sunderland called Duchaineau to tell him to copy-protect the old way. But Mark was still evasive.
Dick was furious. This odd-looking creature, this twenty-one-year-old megalomanic Dungeonmaster, living in one of Ken's houses, taking advantage of On-Line's reputation to promote his system ... now had the gall to hint to Dick that the most lucrative program of the season would not ship because he wanted to copy-protect his way! As frightening as his threat sounded. Mark, as the sole copy-protect person, had the power to back it up it would take weeks to bring in a replacement. What was even more frightening was that Mark Duchaineau, if he chose, could withhold his services for On-Line's entire product line! The company could not release any products without him.
Sunderland was at a loss. Ken had not arrived at the Fest. He was still on his way back from Chicago, where he had attended the convention of pinball and coin-op videogame manufacturers. Dick did not even have the technical wherewithal to judge the validity of Duchaineau's claims. So he recruited one of On-Line's young programmers, Chuck Bueche, to go to the long bank of pay phones by the entrance to Applefest and call Duchaineau not letting on that it was at Dick's behest, of course and get a grasp of the technicalities involved. It wouldn't hurt, either, if the programmer softened the Dungeonmaster's hard line.
Indeed, though Bueche was an uneasy double agent, the call seemed to break the logjam. Perhaps what made Duchaineau relent was that the call reminded him he was slowing down a process that would eventually allow users to benefit from a fellow programmer's triumph Mark Duchaineau was in the awkward role of a hacker trying to stop another hacker's worthy program from getting out. In any case, he agreed to copy-protect the product, though when Ken Williams found out about the incident, his regard for the hacker Mark Duchaineau sank even lower. He later vowed to run Duchaineau out of Oakhurst in tar and feathers as soon as On-Line could figure out how to replace him.
For two years, the Applefest show had been the prime gathering of the Apple World companies like On-Line, Sirius, Br0derbund, and dozens of suppliers of software, add-on boards, and peripherals that ran on the Apple. It was a time to celebrate the machine that had given the Brotherhood its livelihood and inspiration, and the companies were more than happy to entertain the thousands of Apple owners eagerly immersing themselves in a sea of arcade games, printer buffers, disk drives, programming guides, joysticks, RAM cards, RGB monitors, war simulations, and hard-shell computer carrying cases. It was a time to renew the bonds within the Brotherhood, to seek new programmers, to write up orders, to let people see who you were and how you were running your own show.
But the 1982 San Francisco Applefest would turn out to be the last of the important Applefests. For one thing, On-Line and its competitors were now releasing programs for several machines; the Apple was no longer dominant. Also, the companies were beginning to see the open-to-users shows as drains on time, energy, and money resources which could be spent on what were becoming the essential shows: the big, trade-only Consumer Electronics Shows in Las Vegas and Chicago. Where the hero was not the hacker, but the man who wrote up sales.
Still, the show was packed, one more indication of the economic explosion that had come to computers. Amid Applefest's din of shuffling feet, voices, and electronic game noises, what emerged was a melody of unprecedented prosperity. Almost everywhere you turned there were millionaires manning booths, millionaires who only two years ago were mired in obscure and unprofitable activities. Then there were the start-ups, with smaller booths or with no booths at all, dreamers drawn by the thrilling, aphrodisiac scent emanating from the Apple World and the related world of home computers.
That smell of success was driving people batty. People idly swapped unbelievable stories, with even the most startling high-tech Horatio Alger saga effortlessly topped by a more startling example of the boom. It was a gold rush, but it was also true that the minimum buy-in for serious prospectors was a more formidable sum than it had been when Ken Williams began. Venture capital was a necessity, obtained from the men in pinstripe suits who dined at the mediocre French restaurants in the Valley, uttered In-Pursuit-Of-Excellence koans at industry seminars ("Marketing, Marketing, Marketing"), and solemnly referred to themselves as "risk-takers." These were intolerable people, carpetbaggers of the hacker dream, but if you could get them to wink at you, the rewards could be endless. No one knew this better than the people at the Applefest who were working to start a company called Electronic Arts. Their idea was to bypass what they regarded as the already old-fashioned practices of the companies in the Brotherhood, and establish a firm that was even newer than New Age. A company that took software into another realm entirely.
Electronic Arts had denned its mission in a little booklet directed to "software artists" they were trying to lure away from their current publishers. This prospectus sounded like something penned by an ad copywriter who had successfully merged the sensibilities of three-piece suits and top-grade Hawaiian dope. It was loaded with one-sentence paragraphs which contained words like "excitement," "vision," and "nontraditional." Its true brilliance lay in the focus of its appeal aimed directly at the hacker heart of its readers. Electronic Arts knew better than to whip up the greed factor by promising hackers enough royalties to buy cherry-red Trans-Ams and Caribbean trysts with hot-blooded software groupies. It confided instead: "We believe that innovative authors are more likely to come from people who are independent and won't work in a software 'factory' or 'bureaucracy.'" It promised to develop fantastic and powerful tools and utilities that would be available to EA authors. It vowed to maintain the kind of personal values that hackers appreciate more than money. What this would result in was "a great software company." The implication was that as far as creative, honest, foward-thinking programmers with hacker values were concerned, there was at present no such company.
Electronic Arts was the brainchild of Trip Hawkins, who had quit his job as Apple's director of marketing for the LISA project to do this. He started the company out of an extra room in the office of a venture capital firm. Hawkins brought together a team from Apple, Atari, Xerox PARC, and VisiCorp, and, in a coup sure to charm the heart of any hacker, got Steve Wozniak to agree to sit on the board of directors.
Electronic Arts had no booth at the Applefest, but its presence was felt. It hosted a big party on opening night, and its people worked the show floor like politicians. One of them, a former Apple executive named Pat Mariott, a tall, thin, blond woman with huge round glasses and a deep tan, was enthusiastically explaining the company to a reporter. Trip started Electronic Arts, she said, because he saw how fast the business was starting to happen and he "didn't want to miss the window." Pat went with him because she saw it as an opportunity to have fun and, not incidentally, make money.
"I want to get rich, by the way," she said, explaining how, in Silicon Valley, wealth was omnipresent. Everywhere you looked you saw its artifacts: BMWs, stock options, and, though she didn't mention it, cocaine in snowdrift quantities. This was not your garden-variety, hundred-thousand-dollar-a-year wealth, either this was Croesus Mode, where floating-point arithmetic was barely sufficient to count the millions. When you saw your friends come into it, you thought, Why not me? So when a window into wealth opened, you naturally leapt through it. There has never been a window as inviting as that of the software industry. Pat Mariott summed it up in a whisper, quoting gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson: "When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro."
Pat Mariott hoped to kick into Croesus Mode without compromising her sixties-shaped personal values. She would never, for instance, work for a cutthroat company. Pat had been a programmer herself, experiencing hacker culture at Berkeley and the professional milieu at evil IBM. "Berkeley was truth and beauty. IBM was power and money. I wanted both," she said. Electronic Arts seemed the way. The products and philosophy of the company would be troth and beauty, and the company founders would all be powerful and rich. And the programmers, who would be treated with the respect they deserved as the artists of the computer age, would be elevated to the status of rock or movie stars.
This message managed to find its way around the Applefest, enough so knots of programmers began gathering outside the Convention Hall for the buses that supposedly would take them to the Stanford Court Hotel, where Electronic Arts was throwing its big party. One odd group included, among others, several On-Line programmers and John "Captain Crunch" Draper.
John Draper, whose dark stringy hair was flying out in all directions, had done well by himself. During his stint in prison after he was caught using the Apple phone interface as a blue box, he had written a word-processing program called "Easy Writer," which made him a considerable sum. Amazingly, when IBM sought a program to issue as its official word processor, it chose Easy Writer; the company that published Draper's program had the good sense to act as intermediary with IBM, not letting on that the w program's author was the notorious Captain Crunch. Reputedly, Draper had made a million dollars from the transaction. You wouldn't have known it from his faded jeans, his old polo shirt, and his apparent need for dental work. Mark Duchaineau regarded him with a mixture of awe and repulsion as the former phone hacker harangued him about some technical aspect of the IBM PC.
Soon, they gave up on the bus and hailed a cab. The cab driver made the mistake of smoking. John Draper almost ripped the cigarette out the driver's mouth, demanding at the top of his lungs that all the cab windows be opened in the chilly, damp November night of San Francisco.
The hotel was quite fancy, and the hackers, in jeans and sneakers, seemed intimidated. Electronic Arts had prepared for them, though: along with a rock band playing dance music, the company had rented over a dozen stand-up, coin-operated videogames, adjusted to give unlimited free games. This was where the hackers immediately headed. As the party heated up, it was apparent that many of the industry's biggest authors had appeared, some to check things out, others genuinely interested in this newer-than-new-age venture.
The center of attention, though, was EA board member Steve Wozniak, cited in a series of speeches as "the man who started it all." It was an epithet that would have haunted some young genius eager to shake the past and get on to newer things, but Wozniak seemed to revel in it; for over a year now he had been traveling around the country to industry gatherings, accepting the same accolades. He had spent a considerable portion of his Croesus Mode bankroll on presenting massive rock festivals. He still fervently believed in the Hacker Ethic, and wherever he went he not only preached that gospel but set himself as an example of it. Tonight, for instance, he preached to a small group on the evils of secrecy, using Apple's current policy as a prime example. The secrecy and the stifling bureaucracy there were such that he was not sure if he would ever return to the company built on his brainchild, the Apple II.
All in all, the party was a success, crackling with the sweet feeling that everybody was riding on the crest of a tidal wave. Were things like this in the early days of Hollywood? In the record industry in the sixties? The future stood at their feet, a blend of hackerism and untold wealth, and the aggregate impression was that history was being made right there.
The On-Line hackers left impressed. Some would sign with Electronic Arts in the following months. And one of the hackers left with a particularly satisfied grin he had scored the high totals on Pac-Man, Robotron, and Donkey Kong. For a bestselling author, a night to remember.
Ken Williams arrived at Applefest in a bad mood. The pinball manufacturers' convention in Chicago had been frustrating; giant companies, particularly Atari, had thrown truckloads of money at the coin-op manufacturers to nail down first rights of refusal for the home computer version of any game that was even vaguely playable. A repeat ofFrogger, which Ken had procured for a mere 10 percent royalty fee, was out of the question.
Ken, traveling with Roberta, went straight to his company's Applefest display. On-Line had taken a huge booth, situated right at the entrance, by the escalators which would carry the masses down into the underground Brooks Hall complex. The booth featured a giant photo mural of a Sierra waterfall, emphasizing the name change from On-Line Systems. The booth also had plenty of computer-joystick-monitor combinations embedded within panels so that the hordes of computer-freak youngsters could play the latest Sierra On-Line games. The monitors were set into the panels well above eye level, so spectators could easily appreciate how deftly crafted the games were. And to draw customers to the booth, a huge projection-screen color television was hooked up to a computer which continuously played the best-selling On-Line game, Progger. Since the Apple version did not have the continuous music and arcade-level graphics of John Harris' Atari version, On-Line employees discreetly hid an Atari 800 computer underneath a drape, and was running that version at the Applefest: the equivalent of displaying a Japanese car at a General Motors exhibition. With all those crowds, all that hoopla, who would notice?
Two people who noticed were Al and Margot Tommervik, publishers of Softalk. They noticed right away because Frogger was not just another On-Line program to them. It represented a depressing turn of events. Like everyone who had seen John Harris' brilliant conversion, they had been awed and delighted when they saw it earlier that year. But when they viewed the Apple counterpart soon after, they were shocked. It was awful. To Al and Margot, the miserable graphics in this version of Frogger represented at best an error, and at worst an absolute betrayal of the Apple market, which had nurtured On-Line in the first place.
The Apple World was a spiritual preserve to the Tommerviks, and it seemed that by making an inferior Apple Frogger, On-Line had contemptuously spit on the floor of this exalted preserve. Obviously, Al and Margot owed it to the rest of the Apple World to do something they rarely did in their magazine: give a game a negative review. The reviewer they assigned agreed with the Tommerviks, and wrote a scathing description of the game: "It has about as much soul as month-old lettuce in the Sahara," he wrote. "Your frog resembles a chess pawn with vestigial wings ... the logs on the river look like they just escaped from an Oscar Meyer factory..."
The reviewer did not stop there. He asked what had become of the company which once stood as a "bastion of quality in a sea of mediocrity." While giving Atari owners a great program, On-Line was giving Apple owners "a slap in the face." Serious stuff, cutting to the heart of the Hacker Ethic, which instructs you to keep working until your hack tops previous efforts. "Have they forsaken us?" the review asked of On-Line.
Since Margot and Al had been so close to Ken and Roberta, they tried to explain the review to their friends before it appeared in the December Softalk. But they had difficulty reaching Ken or Roberta. The lines of bureaucracy were hardening at On-Line; no longer would one of the Williamses be picking up the phone. You'd get a receptionist, who would connect yon to a secretary, who would take your name and your company's number and tell you someone would return your call. If you were lucky. Finally, Al reached Ken's brother John, who said there were reasons the game looked the way it did ... but these reasons were never presented to the Tommerviks. People at On-Line were too swept up in management battles to explain.
Al and Margot had carried early copies of the magazine to Applefest with them. Seeing On-Line's devious trick with the Atari Frogger only confirmed their belief that the review was a righteous one. They figured that after talking to Ken and Roberta, things would be amicably settled. Weren't they all in this for the same thing? To maintain the fantastic humanistic momentum of Apple World? You couldn't let a disagreement like Frogger affect an important mission like that.
When someone at On-Line's booth gave Ken a copy of the new Softalk, he turned immediately to the Frogger review. Roberta read over his shoulder. They had known the review would be negative, and more or less expected some criticism of the game's graphics, though not in such scathing language. But they had no idea that the review would go on to question whether the company, by releasing such a great Atari version of Frogger and such a pitiful Apple version, had sold out the Apple World. "Either Frogger is a mistake or a betrayal," the review concluded. "You'll have to make up your own mind."
"This goes way beyond what's fair," Ken said. For one thing, he said, Softalk did not realize how difficult it was to do the game on the Apple as compared to the Atari. The Tommervicks had apparently chosen to attack the company all after the Williamses had helped get the magazine off the ground when the Brotherhood was just forming. Roberta thought that this confrontation had been brewing for a while: for some reason Softalk seemed always to give On-Line short shrift. But every time Roberta asked the Tommervicks if anything was wrong, they said things were fine.
"They don't want us in that magazine," Roberta told Ken. "We should pull our ads."
It was another sign that the Brotherhood was not inviolate. Things were bigger now than personal friendships. Now that the companies of the Brotherhood were more like Real World businesses, they were competing among themselves. The Williamses rarely spoke to people at Br0derbund or Sirius, and never swapped secrets anymore. Jerry Jewell later summed it up: "We used to socialize a lot with Br0derbund and On-Line ... now the attitude is that if you invite competitors to parties, all they're going to do is dig up as much dirt about you as they can and try to hire your programmers away. [Socializing] gets less and less possible as the business gets more and more cutthroat. You want your competitors to know less and less what you're doing." It was something you had to accept.
Ken touched on this briefly when he ran into Doug Carlston on the show floor. Doug seemed to have changed the least he was as sincere and open as he always was, the sanest in the Brotherhood. Both agreed that they should get together more, as they had in the old days, one year ago. They discussed new competition, including one new company which was entering the market with $8 million in capital. "That makes us look like toys," said Carlston. "We got a million [in venture capital]. You got ..." "A million two," said Ken. "You gave up more. We gave up 25 percent." "No, we gave up 24."
They talked about Sirius Software's no-show at the Applefest another indication that the action was switching to trade-only shows. Ken thought that Jerry Jewell's push to mass-market cartridges was a good one. "He'll be richer than all of us," he predicted.
Doug smiled. "I don't care if everybody else gets rich ... as long as I do."
"I don't care if anybody gets rich," said Ken, "as long as I get richer."
Ken tried to throw himself into the spirit of the show, and took Roberta, looking chic in designer jeans, high boots, and a black beret, on a quick tour of the displays. Ken was a natural schmoozer, and at almost every booth he was recognized and greeted warmly. He asked about half a dozen young programmers to come up to Oakhurst and get rich hacking for On-Line.
Though they took pains to avoid the Softalk booth, the Williamses did run into Margot Tommervik. After an awkward greeting, she asked Ken if he'd seen the "Dark Crystal" cover.
"All I saw was the Frogger review," he said. Pause. "I thought it was kinda nasty."
Margot hugged him to show no hard feelings. "Oh Ken, the game was crummy," she said. "We did it because we love you. Because your stuff is so much better than that. We expect more of you."
"Well," said Ken, smiling through his teeth, "didn't you think it went beyond the game? It said all kinds of things about our company."
Margot would not hear about it. The Williamses, though, did not consider that matter closed. To them, it was one more case of how people changed when things got big.
That night On-Line hosted a dinner at an Italian restaurant at North Beach. Ken had been talking for weeks about the potential for a good, old-fashioned night of On-Line rowdiness, but though everybody was in a celebratory mood, the affair never took off. Maybe because only two programmers were invited Richard Garriott and Chuck Bueche and the rest of the people were older, many of them mired in the mind-frame of sales, accounting, and marketing. There were the usual repeated toasts, and of course there was the Steel peppermint schnapps large swigs of it from a bottle with a metal drink-pourer attached. Many of the toasts were directed to the guest of honor, Steve Wozniak. Ken had run into him that afternoon, and to Ken's delight the legendary hacker had accepted the belated invitation to dinner. Ken Williams made a point of telling Woz about his prize possession, the most cherished tie he had to the spirit of the liberating age of the home computer: an original Apple I motherboard. Ken loved that hunk of epoxy and silicon; it meant something to him that Woz himself had hand-wired it in a garage, back in the Pleistocene era of 1976. Woz never tired of hearing about Homebrew days, and he appreciated Ken's compliment. Wozniak smiled widely as he was toasted, this time by Dick Sunderland. The Steel went around once more.
For Woz, though, the highlight of the evening was meeting Lord British. Months afterward, he was still talking about how excited he'd been to talk to such a genius.
Dinner was followed by a hectic trip to a disco in the Transamer-ica building. After all that reveling, Ken and Roberta were exhausted by the time they returned to their hotel. An emergency call awaited them. There had been a fire in the A-frame wooden home on Mudge Ranch Road. Only the heroism of a baby-sitter had saved their two sons. The house, though, was severely damaged. Ken and Roberta demanded to speak to their children to make sure they were safe, and immediately drove home.
It was daylight by the time they arrived at the site where their house once stood. The children were safe, everything seemed covered by insurance, and the Williamses had planned to move anyway the following year, to the palatial home currently under construction. The fire was not the catastrophe it might have been. Ken Williams had only one lingering sorrow: the loss of a certain irreplaceable material item in the home, an artifact that meant something to him far beyond its raw utility. The fire had consumed Ken's Apple I motherboard, his link to the idealistic beginning of the humanistic era of computers. It was somewhere in the rubble, damaged beyond repair, never to be found.