Hackers Heroes of the Computer Revolution (25th Anniversary Edition) by Hackers Heroes of the Computer Revolution (25th Anniversary Edition)

Author:Hackers Heroes of the Computer Revolution (25th Anniversary Edition) [Edition), ]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: ePub Bud (www.epubbud.com)
Published: 2011-09-26T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 11

board for a few months. He later described the difference between the two groups: “Homebrew was a place where people came

together mysteriously, twice a month. It never was an organization. But SCCS was more organized. Those guys had megalomania. The politics were terrible, and ruined it.” Somehow, the particulars never became clear, a lot of money was misplaced in the buying scheme. The editor they hired to run the slick magazine felt justified in dropping the publication’s relationship with the club and going off on his own with the magazine (still publishing as Interface Age); a lawsuit resulted. The board meetings became incredibly tempestuous, and the bad feelings spread to the general membership meetings. Eventually the club faded away. Though Lee’s plans were no less ambitious than those of the leaders of SCCS, he realized that this war must not be waged in a bureaucratic, follow-the-leader fashion. He was perfectly happy dealing with an army of Bob Marshes and Tom Pittmans, some changing the world by dint of useful products manufactured in the spirit of hackerism and others just going their way, being hackers. The eventual goal would be a mass distribution of the wonderment that Lee Felsenstein had experienced in his basement monastery. An environment conducive to the Hands-On Imperative. As Lee told a conference of the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers in 1975, “The industrial approach is grim and doesn’t work: the design motto is ‘Design by Geniuses for Use by Idiots,’

and the watchword for dealing with the untrained and unwashed public is KEEP THEIR HANDS OFF! . . . The convivial approach I suggest would rely on the user’s ability to learn about and gain some control over the tool. The user will have to spend some amount of time probing around inside the equipment, and we will have to make this possible and not fatal to either the equipment or the person.”

The piece of equipment to which Felsenstein referred was his Tom Swift Terminal, which still had not been built in 1975. But it was getting close. Bob Marsh, eager to expand the scope of his booming Processor Technology company, offered Lee a deal he couldn’t refuse. “I’ll pay you to design the video portion of the Tom Swift Terminal,” he told him. That sounded all right to Lee, who had been doing work in documentation and schematics for Processor Technology all along. Bob Marsh, in the company’s first year of business, was adhering to the Hacker Ethic. The company Tiny BASIC

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distributed schematics and source code for software, free or at nominal cost. (In partial reaction to MIT’s high-priced BASIC, Processor Technology would develop its own and sell it, along with source code, for five dollars.) For a time, the company had a socialistic salary structure of $800 a month for all employees.

“We didn’t pay attention to profits or management of almost any kind.”

Lee was not an employee, choosing to work on a contract basis.

“I’d quote them a price,” Lee later recalled, and “they had to get the price up by a factor of ten, since I was such a small-time thinker.

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