Hackers heroes of the computer revolution by Steven Levy

Author:Steven Levy [Levy, Steven]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: vl-nfcompvg
ISBN: 9781449388393
Amazon: 1449388396
Publisher: O'Reilly Media
Published: 2010-05-30T00:00:00+00:00

Ken and Jay would be talking about the intricacies of some aspect of programming language—like trying to figure out, when somebody says “List by customer,” what that really means. Does it mean “SORT by customer,” or perhaps “List ALL customers”?

Or maybe “List ANY customers”? (That word again.) The computer had to be programmed so it wouldn’t screw up on any of those interpretations. At the very least it should know when to ask users to clarify their meaning. This took a language of considerable flexibility and elegance, and though Ken and his new guru Jay might not have said it out loud, a task of that sort goes a bit beyond technology and into primal linguistics. After all, once you get waist-deep into a discussion about the meaning of the word

“any,” it’s only a short step to thinking philosophically about existence itself.

Somewhere in the midst of one of these conversations Dick would come in, eager to witness some synergy among his troops. “We’d try to supersubset it so that a two-year-old would understand, ask Dick’s opinion, he’d give it, and we’d chase him out of the room,” Ken later recalled. “Dick never understood what we were putting up. He was obviously out of his league.”

At those times Ken might have felt superior to Dick, but in retrospect he had to admit that Dick was smart enough to recognize talent. Ken realized that he was one of the weaker members of a superteam of programmers who were doing great stuff for Informatics. Sometimes Ken figured that Dick must have gotten lucky, accidentally corralling five of the most creative people around for his new products team. Either that or he was the best manager in the world, or at least the best talent evaluator.

Ken, always needing more money, began moonlighting. Sunderland was refusing his constant requests for raises, and when Ken suggested that he might like to head a programming group, Dick, a little astounded perhaps at the chutzpah of this brilliant but scatter-shot kid, flatly denied the request. “You have no talent for management,” said Dick, and Ken Williams never forgot that. Ken was regularly going home to Roberta and complaining about Dick—how mean he was, how strict, how he had no understanding of people and their problems—but it was less a dissatisfaction with his boss than his desire for more money, money for a bigger house, a faster car, a CB radio, a motorcycle, a hot tub, The Wizard and the Princess

303

more electronic gadgets, that led him to double and even triple up on work, often phasing into a no-sleep mode. Eventually the outside work got to be more than the inside work, and he left Informatics in 1979, becoming an independent consultant.

First there was a guy with a scheme to do tax returns for big companies like General Motors and Shell, and then there was some work with Warner Brothers, programming a system for the record company to keep artists’ royalties straight. There was a bookkeeping system he constructed for Security Pacific Banks, something about foreign tax plans.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.