A protest march that climaxed at Tech Square dramatically indicated how distant the hackers were
from their peers. Many of the hackers were sympathetic to the anti-war cause. Greenblatt, for
instance, had gone to a march in New Haven, and had done some phone line hookups for anti-war
radicals at the National Strike Information Center at Brandeis. And hacker Brian Harvey was very
active in organizing demonstrations; he would come back and tell in what low esteem the AI lab
was held by the protesters. There was even some talk at anti-war meetings that some of the
computers at Tech Square were used to help run the war. Harvey would try to tell them it wasn't so,
but the radicals would not only disbelieve him but get angry that he'd try to feed them bullshit.
The hackers shook their heads when they heard of that unfortunate misunderstanding. One more
example of how people didn't understand! But one charge leveled at the AI lab by the anti-war
movement was entirely accurate: all the lab's activities, even the most zany or anarchistic
manifestations of the Hacker Ethic, had been funded by the Department of Defense. Everything,
from the Incompatible Time-sharing System to Peter Samson's subway hack, was paid for by the
same Department of Defense that was killing Vietnamese and drafting American boys to die
overseas.
The general AI lab response to that charge was that the Defense Department's Advanced Research
Projects Agency (ARPA), which funded the lab, never asked anyone to come up with specific
military applications for the computer research engaged in by hackers and planners. ARPA had
been run by computer scientists; its goal had been the advancement of pure research. During the late
1960s a planner named Robert Taylor was in charge of ARPA funding, and he later admitted to
diverting funds from military, "mission-oriented" projects to projects that would advance pure
computer science. It was only the rarest hacker who called the ARPA funding "dirty money."
Almost everyone else, even people who opposed the war, recognized that ARPA money was the
lifeblood of the hacking way of life. When someone pointed out the obvious that the Defense
Department might not have asked for
specific
 military applications for the Artificial Intelligence and
systems work being done, but still expected a bonanza of military applications to come from the
work (who was to say that all that "interesting" work in vision and robotics would not result in more
efficient bombing raids?) the hackers would either deny the obvious (Greenblatt: "Though our
money was coming from the Department of Defense, it was not military") or talk like Marvin
Minsky: "There's nothing illegal about a Defense Department funding research. It's certainly better
than a Commerce Department or Education Department funding research ... because that would lead
to thought control. I would much rather have the military in charge of that ... the military people
make no bones about what they want, so we're not under any subtle pressures. It's clear what's going
on. The case of ARPA was unique, because they felt that what this country needed was people good
in defense technology. In case we ever needed it, we'd have it."
Planners thought they were advancing true science. Hackers were blithely formulating their tidy,
new-age philosophy based on free flow of information, decentralization, and computer democracy.
But the anti-military protesters thought it was a sham, since all that so-called idealism would
ultimately benefit the War Machine that was the Defense Department. The anti-war people wanted
to show their displeasure, and the word filtered up to the Artificial Intelligence lab one day that the
protesters were planning a march ending with a rally right there on the ninth floor. There, protesters
would gather to vividly demonstrate that all of them hackers, planners, and users were puppets of
the Defense Department.
Russ Noftsker, the nuts-and-bolts administrator of the AI lab, took the threat of protesters very
seriously. These were the days of the Weather Underground, and he feared that wild-eyed radicals
were planning to actually blow up the computer. He felt compelled to take certain measures to
protect the lab.
Some of the measures were so secretive perhaps involving government agencies like the CIA,
which had an office in Tech Square that Noftsker would not reveal them, even a decade after the
war had ended. But other measures were uncomfortably obvious. He removed the glass on the doors
leading from the elevator foyer on the ninth floor to the area where the hackers played with
computers. In place of the glass, Noftsker installed steel plates, covering the plates with wood so it
would not look as if the area were as barricaded as it actually was. The glass panels beside the door
were replaced with half-inch-thick bulletproof Plexiglas, so you could see who was petitioning for
entry before you unlocked the locks and removed the bolts. Noftsker also made sure the doors had
heavy-duty hinges bolted to the walls, so that the protesters would not try to remove the entire door,
rush in, and storm the computers.
During the days preceding the demonstration, only people whose names were on an approved list
were officially allowed entry to this locked fortress. On the day of the demonstration, he even went
so far as to distribute around forty Instamatic cameras to various people, asking them, when they
ventured outside the protected area, to take pictures of the demonstrators. If the demonstrators chose
to become violent, at least there would be documentation of the wrongdoers.
The barricades worked insofar as the protesters around twenty or thirty of them, in Noftsker's
estimate walked to Tech Square, stayed outside the lab a bit, and left without leveling the PDP-6
with sledgehammers. But the collective sigh of relief on the part of the hackers must have been
mixed with much regret. While they had created a lock-less, democratic system within the lab, the
hackers were so alienated from the outside world that they had to use those same hated locks,
barricades, and bureaucrat-compiled lists to control access to this idealistic environment. While
some might have groused at the presence of the locks, the usual free-access guerrilla fervor did not
seem to be applied in this case. Some of the hackers, shaken at the possibility of a rout, even rigged
the elevator system so that the elevators could not go directly to the ninth floor. Though previously
some of the hackers had declared, "I will not work in a place that has locks," after the
demonstrations were over, and after the restricted lists were long gone, the locks remained.
Generally, the hackers chose not to view the locks as symbols of how far removed they were from
the mainstream.
A very determined solipsism reigned on the ninth floor, a solipsism that stood its ground even when
hackerism suffered some direct, though certainly less physically threatening, attacks in publications
and journals. It was tough to ignore, however, the most vicious of these, since it came from within
MIT, from a professor of Computer Science (yes, MIT had come around and started a department)
named Joseph Weizenbaum. A former programmer himself, a thin, moustachioed man who spoke
with a rolling eastern European accent, Weizenbaum had been at MIT since 1963, but had rarely
interacted with the hackers. His biggest programming contribution to AI had been a program called
ELIZA, which carried on a conversation with the user; the computer would take the role of a
therapist. Weizenbaum recognized the computer's power, and was disturbed to note how seriously
users would interact with ELIZA. Even though people knew it was "only" a computer program, they
would tell it their most personal secrets. To Weizenbaum, it was a demonstration of how the
computer's power could lead to irrational, almost addictive behavior, with dehumanizing
consequences. And Weizenbaum thought that hackers or "compulsive programmers" were the
ultimate in computer dehumanization. In what was to become a notorious passage, he wrote, in
Computer Power and Human Reason:
...bright young men of disheveled appearance, often with sunken glowing eyes, can
be seen sitting at computer consoles, their arms tensed and waiting to fire their
fingers, already poised to strike, at the buttons and keys on which their attention
seems to be riveted as a gambler's on the rolling dice. When not so transfixed, they
often sit at tables strewn with computer printouts over which they pore like possessed
students of a cabbalistic text. They work until they nearly drop, twenty, thirty hours at
a time. Their food, if they arrange it, is brought to them: coffee, Cokes, sandwiches. If
possible, they sleep on cots near the printouts. Their rumpled clothes, their unwashed
and unshaven faces, and their uncombed hair all testify that they are oblivious to their
bodies and to the world in which they move. These are computer bums, compulsive
programmers...
Weizenbaum would later say that the vividness of this description came from his own experience as
a hacker of sorts, and was not directly based on observations of the ninth-floor culture. But many
hackers felt otherwise. Several thought that Weizenbaum had identified them personally, even
invaded their privacy in his description. Some others guessed that Greenblatt had been unfairly
singled out; indeed, Greenblatt did send Weizenbaum some messages objecting to the screed.
Still, there was no general introspection resulting from this or any other attack on the hacker life-
style. That was not the way of the lab. Hackers would not generally delve into each other's
psychological makeups. "There was a set of shared goals" Tom Knight would later explain "a set of
shared intellectual excitement, even to a large degree a set of shared social life, but there was also a
boundary which people were nervous to go beyond."
It was this unspoken boundary which came to bother hacker David Silver. He joined the lab as an
adolescent and literally came to maturity there, and besides his productive hacking he spent time
thinking about the relationship between hackers and computers. He came to be fascinated at how all
of them got so attached to, so intimately connected with something as simple as the PDP-6. It was
almost terrifying: thinking about this made David Silver wonder what it was that connected people
together, how people found each other, why people got along ... when something relatively simple
like the PDP-6 drew the hackers so close. The whole subject made him wonder on the one hand
whether people were just fancy kinds of computers, or on the other hand whether they were images
of God as a spirit.
These introspections were not things he necessarily shared with his mentors, like Greenblatt or
Gosper. "I don't think people had sort of warm conversations with each other," he would later say.
"That wasn't the focus. The focus was on sheer brainpower." This was the case even with Gosper:
Silver's apprenticeship with him was not so much a warm human relationship, he'd later reflect, as
"a hacker relationship," very close in terms of what they shared in terms of the computer, but not
imbued with the richness of a Real World friendship.
"There were many many many years that went by when all I did was hack computers, and I didn't
feel lonely, like I was missing anything," Silver would say. "But I guess as I started to grow up
more, round out more, change more, become less eccentric in certain ways, I started needing more
input from people. [By not going to high school] I bypassed all that social stuff and went right into
this blue-sky think tank ... I spent my lifetime walking around talking like a robot, talking to a
bunch of other robots."
Sometimes the hacker failure to be deeply personal had grim consequences. The lab might have
been the ideal location for guru-level hackers, but for some the pressure was too much. Even the
physical layout of the place promoted a certain high-tension feeling, with the open terminals, the
constant intimidating presence of the greatest computer programmers in the world, the cold air and
the endless hum of the air conditioners. At one point a research firm was called in to do a study of
the excessive, inescapable noise, and they concluded that the hum of the air conditioner was so
bothersome because there weren't
enough
 competing noises so they fixed the machines to make
them give off a loud, continual hiss. In Greenblatt's words, this change "was not a win," and the
constant hiss made the long hours on the ninth floor rather nerve-racking for some. Add that to
other factors lack of sleep, missed meals to the point of malnutrition, and a driving passion
to finish
that hack and
 it was clear why some hackers went straight over the edge.
Greenblatt was best at spotting "the classical syndrome of various kinds of losses," as he called it.
"In a certain way, I was concerned about the fact that we couldn't have people dropping dead all
over the place." Greenblatt would sometimes tell people to go home for a while, take it easy. Other
things were beyond him. For instance, drugs. One night, while driving back from a Chinese meal, a
young hacker turned to him and asked, not kidding, if he wanted to "shoot up." Greenblatt was
flabbergasted. The Real World was penetrating again, and there was little Greenblatt could do. One
night not long afterward, that particular hacker leapt off the Harvard Bridge into the ice-covered
Charles River and was severely injured. It was not the only suicide attempt by an AI lab hacker.
From that evidence alone, it would seem that Weizenbaum's point was well taken. But there was
much more to it than that. Weizenbaum did not acknowledge the beauty of the hacker devotion
itself ... or the very idealism of the Hacker Ethic. He had not seen, as Ed Fredkin had. Stew Nelson
composing code on the TECO editor while Greenblatt and Gosper watched: without any of the three
saying a word. Nelson was entertaining the others, encoding assembly language tricks which to
them, with their absolute mastery of that PDP-6 "language," had the same effect as hilariously
incisive jokes. And after every few instructions there would be another punch line in this sublime
form of communication... The scene was a demonstration of sharing which Fredkin never forgot.
While conceding that hacker relationships were unusual, especially in that most hackers lived
asexual lives, Fredkin would later say that "they were living the future of computers ... They just
had fun. They knew they were an elite, something special. And I think they appreciated each other.
They were all different, but each knew something great about the other. They all respected each
other. I don't know if anything like [that hacker culture] has happened in the world. I would say they
kind of loved each other."
The hackers focused on the magic of computers instead of human emotions, but they also could be
touched by other people. A prime example would be the case of Louis Merton.
*
 Merton was an
MIT student, somewhat reserved, and an exceptional chess player. Save for the last trait, Greenblatt
at first thought him well within the spectrum of random people who might wander into the lab.
The fact that Merton was such a good chess player pleased Greenblatt, who was then working to
build an actual computer which would run a souped-up version of his chess program. Merton
learned some programming, and joined Greenblatt on the project. He later did his own chess
program on a little-used PDP-7 on the ninth floor. Merton was enthusiastic about chess and
computers, and there was little to foreshadow what happened during the Thanksgiving break in late
1966, when, in the little theater-like AI "playroom" on Tech Square's eighth floor (where Professor
Seymour Papert and a group were working on the educational LOGO computer language), Merton
temporarily turned into a vegetable. He assumed a classic position of catatonia, rigidly sitting
upright, hands clenched into fists at his side. He would not respond to questions, would not even
acknowledge the existence of anything outside himself. People didn't know what to do. They called
up the MIT infirmary and were told to call the Cambridge police, who carted poor Merton away.
The incident severely shook the hackers, including Greenblatt, who found out about the incident
when he returned from a holiday visit home.
Merton was not one of the premier hackers. Greenblatt was not an intimate friend. Nonetheless,
Greenblatt immediately drove out to Westboro State Hospital to recover Merton. It was a long
drive, and the destination reminded Greenblatt of something out of the Middle Ages. Less a hospital
than a prison. Greenblatt became determined not to leave until he got Merton out. The last step in
this tortuous process was getting the signature of an elderly, apparently senile doctor. "Exactly [like
something] out of a horror film," Greenblatt later recalled. "He was unable to read. This random
attendant type would say, 'Sign here. Sign here.'"
It turned out that Merton had a history of these problems. Unlike most catatonics, Merton would
improve after a few days, especially when he was given medicine. Often, when he went catatonic
somewhere, whoever found him would call someone to take him away, and the doctors would give
a diagnosis of permanent catatonia even as Merton was coming to life again. He would call up the
AI lab and say, "Help," and someone, often Greenblatt, would come and get him.
Later, someone discovered in MIT records a letter from Merton's late mother. The letter explained
that Louis was a strange boy, and he sometimes would go stiff. In that case, all you needed to do
was to ask, "Louis, would you like to play a game of chess?" Fredkin, who had also taken an
interest in Merton, tried this. Merton one day stiffened on the edge of his chair, totally in sculpture
mode. Fredkin asked him if he'd like to play chess, and Merton stiffly marched over to the chess
board. The game got under way, with Fredkin chatting away in a rather one-sided conversation, but
suddenly Merton just stopped. Fredkin asked, "Louis, why don't you move?" After a very long
pause, Merton responded in a guttural, slow voice, "Your ... king's ... in ... check." Fredkin had
inadvertently uncovered the check from his last move.
Merton's condition could be mitigated by a certain medicine, but for reasons of his own he almost
never took it. Greenblatt would plead with him, but he'd refuse. Once Greenblatt went to Fredkin to
ask him to help out; Fredkin went back with Greenblatt to find Merton stiff and unresponsive.
"Louis, how come you're not taking your medicine?" he asked. Merton just sat there, a weak smile
frozen on his face. "Why won't you take it?" Fredkin repeated.
Suddenly, Merton reared back and walloped Fredkin on the chin. That kind of behavior was one of
Merton's unfortunate features. But the hackers showed remarkable tolerance. They did not dismiss
him as a loser. Fredkin considered Merton's case a good example of the essential humanity of the
group which Weizenbaum had, in effect, dismissed as emotionless androids. "He's just crazy,"
Minsky would later say of Weizenbaum. "These [hackers] are the most sensitive, honorable people
that have ever lived." Hyperbole, perhaps, but it was true that behind their single-mindedness there
was
 warmth, in the collective realization of the Hacker Ethic. As much as any devout religious
order, the hackers had sacrificed what outsiders would consider basic emotional behavior for the
love of hacking.
David Silver, who would eventually leave the order, was still in awe of that beautiful sacrifice years
later: "It was sort of necessary for these people to be extremely brilliant and, in some sense,
handicapped socially so that they would just kind of concentrate on this one thing." Hacking. The
most important thing in the world to them.
The computer world outside Cambridge did not stand still while the Hacker Ethic nourished on the
ninth floor of Tech Square. By the late 1960s, hackerism was spreading, partly because of the
proliferation of interactive machines like the PDP-10 or the XDS-940, partly because of friendly
programming environments (such as the one hackers had created at MIT), and partly because MIT
veterans would leave the lab and carry their culture to new places. But the heart of the movement
was this: people who wanted to hack were finding computers to hack on.
These computers were not necessarily at MIT. Centers of hacker culture were growing at various
institutions around the country, from Stanford to Carnegie-Mellon. And as these other centers
reached critical mass enough dedicated people to hack a large system and go on nightly pilgrimages
to local Chinese restaurants they became tempting enough to lure some of the AI lab hackers away
from Tech Square. The intense MIT style of hackerism would be exported through these emissaries.
Sometimes it would not be an institution that hackers moved to, but a business. A programmer
named Mike Levitt began a leading-edge technology firm called Systems Concepts in San
Francisco. He was smart enough to recruit phone-and-PDP-1 hacker Stew Nelson as a partner; TX-0
music master Peter Samson also joined this high-tech hardware design-and-manufacture business.
All in all, the small company managed to get a lot of the concentrated talent around Tech Square out
to San Francisco. This was no small feat, since hackers were generally opposed to the requirements
of California life, particularly driving and recreational exposure to the sun. But Nelson had learned
his lesson earlier despite Fredkin's repeated urgings in the mid-sixties, he'd refused to go to Triple-
I's new Los Angeles headquarters until, one day, after emphatically reiterating his vow, he stormed
out of Tech Square without a coat. It happened to be the coldest day of the Cambridge winter that
year, and as soon as he walked outside his glasses cracked from the sudden change of temperature.
He walked straight back to Fredkin's office, his eyebrows covered with icicles, and said, "I'm going
10 Los Angeles."
In some cases, a hacker's departure would be hastened by what Minsky and Ed Fredkin called
"social engineering." Sometimes the planners would find a hacker getting into a rut, perhaps stuck
on some systems problem, or maybe becoming so fixated on extracurricular activities, like lock
hacking or phone hacking, that planners deemed his work no longer "interesting." Fredkin would
later recall that hackers could get into a certain state where they were "like anchors dragging the
thing down. Time had gone by them, in some sense. They needed to get out of the lab and the lab
needed them out. So some surprising offer would come to those persons, or some visit arranged,
usually someplace far, far away. These people started filtering out in the world to companies or
other labs. It wasn't fate 1 would arrange it."
Minsky would say, "Brave Fredkin," acknowledging the clandestine nature of Fredkin's activity,
which would have to be done without the knowledge of the hacker community; they would not
tolerate an organizational structure which actually dictated where people should go.
While the destination could be industry besides Systems Concepts, Fredkin's Information
International company hired many of the MIT hackers it was often another computer center. The
most desirable of these was the Stanford AI Lab (SAIL), which Uncle John McCarthy had founded
when he left MIT in 1962.
In many respects SAIL was a mirror image of MIT's operation, distorted only by the California haze
that would sometimes drift from the Pacific Ocean to the peninsula. But the California distortion
was a significant one demonstrating how even the closest thing to the MIT hacker community was
only an approximation of the ideal; the hothouse MIT style of hackerism was destined to travel, but
when exposed to things like California sunlight it faded a bit in intensity.
The difference began with the setting, a semicircular concrete-glass-and-redwood former
conference center in the hills overlooking the Stanford campus. Inside the building, hackers would
work at any of sixty-four terminals scattered around the various offices. None of the claustrophobia
of Tech Square. No elevators, no deafening air-conditioning hiss. The laid-back style meant that
much of MIT's sometimes constructive acrimony the shouting sessions at the TMRC classroom, the
religious wars between grad students and hackers did not carry over. Instead of the battle-strewn
imagery of shoot-'em-up space science fiction that pervaded Tech Square, the Stanford imagery was
the gentle lore of elves, hobbits, and wizards described in J. R. R. Tolkien's Middle Earth trilogy.
Rooms in the AI lab were named after Middle Earth locations, and the SAIL printer was rigged so it
could handle three different Elven type fonts.
The California difference was reflected in the famous genre of computer games that the Stanford lab
eventually developed after the heyday of MIT Spacewar. A Stanford hacker named Donald Woods
discovered a kind of game on a Xerox research computer one day that involved a spelunker-
explorer seeking treasure in a dungeon. Woods contacted the programmer, Will Crowther, talked to
him about it, and decided to expand Crowther's game into a full-scale "Adventure," where a person
could use the computer to assume the role of a traveler in a Tolkienesque setting, fight off enemies,
overcome obstacles through clever tricks, and eventually recover treasure. The player would give
two-word, verb-noun commands to the program, which would respond depending on how the
command changed the universe that had been created inside the computer by Don Woods'
imagination. For instance, the game began with the computer describing your opening location:
  YOU ARE STANDING AT THE END OF A ROAD BEFORE A SMALL BRICK
BUILDING.
  AROUND YOU IS A FOREST.  A SMALL STREAM PLOWS OUT OF THE BUILDING
  AND DOWN A GULLY.
If you wrote
GO SOUTH
, the computer would say:
  YOU ARE IN A VALLEY IN THE FOREST BESIDE A STREAM TUMBLING ALONG
A
  ROCKY BED.
Later on, you would have to figure all sorts of tricks to survive. The snake you encountered, for
instance, could only be dealt with by releasing a bird you'd picked up along the way. The bird
would attack the snake, and you'd be free to pass. Each "room" of the adventure was like a
computer subroutine, presenting a logical problem you'd have to solve.
In a sense, Adventure was a metaphor for computer programming itself the deep recesses you
explored in the Adventure world were akin to the basic, most obscure levels of the machine that
you'd be traveling in when you hacked in assembly code. You could get dizzy trying to remember
where you were in both activities. Indeed, Adventure proved as addicting as programming Woods
put the program on the SAIL PDP-10 on a Friday, and some hackers (and Real World "tourists")
spent the entire weekend trying to solve it. Like any good system or program, of course, Adventure
was never finished Woods and his friends were always improving it, debugging it, adding more
puzzles and features. And like every significant program. Adventure was expressive of the
personality and environment of the authors. For instance, Woods' vision of a mist-covered Toll
Bridge protected by a stubborn troll came during a break in hacking one night, when Woods and
some other hackers decided to watch the sun rise at a mist-shrouded Mount Diablo, a substantial
drive away. They didn't make it in time, and Woods remembered what that misty dawn looked like,
and wrote it into the description of that scene in the game, which he conceived of over breakfast that
morning.
It was at Stanford that gurus were as likely to be faculty people as systems hackers (among Stanford
professors was the noted computer scientist Donald Knuth, author of the multivolume classic
The
Art of Computer Programming).
 It was at Stanford that, before the Adventure craze, the casual
pleasures of Spacewar were honed to a high art (Slug Russell had come out with McCarthy, but it
was younger hackers who developed five-player versions and options for reincarnation, and ran
extensive all-night tournaments). It was at Stanford that hackers would actually
leave their
terminals
 for a daily game of volleyball. It was at Stanford that a fund-raising drive was
successfully undertaken for an addition to the lab which would have been inconceivable at MIT: a
sauna. It was at Stanford that the computer could support video images, allowing users to switch
from a computer program to a television program. The most famous use of this, according to some
SAIL regulars, came when SAIL hackers placed an ad in the campus newspaper for a couple of
willing young coeds, and the women answering the ad became stars of a sex orgy at the AI lab,
captured by a video camera and watched over the terminals by appreciative hackers. Something else
that never would have occurred at MIT.
It was not as if the SAIL hackers were any less devoted to their hacking than the MIT people. In a
paper summarizing the history of the Stanford lab, Professor Bruce Buchanan refers to the "strange
social environment created by intense young people whose first love was hacking," and it was true
that the lengths that hackers went to in California were no less extreme than those at Tech Square.
For instance, it did not take long for SAIL hackers to notice that the crawl space between the low-
hanging artificial ceiling and the roof could be a comfortable sleeping hutch, and several of them
actually lived there for years. One systems hacker spent the early 1970s living in his dysfunctional
car parked in the lot outside the building once a week he'd bicycle down to Palo Alto for provisions.
The other alternative for food was the Prancing Pony; named after a tavern in Middle Earth, this
was the SAIL food-vending machine, loaded with health-food goodies and pot-stickers from a local
Chinese restaurant. Each hacker kept an account on the Prancing Pony, maintained by the computer.
After you made your food purchase, you were given the option to double-or-nothing the cost of
your food, the outcome depending on whether it was an odd- or even-numbered millisecond when
you made the gamble. With those kinds of provisions, SAIL was even more amenable than MIT for
round-the-clock hacking. It had its applications people and its systems people. It was open to
outsiders, who would sit down and begin hacking; and if they showed promise, Uncle John
McCarthy might hire them.
SAIL hackers also lived by the Hacker Ethic. The time-sharing system on the SAIL machine, like
ITS, did not require passwords, but, at John McCarthy's insistence, a user had the option to keep his
files private. The SAIL hackers wrote a program to identify these people, and proceeded to unlock the files, which they would read with special interest. "Anybody that's asking for privacy must be
doing something interesting," SAIL hacker Don Woods would later explain.
Likewise, SAIL was in no way inferior to MIT in doing important computer work. Just like their
counterparts at MIT's AI lab, SAIL hackers were robotics fans, as implied by the sign outside SAIL:
CAUTION, ROBOT VEHICLE. It was John McCarthy's dream to have a robot leave the funky AI
lab and travel the three miles to campus under its own physical and mental power. At one point,
presumably by mistake, a robot got loose and was careening down the hill when, fortunately, a
worker driving to the lab spotted it, and rescued it. Various hackers and academics worked at SAIL
in important planner fields like speech understanding and natural language studies. Some of the
hackers got heavily involved in a computer music project that would break ground in that field.
Stanford and other labs, whether in universities like Carnegie-Mellon or research centers like
Stanford Research Institute, became closer to each other when ARPA linked their computer systems
through a communications network. This "ARPAnet" was very much influenced by the Hacker
Ethic, in that among its values was the belief that systems should be decentralized, encourage
exploration, and urge a free flow of information. From a computer at any "node" on the ARPAnet,
you could work as if you were sitting at a terminal of a distant computer system. Hackers from all
over the country could work on the ITS system at Tech Square, and the hacker values implicit in
that were spreading. People sent a tremendous volume of electronic mail to each other, swapped
technical esoterica, collaborated on projects, played Adventure, formed close hacker friendships
with people they hadn't met in person, and kept in contact with friends at places they'd previously
hacked. The contact helped to normalize hackerism, so you could find hackers in Utah speaking in
the peculiar jargon developed in the Tool Room next to the Tech Model Railroad Club.
Yet even as the Hacker Ethic grew in the actual number of its adherents, the MIT hackers noted that
outside of Cambridge things were not the same. The hackerism of Greenblatt, Gosper, and Nelson
had been directed too much toward creating one Utopia, and even the very similar offshoots were,
by comparison, losing in various ways.
"How could you go to California, away from the action?" people would ask those who went to
Stanford Some left because they tired of the winner-loser dichotomy on the ninth floor, though they
would admit that the MIT intensity was not in California. Tom Knight, who hacked at Stanford for a
while, used to say that you couldn't
really
 do good work at Stanford.
David Silver went out there, too, and concluded that "the people at Stanford were kind of losers in
their thinking. They weren't as rigorous in certain ways and they sort of were more fun-loving. One
guy was building a race car and another was building an airplane in the basement..." Silver himself
got into hardware at Stanford when he built an audio switch to allow people working at their
terminals to listen to any of sixteen channels, from radio stations to a SAIL public-address system.
All the choices, of course, were stored within the SAIL PDP-6. And Silver thinks that exposure to
the California style of hacking helped loosen him up, preparing him to make the break from the
closed society of the ninth floor.
The defection of Silver and the other MIT hackers did not cripple the lab. New hackers came to
replace them. Greenblatt and Gosper remained, as did Knight and some other canonical hackers.
But the terrifically optimistic energy that came with the opening explosion of AI research, of setting
up new software systems, seemed to have dissipated. Some scientists were complaining that the
boasts of early AI planners were not fulfilled. Within the hacker community itself, the fervid habits
and weird patterns established in the past decade seemed to have solidified. Were
they
 ossified as
well? Could you grow old as a hacker, keep wrapping around to those thirty-hour days? "I was
really proud," Gosper would say later, "of being able to hack around the clock and not really care
what phase of the sun or moon it was. Wake up and find it twilight, have no idea whether it was
dawn or sunset." He knew, though, that it could not go on forever. And when it could not, when
there was no Gosper or Greenblatt wailing away for thirty hours, how far would the hacker dream
go? Would the Golden Age, now drawing to its close, really have
meant
 anything?
It was in 1970 that Bill Gosper began hacking LIFE. It was yet another system that was a world in
itself, a world where behavior was "exceedingly rich, but not so rich as to be incomprehensible." It
would obsess Bill Gosper for years.
LIFE was a game, a computer simulation developed by John Conway, a distinguished British
mathematician. It was first described by Martin Gardner, in his "Mathematical Games" column in
the October 1970 issue
of Scientific American.
 The game consists of markers on a checkerboard-like
field, each marker representing a "cell." The pattern of cells changes with each move in the game
(called a "generation"), depending on a few simple rules cells die, are born, or survive to the next
generation according to how many neighboring cells are in the vicinity. The principle is that
isolated cells die of loneliness, and crowded cells die from overpopulation; favorable conditions
will generate new cells and keep old ones alive. Gardner's column talked of the complexities made
possible by this simple game and postulated some odd results that had not yet been achieved by
Conway or his collaborators.
Gosper first saw the game when he came into the lab one day and found two hackers fooling around
with it on the PDP-6. He watched for a while. His first reaction was to dismiss the exercise as not
interesting. Then he watched the patterns take shape a while longer. Gosper had always appreciated
how the specific bandwidth of the human eyeball could interpret patterns; he would often use weird
algorithms to generate a display based on mathematical computations. What would appear to be
random numbers on paper could be brought to life on a computer screen. A certain order could be
discerned, an order that would change in an interesting way if you took the algorithm a few
iterations further, or alternated the
x
 and
y
 patterns. It was soon clear to Gosper that LIFE presented
these possibilities and more. He began working with a few AI workers to hack LIFE in an
extremely serious way. He was to do almost nothing else for the next eighteen months.
The group's first effort was to try to find a configuration in the LIFE universe which was possible in
theory but had not been discovered. Usually, no matter what pattern you began with, after a few
generations it would peter out to nothing, or revert to one of a number of standard patterns named
after the shape that the collection of cells formed. The patterns included the beehive, honey farm
(four beehives), spaceship, powder keg, beacon, Latin cross, toad, pinwheel, and swastika.
Sometimes, after a number of generations, patterns would alternate, flashing between one and the
other: these were called oscillators, traffic lights, or pulsars. What Gosper and the hackers were
seeking was called a glider gun. A glider was a pattern which would move across the screen,
periodically reverting to the same pointed shape. If you ever created a LIFE pattern which actually
spewed out gliders as it changed shape, you'd have a glider gun, and LIFE'S inventor, John Conway,
offered fifty dollars to the first person who was able to create one.
The hackers would spend all night sitting at the PDP-6's high-quality "340" display (a special, high-
speed monitor made by DEC), trying different patterns to see what they'd yield. They would log
each "discovery" they made in this artificial universe in a large black sketchbook which Gosper
dubbed the LIFE Scrap-book. They would stare at the screen as, generation by generation, the
pattern would shift. Sometimes it looked like a worm snapping its tail between sudden reverses, as
if it were alternating between itself and a mirror reflection. Other times, the screen would eventually
darken as the cells died from aggregate overpopulation, then isolation. A pattern might end with the
screen going blank. Other times things would stop with a stable "still life" pattern of one of the
standards. Or things would look like they were winding down, and one little cell thrown off by a
dying "colony" could reach another pattern and this newcomer could make it explode with activity.
"Things could run off and do something incredibly random," Gosper would later recall of those
fantastic first few weeks, "and we couldn't stop watching it. We'd just sit there, wondering if it was
going to go on forever."
As they played, the world around them seemed connected in patterns of a LIFE simulation. They
would often type in an arbitrary pattern such as the weaving in a piece of clothing, or a pattern one
of them discerned in a picture or a book. Usually what it would do was not interesting. But
sometimes they would detect unusual behavior in a small part of a large LIFE pattern. In that case
they would try to isolate that part, as they did when they noticed a pattern that would be called "the
shuttle," which would move a distance on the screen, then reverse itself. The shuttle left behind
some cells in its path, which the hackers called "dribbles." The dribbles were "poison," because
their presence would wreak havoc on otherwise stable LIFE populations.
Gosper wondered what might happen if two shuttles bounced off each other, and figured that there
were between two and three hundred possibilities. He tried out each one, and eventually came
across a pattern that actually threw off gliders. It would move across the screen like a jitterbugging
whip, spewing off limp boomerangs of phosphor. It was a gorgeous sight. No wonder this was
called LIFE the program created life itself. To Gosper, Con-way's simulation was a form of genetic
creation, without the vile secretions and emotional complications associated with the Real World's
version of making new life. Congratulations you've given birth to a glider gun!
Early the next morning Gosper made a point of printing out the coordinates of the pattern that
resulted in the glider gun, and rushed down to the Western Union office to send a wire to Martin
Gardner with the news. The hackers got the fifty dollars.
This by no means ended the LIFE craze on the ninth floor. Each night, Gosper and his friends
would monopolize the 340 display running various LIFE patterns, a continual entertainment,
exploration, and journey into alternate existence. Some did not share their fascination, notably
Greenblatt. By the early seventies, Greenblatt had taken more of a leadership role in the lab. He
seemed to care most about the things that
had to be done,
 and after being the de facto caretaker of
the ITS system he was actively trying to transform his vision of the hacker dream into a
machine
that would embody it. He had taken the first steps in his "chess machine," which responded with a
quickness unheard of in most computers. He was also trying to make sure that the lab itself ran
smoothly, so that hacking would progress and be continually interesting.
He was not charmed by LIFE. Specifically, he was unhappy that Gosper and the others were
spending "unbelievable numbers of hours at the console staring at those soupy LIFE things" and
monopolizing the single 340 terminal. Worst of all, he considered the program they were using as
"clearly non-optimal." This was something the LIFE hackers readily admitted, but the LIFE case
was the rare instance of hackers tolerating some inefficiency. They were so thrilled at the unfolding
display of LIFE that they did not want to pause even for the few days it might take to hack up a
better program. Greenblatt howled in protest "the heat level got to be moderately high," he later
admitted and did not shut up until one of the LIFE hackers wrote a faster program, loaded with
utilities that enabled you to go backward and forward for a specified number of generations, focus
in on various parts of the screen, and do all sorts of other things to enhance exploration.
Greenblatt never got the idea. But to Gosper, LIFE was much more than your normal hack. He saw
it as a way to "basically do science in a new universe where all the smart guys haven't already nixed
you out two or three hundred years ago. It's your life story if you're a mathematician: every time
you discover something neat, you discover that Gauss or Newton knew it in his crib. With LIFE
you're the first guy there, and there's always fun stuff going on.
You can do everything from recursive function theory to animal husbandry. There's a community of
people who are sharing these experiences with you. And there's the sense of connection between
you and the environment. The idea of where's the boundary of a computer. Where does the
computer leave off and the environment begin?"
Obviously, Gosper was hacking LIFE with near-religious intensity. The metaphors implicit in the
simulation of populations, generations, birth, death, survival were becoming real to him. He began
to wonder what the consequences would be if a giant supercomputer were dedicated to LIFE ... and
imagined that eventually some improbable objects might be created from the pattern. The most
persistent among them would survive against odds which Gosper, as a mathematician, knew were
almost impossible. It would not be randomness which determined survival, but some sort of
computer Darwinism. In this game which is a struggle against decay and oblivion, the survivors
would be the "maximally persistent states of matter." Gosper thought that these LIFE forms would
have
contrived
 to exist they would actually have evolved into intelligent entities.
"Just as rocks wear down in a few billion years, but DNA hangs in there," he'd later explain. "This
intelligent behavior would be just another one of those organizational phenomena like DNA which
contrived to increase the probability of survival of some entity. So one tends to suspect, if one's not
a creationist, that very very large LIFE configurations would eventually exhibit intelligent
[characteristics]. Speculating what these things could know or could find out is very intriguing ...
and perhaps has implications for our own existence."
Gosper was further stimulated by Ed Fredkin's theory that it is impossible to tell if the universe isn't
a computer simulation, perhaps being run by some hacker in another dimension. Gosper came to
speculate that in his imaginary ultimate LIFE machine, the intelligent entities which would form
over billions of generations might also engage in those very same speculations. According to the
way we understand our own physics, it is impossible to make a perfectly reliable computer. So
when an inevitable bug occurred in that super-duper LIFE machine, the intelligent entities in the
simulation would have suddenly been presented with a window to the metaphysics which
determined their own existence. They would have a clue to how they were really implemented. In
that case, Fredkin conjectured, the entities might accurately conclude that they were part of a giant
simulation and might want to pray to their implementors by arranging themselves in recognizable
patterns, asking in readable code for the implementors to give clues as to what
they're
 like. Gosper
recalls "being offended by that notion, completely unable to wrap my head around it for days,
before I accepted it."
He accepted it.
Maybe it is not so surprising. In one sense that far-flung conjecture was already reality. What were
the hackers but gods of information, moving bits of knowledge around in cosmically complex
patterns within the PDP-6? What satisfied them more than this power? If one concedes that power
corrupts, then one might identify corruption in the hackers' failure to distribute this power and the
hacker dream itself beyond the boundaries of the lab. That power was reserved for the winners, an
inner circle that might live by the Hacker Ethic but made little attempt to widen the circle beyond
those like themselves, driven by curiosity, genius, and the Hands-On Imperative.
Not long after his immersion in LIFE, Gosper himself got a glimpse of the limits of the tight circle
the hackers had drawn. It happened in the man-made daylight of the 1972 Apollo 17 moon shot. He
was a passenger on a special cruise to the Caribbean, a "science cruise" timed for the launch, and
the boat was loaded with sci-fi writers, futurists, scientists of varying stripes, cultural commentators,
and, according to Gosper, "an unbelievable quantity of just completely empty-headed cruise-niks."
Gosper was there as part of Marvin Minsky's party. He got to engage in discussion with the likes of
Norman Mailer, Katherine Anne Porter, Isaac Asimov, and Carl Sagan, who impressed Gosper with
his Ping-Pong playing. For real competition, Gosper snuck in some forbidden matches with the
Indonesian crewmen, who were by far the best players on the boat.
Apollo 17 was to be the first manned space shot initiated at night, and the cruise boat was sitting
three miles off Cape Kennedy for an advantageous view of the launch. Gosper had heard all the
arguments against going to the trouble of seeing a liftoff why not watch it on television, since you'll
be miles away from the actual launching pad? But when he saw the damn thing actually lift off, he
appreciated the distance. The night had been set ablaze, and the energy peak got to his very insides.
The shirt slapped on his chest, the change in his pocket jingled, and the PA system speakers broke
from their brackets on the viewing stand and dangled by their power cords. The rocket, which of
course never could have held to so true a course without computers, leapt into the sky, hell-bent for
the cosmos like some naming avenger, a Spacewar nightmare; the cruise-niks were stunned into
trances by the power and glory of the sight. The Indonesian crewmen went berserk. Gosper later
recalled them running around in a panic and throwing their Ping-Pong equipment overboard, "like
some kind of sacrifice."
The sight affected Gosper profoundly. Before that night, Gosper had disdained NASA's human-
wave approach toward things. He had been adamant in defending the AI lab's more individualistic
form of hacker elegance in programming, and in computing style in general. But now he saw how
the Real World, when it got its mind made up, could have an astounding effect. NASA had not
applied the Hacker Ethic, yet it had done something the lab, for all its pioneering, never could have
done. Gosper realized that the ninth-floor hackers were in some sense deluding themselves, working
on machines of relatively little power compared to the computers of the future yet still trying to do
it all, change the world right there in the lab. And since the state of computing had not yet
developed machines with the power to change the world at large certainly nothing to make your
chest rumble as did the NASA operation all that the hackers wound up doing was making Tools to
Make Tools. It was embarrassing.
Gosper's revelation led him to believe that the hackers
could
change things just make the computers
bigger, more powerful, without skimping on expense. But the problem went even deeper than that.
While the mastery of the hackers had indeed made computer programming a spiritual pursuit, a
magical art, and while the culture of the lab was developed to the point of a technological Walden
Pond, something was essentially lacking.
The world.
As much as the hackers tried to make their own world on the ninth floor, it could not be done. The
movement of key people was inevitable. And the harsh realities of funding hit Tech Square in the
seventies: ARPA, adhering to the strict new Mansfield Amendment passed by Congress, had to ask
for specific justification for many computer projects. The unlimited funds for basic research were
drying up; ARPA was pushing some pet projects like speech recognition (which would have
directly increased the government's ability to mass-monitor phone conversations abroad and at
home). Minsky thought the policy was a "losing" one, and distanced the AI lab from it. But there
was no longer enough money to hire anyone who showed exceptional talent for hacking. And
slowly, as MIT itself became more ensconced in training students for conventional computer
studies, the Institute's attitude to computer studies shifted focus somewhat. The AI lab began to look
for teachers as well as researchers, and the hackers were seldom interested in the bureaucratic
hassles, social demands, and lack of hands-on machine time that came with teaching courses.
Greenblatt was still hacking away, as was Knight, and a few newer hackers were proving
themselves masters at systems work ... but others were leaving, or gone. Now, Bill Gosper headed
West. He arranged to stay on the AI lab payroll, hacking on the ninth-floor PDP-6 via the ARPAnet
... but he moved to California, to study the art of computer programming with Professor Donald
Knuth at Stanford. He became a fixture at Louie's, the best Chinese restaurant in Palo Alto, but was
missing in action at Tech Square. He was a mercurial presence on computer terminals there but no
longer a physical center of attention, draped over a chair, whispering, "Look at
that,"
 while the 340
terminal pulsed insanely with new forms of LIFE. He was in California, and he had bought a car.
With all these changes, some of the hackers sensed that an era was ending. "Before [in the sixties],
the attitude was 'Here's these new machines, let's see what they can do,'" hacker Mike Beeler later
recalled. "So we did robot arms, we parsed language, we did Spacewar ... now we had to justify
according to national goals. And [people pointed out that] some things we did were curious, but not
relevant ... we realized we'd had a Utopian situation, all this fascinating culture. There was a certain
amount of isolation and lack of dissemination, spreading the word. I worried that it was all going to
be lost."
It would not be lost. Because there was a second wave of hackers, a type of hacker who not only
lived by the Hacker Ethic but saw a need to spread that gospel as widely as possible. The natural
way to do this was through the power of the computer, and the time to do it was now. The
computers to do it would have to be small and cheap making the DEC minicomputers look like IBM
Hulking Giants by comparison. But small and powerful computers in great numbers could truly
change the world. There were people who had these visions, and they were not the likes of Gosper
or Greenblatt: they were a different type of hacker, a second generation, more interested in the
proliferation of computers than in hacking mystical AI applications. This second generation were
hardware hackers, and the magic they would make in California would build on the cultural
foundation set by the MIT hackers to spread the hacker dream throughout the land.