It turned out that these pasty-faced,
hollow-eyed, jargon-spewing, insanely cackling young men were the first,
founding generation of dropout programming wizards to call themselves
"hackers," and Building 26 was where the hotshot hired programmers of
MIT's artificial intelligence Project MAC were caged until they all
moved to the ninth floor of 545 Technology Square, in the early sixties.
Technology Square was MIT's space-age temple of sci-tech. The
geographical move from outpost to the pinnacle of the technohierarchy
reflected an elevation in the importance of the whole field of
man-machine systems. MAC was set up originally by
Licklider, later
administered at various times by Fano, Minsky, and Papert, and the
ambiguity about the meaning of the acronym was deliberate. On the level
of the hackers' employers, it meant both
"machine-aided cognition" and "Multi-access computing," because
in the early 1960s computer system design and AI research had not yet
parted ways.
Down in Building 26, where the dirty work went on, where this motley
group of exceptionally gifted programmers got their fingers into the
logical guts of machines and made them do their bidding, they were
Maniacs And Clowns, Men Against Computers, and numerous unprintable
variations. They were the unruly but indispensable hired craftsmen of
the projects directed by the likes of McCarthy and Minsky and funded by
Licklider -- the ones who built the software probes their employers
launched into the frontiers of machine intelligence.
At the moment David walked in, a young man named Richard Greenblatt,
who lived on the stereotypical hacker diet of soft drinks, candy bars,
and Rolaids, and who didn't stop to sleep, much less to wash or change
clothing, was explaining to a circle of awed admirers, which included
some of the computer scientists who had hired him, how he intended to
write a chess playing program good enough to beat a human. Greenblatt's
thesis advisor, Marvin Minsky, tried to discourage Greenblatt, telling
him there was little hope of making progress in chess playing software.
Six years after he first stumbled upon the inhabitants of building
26, sixteen-year-old David Rodman, by now a dropout, acidhead, and
professional AI programmer of his own, albeit smaller, repute, was in
the group that watched Greenblatt's "MacHack" program demolish Hubert
Dreyfus, the number one critic of the whole AI field, in a much-heralded
and highly symbolic game of chess. The MacHack versus Dreyfus duel has
become one of the hacker legends, and MacHack became the first program
to be granted honorary membership in the American Chess Federation.
The Dreyfus chess match was only one of several historic moments in
AI history that David witnessed from his vantage point of mascot, then
apprentice, then full-fledged hired hacker, during the heyday of MAC,
between 1960 and 1967. He was there when his motley colleagues began to
build the programming and operating systems for the TX-0 and PDP-1
computer hardware, thus establishing the first software thrust into the
age of interactive computing. David was also there when Joseph
Weizenbaum, to his later regret unveiled ELIZA, probably the most widely
quoted and widely misunderstood program in history -- the program that
seems to be an uncannily perceptive psychiatrist, but is actually a
programmer's semantic trick.
David came upon the hackers through a mixture of mischief and
happenstance. He was one of those prodigies who was angry about having a
brain like his trapped for another eight years in the body of a child.
Since he was six, he had been an exceptional musician, but he gave up
the piano at ten because he despised performing for adults. He was a
loner, a wanderer, a looker through doorways, an urban spelunker -- a
snoop, but not a thief, unless you consider knowledge of how to find
your way through a complicated system as a stealable property. By the
age of fifteen, David and his friends could find their way into any
building in the MIT complex, via the system of underground utility
tunnels.
Wandering through the halls of MIT, where his father worked in the
medical school, was one of his favorite pastimes. He liked to try doors
and see what was behind the unlocked ones. When he cast his eyes on
those strange guys gathered around an odd-looking television set with
wires coming out of it, and then joined them at a game called
"Spacewar," using a control panel made out of a cigar box, and nobody
seemed to notice that he was ten years old -- David knew he had found
his new intellectual home.
"They treated me with some subtlety. I think it was a kind of
recognition. They had all been through it, but they weren't about to
tell me anything before I figured it out for myself," David recalled,
twenty years later. He just sat down and there was a keyboard and
someone got him started, and although they were the first people he had
met who didn't make a fuss over his intelligence, they noticed how quick
he picked it up, all right.
After David returned a few times, and demonstrated his ability to
find his way around the computer, the hackers made him a mascot, and
when he was a full-blooded initiate ("when they started calling me
'Rodman' instead of 'hey, kid'"), they started giving him small tasks in
machine language, eventually showing him tricks in the sexy new
programming language known as LISP invented specifically for AI
programmers by John McCarthy, one of the project's founders.
Marvin Minsky's secretary took a liking to this wiseass ten-year-old
who seemed to take to programming as some kids take to chess or tennis
or ballet, and Minsky, who had always been the hackers' patron in MIT
computer circles, let David use his password.
Today, having grown up through the early days of the hackers and AI
research, the ARPAnet years, the consulting contracts and security
clearances, the regular escalation of his income, and the transformation
of the social status of computer programmers from weirdo outsiders to
millionaire culture heroes, David Rodman is the president of a
microcomputer software company whose primary product is a system of
programs he wrote himself. His personal odyssey from the inner sanctums
of AI hackdom to the rough-and-tumble capitalism of the microcomputer
industry is a kind of capsule history of the whole strange journey of
interactive computing from laboratory curiosity to home appliance.
But like many others who are now in their middle thirties and who
didn't wear suits and carry briefcases, the early history was colorful
and not a little painful: "At the age of ten, I was like a coiled spring
inside -- lonely, uptight, angry, cynical. I was unable to balance my
intelligence against the rest of the world. Then suddenly, here were
people not unlike myself, who showed me a device that would respond to
me when I sat down to program it. Those people knew what was
happening to me, and when I began programming, they encouraged it."
MIT, to begin with, was the engineers' school of engineers' schools,
where the undergraduates hold an annual "ugliest man on campus" contest
-- an unashamed, self-proclaimed, national haven for supernerds. The
campus population was primarily composed of the people from all the high
schools in the country who stayed home and learned integral calculus or
built ham radios while everybody else was at the sock hop.
Amid all this self-styled rejection of
conventional youth culture and the atmosphere of cultivated
unfashionability, computer obsessives were considered oddballs even by
the other outcasts. Their standards were entirely their own. They
and their computers, and a few people in ARPA, were the only ones who
knew that the top hackers were really the insiders. Although they were
outcasts from the wider society, from their fellow techies, and even
from most other computer scientists, they happened to be the people who
were creating the future of computing -- the first time-sharing systems.
They were having so much fun with what they all knew to be the hot
technology of the future that they seemed to deliberately encourage
their unappetizing image. You don't just barge in and make yourself a
hacker. You've gotta hack. And that
means making a computer do things its manufacturers never expected it to
do. (This kind of programming is known among hackers as "black
magic.") It also meant surviving what the other hackers could do to the
results of all your work if you weren't clever enough to prevent them.
There was a matter of intellectual
style. Boldness and speed and raw power were as important as (critics of
hackers would say more important than) elegance and efficiency
when it came to "cutting code" (writing the detailed machine
language or high-level language lists of instructions that make programs
do what computer users want them to do.).
One common comeback when an outsider
asked what "hacker" meant was "somebody who makes furniture with an
axe." Orthodox programming style was hardly de rigeur in this
crowd. The challenge was to think of a clever way to do something that
most normal computer experts would do some other way or not at all. The
performance standards were idiosyncratic and subtle, but all-important.
These people judged each other by criteria that the rest of the world
didn't even understand, and the hackers didn't mind keeping it that way.
They were other kinds of outcasts besides social outcasts,
self-selected or otherwise. Their values were entirely their own:
academic or commercial success was too trivial to be considered a
driving motivation; the opportunity to work with like-minded colleagues
on state-of-the-art equipment was paramount. They had their own culture,
their own ethic, even their own dialect. The eighteen-year-old MIT
dropouts David Rodman wanted to emulate were distinguished from the
hippies and radicals they superficially resembled because they all
happened to have a talent that was particularly valued in those days,
and still is -- the ability to write
code that makes computers useful to nonprogrammers.
While all their former classmates were on to their doctorates and
assistant professorships and corporate research laboratories, the
misfits suddenly found their conventionally successful peers, at a job
where they weren't relegated to working out a payroll system or an
airline reservation service. The hackers knew, even if nobody else did,
that they -- and not IBM, or even their straighter "FORTRAN type"
colleagues in computer science -- were the test pilots of the
computational frontier, pushing the limits of what could be done with
each fresh generation of hardware.
Their mandate was to dream up new
things for computers to do, and in the process what they did was invent
a whole new computer system and computer-oriented society, a technology
and social order in which their own little fraternity of ex-outsiders,
and not the conventional computer types, were privileged to know the
inner mysteries. When the rest of the world caught up with them,
they knew they would be on to something even more mysterious to the
outsider and more exciting to the hacker. None of them would deny the
charges of addiction. Some of the same people who were in that room when
David walked in, almost a quarter of a century ago, are still sitting in
front of a computer terminal, somewhere on the upper floors of 545
Technology Square.
Their superiors were smart enough to know that
the best of the hackers would come up
with amazing things if they were left to their own devices.
Spacewar, which spread from MIT to other campus computer centers, was
one of the rites of passage and defining characteristics of any den of
hackers. It was invented by a MAC hacker named Russell, known as "Slug",
and was perfected in a communal effort by generations, and it survived
wherever it sprouted, like some antibiotic resistant organism, because
every computer laboratory manager in the
country learned that productivity dove when Spacewar was banned and shot
back up when the game was reinstated.It was Spacewar that
influenced Nolan Bushnell to create, over a decade later, a much simpler
version called Pong, a commercial venture that created the first
incarnation of Atari Corporation and a billion-dollar video game
industry. Before Pong succeeded, however, Bushnell had failed to get
people interested in a more complex game, a more direct derivation of
Spacewar. But in those days, the people who put quarters into video
machines at bars and arcades hadn't yet been educated in their video
game sensibilities by the Space Invaders and Pac-Man phenomena of the
late 1970s and early 1980s.
But fun and games were only part of the fun and games. One of the
things the hackers were building when David arrived was the software for
one of the first time-sharing systems. They were writing a time-sharing
operating system that they intended to use to create the greatest hacks,
the biggest pranks, the most amazing demonstrations of programming
virtuosity in hacker history. The fact that they were pioneering a whole
new way to use computers that would eventually bring the outside
population in on it was not the first thing on their mind. They wanted
to get their own hands on the system, so they built it in record time.
Actually, there were two MIT time-sharing projects. The more staid
project was CTSS -- Compatible Time-Sharing System, so named because it
was designed to be compatible with other systems that were being
constructed elsewhere. The MAC hackers were designing an operating
system they called ITS -- the Incompatible Time-sharing System. They
couldn't care less about making it easy for outsiders to use. They were
having too much fun to share it with the kind of straight-arrow
programmers who could stand to eat or sleep before finishing a good
hack.
There were hackers and there were metahackers. Richard Greenblatt,
because of what his program did to Dreyfus, and because of his ability
to improvise great code without fully understanding how he did it, was
at the top of the hacking order. He was
a dropout and looked the part of the "Pepsi-guzzling, nonsleeping,
single-minded programming addict who ate only food that came from a
vending machine and whose skin had not absorbed anything but fluorescent
light in three years," as Rodman fondly remembered him, three
decades later. But Greenblatt's peers knew him as a Nijinsky, a Frank
Lloyd Wright, a Johann Sebastian Bach of LISP programming.
The matter of pranks, of what the hackers called "wheel wars" --
mucking up each others files, trying to thwart each other or "crash" the
operating system -- was part of the working environment. Crashing the
system could be accomplished by running some kind of unrunnable
self-swallowing program that the programmer who designed the system
hadn't made precautions for. When such a prank succeeds, everybody
connected to the system can lose important data. In the early sixties,
at places like MAC, it was understood that, despite its unfortunate side
effects, crashing was an allowable test of the system if the hack
revealed an important system vulnerability.
Two decades later, when mischievous and sometimes vandalistic
teenagers with home computers started calling themselves "hackers" and
crashed the files of nonhackers via the telephone, they were doing
something quite different in its ultimate effect, if not in its outward
appearance, from what the first such outlaws at MAC were trying to
accomplish. The excuse was that they were "just exploring" an
interesting vulnerability in the system had some real validity back when
the hackers were creating and testing new time-sharing systems, and when
their expertise was aimed toward a common goal. But when the system that
crashes, as nearly happened in 1983, is an operational computer used by
a hospital to keep track of patient medication records, it is a somewhat
different matter. The same kind of iconoclastic mischief that had one
meaning in the 1960s took on another meaning in the 1980s.
"Phone-hacking" was another kind of prank pioneered by MAC hackers in
the early 1960s that was to spawn anarchic variants in the 1970s.
The self-taught mastery of complex
technologies is the hallmark of the hacker's obsession, the conviction
that all information (and information delivery technologies) ought to be
free is a central tenet of the hacker ethical code, and the global
telephone network is a complex technological system par excellence,
a kind of ad hoc worldwide computer. The fact that a tone
generator and a knowledge of switching circuits could provide access to
long-distance lines, free of charge, led to a number of legendary phone
hacks. But the mythology didn't die there.
In California, the Stanford AI Laboratory (SAIL) and the proximity to
Silicon Valley led to the growth of another phone-hacking subcult of
"phone Phreaks" in the 1970s, whose hero was a fellow who went by the
name of Captain Crunch. A
gap-toothed, crazy-eyed, full-bearded fellow who now writes software and
stays away from illegal activities, Crunch traveled the highways in the
late sixties and early seventies with a van full of electronic
equipment, playing virtuoso pranks from roadside phone booths -- until
he was caught, prosecuted, sentenced, and jailed. One of Crunch's phone
hacking buddies from the outlaw days,
Steve Wozniak, went on to bigger fame when he invented the first
Apple computer. Captain Crunch, also known as John Draper, now makes
very decent legitimate money as "Cap'n Software," the sole programmer
for the microcomputer software company of the same name.
At Project MAC, and at the subcultural counterparts at Stanford
(where they began to blend some of their California brand of craziness
into the hacker formula) and elsewhere, you had to suffer in order to be
admitted to the more interesting levels of hacker wisdom. As in any
closed subculture, the hackers spared no one their own kind of rites of
passage. David was the youngest initiate, but they didn't go any easier
on him than any other newcomer. You just weren't part of things at MAC
until you met the now-legendary "cookie monster" and some of its nastier
relatives.
Crashing the system was a fact of life and an implicit challenge at
the higher reaches of hackdom -- if you were smart enough to come up
with something that the system programmers hadn't guarded against, it
was more of an honor than a misdemeanor to bring the computer to a halt,
dumping hours or weeks of someone's work. By comparison, the cookie
monster was relatively mild. Unlike an operating system crash, the
cookie monster struck only selected victims, rather than everybody who
was unfortunate enough to be using the system when a crash was
perpetrated.
The cookie monster would strike most often at four in the morning.
(All-night hacking began with
time-sharing systems, not only because it fit in with the hacker's weird
self-image, but because time-shared systems run faster at night, when
all the nonhackers are out having dates or studying poetry or sleeping
or whatever nonhackers do at night in the real world.) You would
be looking for a bug somewhere in the two-thousandth line of your
program. Suddenly, without warning, the words "I WANT A COOKIE!!" appear
on your monitor screen -- and all your painstakingly crafted code is
relentlessly munched into oblivion by the word COOKIE!!, multiplied over
and over until you finally figure out or (horror of horrors) somebody
has to tell you: you have to type the word COOKIE!! on your keyboard.
In their own way, the MAC hackers were the forerunners of other kinds
of psychic desperadoes who appeared on college campuses in the 1960s. A
contempt for middle-class values and an abiding interest in the workings
of their own mind were two characteristics that hackers were to share
with later subcultures who had nothing to do with computers. David
Rodman was a confirmed hacker in the late 1960s, when he began to dabble
in a very different yet strangely similar outlaw subculture that was
springing up in the Cambridge student community.
"I would characterize my first acid trip as a quantum leap into the
innards of my own psychology," David recalls today. "Suddenly, there I
was -- inside myself. I didn't know the path to get in, but there I was.
I could observe myself playing the guitar or writing code, and think to
myself while improvising. 'Where am I going and how do I know how to go
there and what am I really expressing?' It was the trip of all trips."
David thinks that "for my peculiar cognitive style, programming was a
perfect preparation for psychedelics, because it allowed me to model a
little piece of my personality in the machine, and interact with it. The
older hackers would tell me 'never mind what the main program does, we
want you to write a program that moves a chess piece on a chessboard,'
so I wrote a small, gemlike part of the utility package that went into
one of the chess programs. The next time I found myself in one of those
gemlike structures on my first acid trip."
The small "gemlike structures" that David created were incorporated
into early versions of Greenblatt's MacHack, the program that eventually
became an emblem of the hackers' sovereignty within the AI community
when MacHack met Dreyfus in 1967. It all started when Hubert Dreyfus had
the temerity to question not only the chances of success but the very
legitimacy of AI research. The entire field of artificial intelligence
had been challenged as a fraud, and very serious efforts that went
beyond the usual acrimony of academic debate were being made to cut off
funding for the foolishness Minsky et al. were attempting. The Dreyfus
affair began in the summer of 1965, when Hubert Dreyfus -- a
philosopher, not a computer scientist -- spent a few months at the Rand
Corporation. The paper that Dreyfus wrote at the end of that summer,
entitled "Alchemy and Artificial Intelligence," was informally
circulated as a Rand report.
Dreyfus thought that AI was a crock. He specifically attacked some of
the claims AI enthusiasts had made about the future of their field. He
claimed that the "progress" the AI folks had been citing was an
illusion, and attempted to prove that their goal was a delusion. An IBM
researcher, Arthur Samuels, had recently created a pretty decent
checkers program that was on its way to becoming a champion. To Dreyfus,
saying that the checkers program represented a step toward a true
human-like machine intelligence was like saying that an ape who could
climb to the top of a tree was making progress toward flying to the
moon.
Dreyfus challenged the idea that a chess playing program of any
significance could ever be built, pointed out that in 1957 Herbert Simon
had predicted an unbeatable chess playing program within ten years, and
noted that the time was about up. Greenblatt came out of nowhere with
his carefully constructed chess hack, and Seymour Papert, then
codirector of MAC, maneuvered Dreyfus into a public match.
David and other witnesses remember the game as a dramatic and
unpredictable match -- a cliff-hanger that was far more suspenseful and
ingenious and less mechanical than what any of them had expected. This
was more than a friendly rivalry. The source of their funds was being
attacked, and it was just possible that this . . . this . . .
philosopher might manage to get people so stirred up that they would
take their precious terminals away. It was a grudge match, no question
about it.
MacHack won. Gleefully, the bulletin of the Special Interest Group in
Artificial intelligence (SIGART) of the Association for Computing
Machinery reported the results of the match under a headline taken from
Dreyfus' paper: "A Ten-Year-Old Can Beat the Machine -- Dreyfus." The
SIGART editors amended it with a subhead of their own: "But the Machine
Can Beat Dreyfus." The SIGART article touched off a series of letters to
editors, accusations, and counteraccusations, and Dreyfus ended up
writing a book, What Computers Can't Do in which he admitted:
"Embarrassed by my expose of the disparity between their enthusiasm and
their results, AI workers finally produced a reasonably competent
program. R. Greenblatt's program called MacHack did in fact beat the
author, a rank amateur."
MacHack went on to become an honorary member of the U. S. Chess
federation, and the Dreyfus-versus-AI controversy has dragged on for
decades, albeit without the hand-to-hand fury of 1967, when a hacker
rose brilliantly to the defense of his art with a legendary hack, then
retreated back to his terminal while others argued the significance of
what he had done. The event had more than symbolic significance: the
formal paper Greenblatt wrote about the program was of historical value
to those who still hope to fulfill Turing's, von Neumann's, and
Shannon's dreams of playing against a true master chess-machine
MacHack was actually the second of two historic software births David
Rodman witnessed during his apprenticeship at MAC. Joseph Weizenbaum
showed up at MIT in 1963, and when he created
ELIZA between 1964
and 1966, he changed the way everybody thought about what computers
can't do -- and that included changing his own mind about where the
whole computer-AI enterprise was heading.
ELIZA was a clever way of mimicking
human interaction through a computer-mediated dialogue; what the
inventor hadn't anticipated was people's willingness to be taken in by
the mimicry -- even people who should have known better. By the
time Weizenbaum recovered from the shock of seeing the way people
reacted to his program, he was convinced that something very dangerous
lurked in the much-heralded computer revolution.The reaction to ELIZA
eventually led Weizenbaum to question the ultimate value of the changes
that computers were introducing to the general population -- changes he
felt we might all later regret. He also declared that we would soon be
faced with important decisions about what computers ought and ought not
to do. He specifically cited the hackers as a symptom of a sickness in
the heart of computerdom. Weizenbaum's assault on some of the most
fundamental premises of the computer culture with the 1976 publication
of Computer Power and Human Reason set off a continuing,
oft-heated public debate between Weizenbaum and the AI community.
The Dreyfus-AI debate had been largely a technical argument, which
helped make MacHack's technical victory so sweet. Weizenbaum's was a
moral argument, and it carried a passionate force far different in
effect from that of Hubert Dreyfus, flying in from California with his
phenomenology. This was Joseph Weizenbaum, honored professor of computer
science at MIT, saying that AI might not be a crock, but we better be a
lot more careful with computers, and watch out for the hackers in the
process.
Remember when those funny-looking "computer letters" started
appearing on the bottom of checks, in the early 1960s? That was part of
Joseph Weizenbaum's work in the days before he came to MIT. As a
software expert for General Electric, he was centrally involved in Bank
of America's ERMA project, a milestone in the computerization of the
world's banking system. When Weizenbaum later spoke about the morality
of using computers in ways that might change millions of people's lives,
he was speaking from experience. His creation of a program that gave the
illusion of a wise, all-knowing, computerized psychiatrist -- and his
shock at seeing how willingly even his computer-sophisticated colleagues
were taken in by the illusion -- triggered Weizenbaum's dissension.
Weizenbaum started out at MIT with what he thought would be an
abstract interest in programs that used simple programming tricks to
answer questions posed in English. He put together a working version
that the hackers had fun with, and which seemed to be a step, albeit a
very primitive first step, toward a genuine language-understanding
program. The hackers enjoyed the
pretense that they were "conversing" with a computer, even though they
knew that the program was parsing very simple sentences with no real
underlying understanding of their meaning.
While he was working on a more elaborate question-answering program,
with greater sentence-parsing capabilities than his first version,
Weizenbaum met a psychiatrist from Stanford named Kenneth Colby, who was
interested in using computers to model mental states and mental
disorders in order to find clues to more effective forms of
psychotherapy. Colby helped Weizenbaum create a special-case version of
ELIZA, known as DOCTOR. In the introduction of his 1976 book, Weizenbaum
described how this most successful and disturbing version of ELIZA came
into being, and conveyed a little of the flavor of the "ELIZA effect":
The work was done in the period 1964-1966, and it
was reported in the computer-science literature in January 1966 and
August 1967. To summarize it briefly, I composed a computer program
with which one could "converse" in English. The human
conversationalist partner would type his portion of the conversation
on a typewriter connected to a computer, and the computer, under
control of my program, would analyze the message that had been
transmitted to it, compose a response to it in English, and cause
the response to be typed on the computer's typewriter.
I chose the name ELIZA for the language analysis
program because, like the Eliza of Pygmalion fame, it could be
taught to "speak" increasingly well. . . .
For my first experiment, I gave ELIZA a script
designed to permit it to play (I really should say parody) the role
of a Rogerian psychotherapist engaged in an initial interview with a
patient. The Rogerian psychotherapist is relatively easy to imitate
because much of his technique consists of drawing his patient out by
reflecting the statements back to him. The following conversation
betwen a young lady and ELIZA playing doctor illustrates both the
Rogerian technique of encouraging a patient to keep talking and the
operation of the computer program ELIZA. The first to "speak" is the
young lady. The computer's responses are printed entirely in
capitals.
Men are all alike.
IN WHAT WAY
They're always bugging us about something or other.
CAN YOU THINK OF A SPECIFIC EXAMPLE
Well, my boyfriend made me come here.
YOUR BOYFRIEND MADE YOU COME HERE
He says I'm depressed much of the time.
I'M SORRY TO HEAR YOU ARE DEPRESSED
The first thing that alarmed Weizenbaum was the way people who knew
enough about computers to know better began to get drawn into serious
conversations with it about their lives! Even his own secretary had
fallen into the habit of conversing with it! People were asking to be
left alone with the machine to spill out their most intimate thoughts!
Weizenbaum was so horrified that he started rethinking everything he
believed. But that was just a symptom of how gullible we all might be to
what he knew was just a clever hack.
More serious, to Weizenbaum's way of
thinking, was the fact that Colby and others thought that
"computer-therapists" might soon be applied to some form of "automatic
psychotherapy" -- an idea Weizenbaum considered "obscene."
Weizenbaum's ethical debate, although it originated in the same
laboratory that spawned so many important innovations in AI and computer
systems design, will not be discussed at length here. His books and the
ideas expressed by Weizenbaum and his critics deserve consideration on
their own accord.
David Rodman was one of those who spent time conversing with ELIZA
when it was still in its infancy, while he was employed as a research
assistant in the same laboratory. Some of David's earliest LISP hacks
were attempts to emulate ELIZA. And although Weizenbaum didn't know it,
some of David's early acid trips were spent in "conversation" with
ELIZA.
While Minsky was a kind of patron saint of hackdom, and Greenblatt
was an unkempt hero, and McCarthy had his own brand of AI prodigies,
Weizenbaum was not very fond of some of the hackers who shared his
working quarters, to put it mildly. In his book, he mounted a direct
assault on the inner circle of hard-core hackers:
Wherever computer centers have become established,
that is to say, in countless places in the United States, as well as
in virtually all other industrial regions of the world, bright young
men of disheveled appearance, often with sunken glowing eyes, can be
seen sitting at computer consoles, their arms tensed waiting to
fire, their fingers, already poised to strike at the buttons and
keys on which their attention seems to be as 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 cabalistic text. They work until they 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 computer. But only for a few hours -- then back to
the console or 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.
They exist, at least when so engaged, only through and for
computers. These are computer bums, compulsive programmers. They are
an international phenomenon.
Weizenbaum attacked those particularly obsessed specimens among the
hackers he called "compulsive programmers" on several grounds besides
their unorthodox appearance and dietary habits. But he also took care to
note (parenthetically) that "(It has to be said that not all hackers are
pathologically compulsive programmers. Indeed, were it not for the
often, in its own terms, highly creative labor of people who proudly
claim the title 'hacker,' few of today's sophisticated time-sharing
systems, computer language translators, computer graphics systems, etc.,
would exist.)"The compulsive programmers, according to Weizenbaum's
criteria, spend far more time playing with their computers than using
them to solve the problems they are being paid to solve. They are often
superb technicians, he admitted, but he also charged that they are very
often so sloppy when they document the programs they have written that
other programmers, when they later have to use or modify them, are
unable to make sense of what they did.
The obsessed hacker's motivation is not problem-solving, but the raw
thrill of interacting with the computer, and that, Weizenbaum charged,
was a sign, not of prodigy, but of pathology. "The compulsive
programmer," he insisted, "is merely the proverbial mad scientist who
has been given a theater, the computer, in which he can, and does, play
out his fantasies."
Minsky and others rose to the hackers' defense, pointing out that
they should be considered with some of the same suspension of normal
standards that society reserves for artists. And just as it is true that
a hollow-eyed dropout is not a particularly pleasant sight, and perhaps
there is truth to the charge that many of them find it easier to relate
to the machine than to other people; isn't there also a chance that they
are being unfairly maligned?
Hackers would rather be judged by their creations than by their
behavior, and nobody cares about van Gogh's habits of dressing, or
whether Mozart went without sleep for days at a time. Minsky deplored
public stereotyping and scapegoating of people who happen to be
passionate about programming instead of violin playing or basketball or
making money.
Weizenbaum was undoubtedly right
about the temptation to use computers for stimulating fantasies of
omnipotence over fantastically controllable worlds. The value to
society of obsessively converting sophisticated computers into toys and
games has been a matter of extended debate. Nobody would deny that
hackers love fantasy. That these fantasies can be fascinating to
nonhackers as well has been an inside secret for years, ever since the
hack known as "Dwarf Hall of Mists, XYZZY and the Infamous Repository,"
created by Will Crowther and Don Woods, now more commonly known as
"Adventure," surfaced at MAC and SAIL.
After they introduce you to ELIZA, "Adventure"
is what hackers show you when you ask them why they are addicted to
computing. They hit a few keys, sit you down in front of a monitor and a
keyboard, and come back in a few hours to forcibly unplug you. Even in
this age of more dazzling computer-generated effects, the sheer
temptation to explore the
computer-stored fantasy remains strong.
After you are told you can give simple instructions like "drop
sword," "go up," "cross bridge," the following words, still famous at
every computer center, appear on the screen: "You are standing at the
end of a road before a small brick building. Around you is a forest. A
small stream flows out of the building and down a gully . . ."
Without warning, and without any high-resolution graphics or sound
effects, you are drawn into Colossal Cave, where a labyrinth of chambers
containing treasure, dwarfs, magic, strategy and dangers awaits your
command. It can take weeks to finish a game. More than one commentator
has used "Adventure" as a metaphor for hacking: This is a complex
pathway hidden inside the computer, and it is up to the hacker to use
all his or her skill, knowledge, and magic to find the treasure and
bring it back.
A high regard for programming skill,
a mischievous bent, and a predilection for playing games seemed to
accompany the spread of the hacker culture, along with Spacewar and
Adventure. Weizenbaum might have been the first, but he wasn't
the last computer scientist to voice concern over the possible dangerous
side effects of this way of thinking.
One famous debate erupted at Stanford, years after Weizenbaum's
original diatribe. Stanford has been a West Coast headquarters for
hackers since the mid-1960s, although significant outposts have long
existed at UC Berkeley, Los Angeles, San Diego, and Santa Barbara, at
Stanford Research Institute, and even at Rand before the Ellsberg
affair. But LOTS -- Stanford's Low Overhead Time-sharing System -- is
where the undergraduate hackers hang out. It was here that another, more
recent major hacker controversy surfaced, in the form of a dialogue on
the medium that was known by the mid-1970s as "electronic mail." It was
the option of everybody on LOTS to post and read messages, either to
specific individuals or groups, or to anyone who was interested, via the
"bulletin board" sector of the mail program. People could read and add
messages whenever they were logged onto the computer.
Sometimes serious issues were discussed in this manner, and sometimes
long impassioned graffiti (known as "flames") were launched against a
variety of targets ranging from the profound to the utterly
inconsequential. Sometimes serious issues were disguised as flames, and
vice versa. Branches and subbranches of such exchanges could continue
for months, making up a kind of electronically embedded ad hoc
literature. That was where the "hacker papers" came from.
This particular counterpoint of flames on the subject of hackers,
written by hackers, came to the attention of the "real world" because a
Stanford professor of psychology named
Philip Zimbardo discovered the dialogue and published it, with
commentary, in Psychology Today magazine in 1980, twenty years
after Rodman met Greenblatt et al. in Building 26.
The exchange of flames began with a hacker's version of Luther's 95
theses, nailed, metaphorically, to the door of the electronic temple. A
self-sworn ex-hacker who called himself "G. Gandalf" (the tradition is
to give oneself a pseudonym on the public mail channel, like the
"handles" used in the citizen's-band radio subculture) posted a bulletin
entitled "Essay on Hacking," that said, among other things:
In the middle of Stanford University there is a
large concrete-and-glass building filled with computer terminals.
When one enters this building through the glass doors, one steps
into a different culture. Fifty people stare at terminal screens.
Fifty faces connected to fifty bodies connected to 50 sets of
fingers that pound on 50 keyboards ultimately linked to a computer.
. . . These are the members of a subculture so foreign to most
outsiders that it not only walls itself off but is walled off, in
turn, by those who cannot understand it. The wall is built from both
sides at once.These people deserve a
description. In very few ways do they seem average. First they are
all bright, so bright, in fact, that they experienced social
problems even before they became interested in computers. Second,
they are self-contained. Their entire social existence usually
centers around one another. . . . Third, all aspects of their
existence reinforce one another. They go to school in order to learn
about computers, they work at jobs in programming and computer
maintenance, and they lead their social lives with hackers.
Academically, socially, and in the world of cash, computers are the
focus of their existence.
As might well be expected, this diatribe did not go unanswered. As
usual, opinion was heatedly divided. Some -- a minority, of course --
agreed wholeheartedly with the heresy. Hackers as a group harbor a love
for heresy, iconoclasm, and debating whether something is or is not
heretical, even if -- especially if -- the topic relates to hackers
themselves.Of those who rebutted Gandalf, the one known as "A.
Anonymous" offered the West Coast version of the "Minsky defense":
We are dealing with an infinitely malleable tool.
People who choose to develop and use that tool, whether for work,
play, or both, have that choice and cannot be denied it. A person
who chooses to be a musician must devote hours and hours to gain
adequate expertise. But would you consider the computer hacker any
less creative than such a person? I certainly wouldn't. The computer
serves not only as a workhorse, but also as an easel for exercising
one's creative abilities. Therefore, in my opinion, the hacker has
not limited myself at all. Rather, he has expanded his intellectual
horizon because now he has the infinite tool.
As for the charge that it disrupts one's social
life, I would tend to agree with this to a point. But it depends on
how controlled the individual is. At any time, he can withdraw to a
more normal schedule. Why doesn't he? The reason is obvious. The
infinite tool that knows few boundaries is accessible to a much
higher degree, and thus he can devote more time to it. Why is this
wrong? I think it is definitely a bonus, since the usual restraints
of 9-to-5 are eliminated and the person is allowed to expand beyond
boundaries to do what he wants.
Now we come to the human versus the machine
factor. Gandalf stresses the necessity of human interaction and the
inherent evil of the machine. Would you stress the evil of
instruments in an orchestra, or the instruments in a laboratory, or
the typewriter of an author? All of these occupations demand
extraordinary amounts of time for excellence. But I see no greater
human interaction in these fields than in computers. I feel that
people who disparage computers for a seemingly decreased human
interaction are not at all familiar with the true import of the
computer. Not only is it the infinite tool, it is also an extremely
fluid medium of communication.
The publication of the controversy set off an avalanche of electronic
mail over the ARPAnet and at local computer centers. The hacker debates
had spread to the amateur "bulletin board computers" by 1983, when the
movie WarGames and the real-life young computer-systems
"crackers" who subsequently surfaced brought the word hacker to
widespread public attention, in this newer, unpleasantly restricted
sense.
One of the oldest rules of the game is "thou shalt not do unto
ordinary computer users what thou hast done to other hackers." Almost
all of the old-time hackers deplore what the young computer trespassers
and crashers did -- "dark-side hacking" -- although the anarchist
minority still insist that the ultimate freedom is the freedom to figure
out how the communication-computing system works, and declare that the
burden of protection against trespassing ought to be on the system
programmer who has files to protect, not on the explorer who might tap
in during some midnight jaunt through the network.
Real computer criminals aside, the
concern of the noncomputing public over the hacker controversy does seem
a bit strange. After all, these people aren't accused of mayhem
or arson -- just of being very smart when it comes to knowing how to
operate computers. The capacity for scapegoating is very high in a
culture where most people have been led to believe that computers are
either smarter than they are or too complicated for ordinary people to
use. James Milojkovic, an associate of Zimbardo's at Stanford who was
writing his psychology doctoral thesis about the cognitive and
motivational impact of the microcomputer, came to the hackers' defense.
In a 1982 interview, Milojkovic said he spent plenty of time around
hackers, and saw nothing pathological about what they were doing. In
regard to all the public concern about what threat (noncriminal) hackers
might pose, he said "clearly it's nonsense. I think what's happening is
that there's some sort of fear that maybe what they're doing with the
machines is aimed against us." Like "A. Anonymous," Milojkovic sees
nothing wrong with a little compulsiveness in regard to learning: "I can
think of nothing more natural than to fall in love with knowledge," he
said, "and hackers are so deeply in love
with knowledge of the computers that they're just swept off their feet."
A case in point: David Rodman. When last we saw him, lurking in the
background of the MacHack versus Dreyfus match, an acidhead teenage
dropout hacker, he was almost certainly headed for a sunken-eyed,
computer-nut future. In fact, quite the opposite turned out to be the
case. He was doing quite well for himself, even at sixteen, as a
freelance programmer. He got some offers to set up computer systems for
social service bureaucrats, so he moved to D.C. in his early twenties.
By 1972, David found himself up to his ears in the same problem that
plagued Herman Hollerith -- handling huge data bases. In fact, designing
probes of the U.S. Census information, now stored on magnetic tape, was
David's specialty. He moved back to Cambridge to work for a software
think tank, did more than a few jobs for agencies he doesn't want to
name, and in 1978 he decided it was time to turn what he knew into a
marketable product.
David Rodman ended up creating and marketing a tool for managing data
bases, a program that he designed to be usable by microcomputer owners.
Thus he was one of many formerly sequestered programmers who joined the
software business at the beginning of the consumer computing boom, when
it was still possible for a programmer-turned-entrepreneur to go far and
fast. A couple of other, older, MIT hackers put out VisiCalc in 1978 --
the "electronic spreadsheet" that allows users to ask "what-if"
questions about numerical data -- and millions of people who had never
touched a keyboard before began tackling problems that had formerly been
reserved for mainframe programmers.
I first met David Rodman in the early 1980s, because of his strange
grin. I knew his name because it was stamped onto the plastic card that
was pinned to his lapel. His rumpled suit and convention badge didn't
exactly mark him as a high roller, but his smile projected a
self-assurance of almost demented intensity. We were standing in the
magnificent casino that is conveniently located between the Hilton lobby
and the indoor walkway to the Las Vegas convention center. Upward of
fifty thousand people attending Comdex, a national convention for the
microcomputer industry, trooped through the casino every day. The
arriving computerists didn't mind spending their money, and they were an
amiable group. A lot of them seemed downright happy. David
Rodman, for example, was still smiling after he turned away from the
craps table.
"Why do you look so damn cheerful?" I couldn't help
inquiring."I was wrong about the dice," he
replied, "but I'm too far ahead to complain."
"Craps?"
"Data management systems."
"Not my game," I said. "What's the product?"
"About forty pages of zeroes and ones."
"The market pretty good for zeroes and ones?"
"The software market, as of today, is nothing
less than astounding."
Considering the fact that he had just dropped a hundred dollars in less
than ten seconds, he must have been doing very well indeed to be making
money at the convention faster than he was losing it in the casino. The
crooked grin on his face, a variant of the slightly demented expression
that attracted my attention at the craps table, made it clear that he
didn't mind talking about his business.We got to know each other, and
eventually I learned about what he did before he was the prime mover and
chief asset of a software corporation. There was no sign that he was an
ex-MAC hacker, ex-acidhead, ex-consultant to unnamed intelligence
agencies. He was freckled, balding, and what hair he had left was short
and neatly combed. He was clean-shaven, and his attire wouldn't have
been out of place on an accountant or a widget salesman. But in his
heart, he was still a hacker, and an evangelistic one at that.
By the time we got through the story
to the point of talking about his current product, it was clear that he
had not turned his back on the programming priesthood, but was merely
interested in expanding it, to his own profit, by giving millions of
people a direct taste of the same experience that hooked him back in
Building 26.
"I remember the way I learned jazz improvisation, and how that
affected my programming. When I was first learning, I said to myself,
'Here I am in this chord, and I've got to get to that chord.' The
transition, the way you hop from note to note or pass a variable from
procedure to procedure -- that's where the individual style of the
musician or the programmer comes in. Nothing happened, a lot of the
time. But when my teacher showed me something I hadn't realized before,
pointed out that a certain note would work in a way I wasn't expecting,
for instance, I would get a little shock of understanding, and the next
time I came to a transition I'd loosen my grip on my conscious effort
and try to recapture that shock, and there would be the note or the line
of code I needed.
"Now I think of the person sitting in front of his computer with a
keyboard. What this person needs is a profit and loss statement, or
information about sales accounts, or a breakdown of stock in inventory.
What I need to do is to create an environment for that person,
structured in such a way that it is natural and easy to translate his or
her desire to the actual P & L statement, or a sales report or inventory
account, and even show them how they can improvise along the way. Not
only should this tool work better than their old pencil and paper and
calculator and filing cabinet -- it should also give the user one of
those pleasurable little shocks. I want
my file management system to enable that person to become a jazz
musician.
"A really good program designer makes
an artist out of the person who uses the computer, by creating a world
that puts them in the position of 'Here's the keyboard, and here's the
screen. Now once you learn a few rudimentary computer skills, you can be
a superstar.' "
It was an unexpected, but perhaps not inappropriate philosophy to
hear from a LISP hacker turned software vendor. He has yet to carve out
an empire like Bill Gates or Steve Wozniak, but David Rodman knows that
most of the potential consumers of microcomputer software are still in
the earliest stages of their progression toward obsessive software
intoxication. David sees a niche for people like himself as toolmakers
and trailblazers, leading the way for the emergence of an entire
population of programming artists. He wants programming to become a
performing art.
But long before hackers started thinking about using their computers
for intellectual improvisation -- before David Rodman was born, in fact
-- a dreamer out in California was designing his own kind of mind
amplifier.
