Hackers

Chapter 4. Greenblatt and Gosper

Ricky Greenblatt was a hacker waiting to happen. Years later, when he was known throughout the nation’s computer centers as the archetypal hacker, when the tales of his single-minded concentration were almost as prolific as the millions of lines of assembly-language code he’d hacked, someone would ask him how it all started. He’d twist back in his chair, looking not as rumpled as he did back as an undergraduate, when he was cherub-faced and dark-haired and painfully awkward of speech; the question, he figured, came down to whether hackers were born or made, and out came one of the notorious non sequiturs which came to be known as Blatt-isms: “If hackers are born, then they’re going to get made, and if they’re made into it, they were born.”

But Greenblatt would admit that he was a born hacker.

Not that his first encounter with the PDP-1 had changed his life. He was interested, all right. It had been freshman rush week at MIT, and Ricky Greenblatt had some time on his hands before tackling his courses, ready for academic glory. He visited the places that interested him most: the campus radio station WTBS (MIT’s was perhaps the only college radio station in the country with a surfeit of student audio engineers and a shortage of disc jockeys), the Tech Model Railroad Club, and the Kluge Room in Building 26, which held the PDP-1.

Some hackers were playing Spacewar.

It was the general rule to play the game with all the room lights turned off, so the people ...