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Then, in high school around 1974, I did a little hacking on a Wang 720B 'programmable calculator', a big clunky machine with a neat nixie-tube display that you could program with ditsy little punched cards; five years later it would have been called a personal computer. But what I was serious about was wanting to be a pure mathematician; all this stuff with computers was just playing around. |
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If I'd gone to MIT, I would certainly have gravitated to the AI Lab hacker culture, which was perhaps at its most vigorous when I started college in 1976. As things turned out, I went to the University of Pennsylvania and learned hacking more or less on my own using a 'borrowed' account on the Wharton School's DEC-10. When it became apparent that I'd taken on too much too soon and burned out in the math department, getting seriously into hacking seemed the most natural thing in the world. In 1978, I was mousing around on the ITS systems using a tourist account over the ARPANET; by 1979, I was handholding for APL and LISP users, making my lunch money coding for research projects, and writing a manual for UCI LISP that for all I know may still be in use at Penn. And sometime in there I got my first look at the old Jargon File. I loved it, and I spread some of the jargon around among the other expert-user and fledgling-hacker types at my site. |
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My first real job, in 1980, was in a LISP support group for AI research at Burroughs. But that only lasted a year, and it was after that that my career really took a turn away from what, up to then, had been the 'classical' hacker growth path. I'd been one of the last generation of LISP hackers to cut my teeth on the PDP-10; and, while I was at Burroughs, I became one of the first to get involved with microcomputers. I bought an Osborne 1 and learned CP/M; a few months later, I ditched that and bought IBM PC number six-hundred-and-something. |
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Yes, the age of the personal computer had arrived. For the next two and a half years I toiled over TRS-80s and IBM PCs in a basement sweatshop off Walnut Street in Philadelphia. In 1983 I went to work for a startup company in the suburbs, helping write comm software to link microcomputers to VAXen and IBM mainframes. Outside, change was overtaking the AI-hacker culture that Steele & Co. had grown up in and I had briefly been part of. The DEC-10 died, displaced by the VAX; the AI Lab lost its bloom as rival groups tried to commercialize LISP and AI technology; and, almost unnoticed by the AI crowd, an operating system called UNIX was beginning to win hearts and minds out in the real world. |
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I'd first become intrigued by UNIX in 1974 after reading the classic Thompson and Ritchie paper in Communications of the ACM, only to have |
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