The Innovators: How a Group of Inventors, Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolutio - Isaacson Walter (книги полностью .txt) 📗
I.?Only living people can be selected for a Nobel.
II.?The vehicle he used was convertible debentures, which were loans that could be converted into common stock if the company became successful but were worthless (at the end of the line of creditors) if it failed.
III.?Edward “Ned” Johnson III, then running the Fidelity Magellan Fund. In 2013 Rock still had these two sheets, along with the older one seeking the patron for what became Fairchild, tucked in a filing cabinet in his office overlooking San Francisco Bay.
IV.?After she married Noyce she had to leave Intel, and she moved to the fledgling Apple Computer, where she became Steve Jobs’s first director of human resources and also a calming maternal influence on him.
Dan Edwards and Peter Samson in 1962 playing Spacewar at MIT.
Nolan Bushnell (1943– ).
CHAPTER SIX
VIDEO GAMES
The evolution of microchips led to devices that were, as Moore’s Law forecast, smaller and more powerful each year. But there was another impetus that would drive the computer revolution and, eventually, the demand for personal computers: the belief that computers weren’t merely for number-crunching. They could and should be fun for people to use.
Two cultures contributed to the idea that computers should be things that we interact and play with. There were the hard-core hackers who believed in “the hands-on imperative” and loved pranks, clever programming tricks, toys, and games.1 And there were the rebel entrepreneurs eager to break into the amusement games industry, which was dominated by syndicates of pinball distributors and ripe for a digital disruption. Thus was born the video game, which turned out to be not merely an amusing sideshow but an integral part of the lineage that led to today’s personal computer. It also helped to propagate the idea that computers should interact with people in real time, have intuitive interfaces, and feature delightful graphic displays.
STEVE RUSSELL AND
SPACEWAR
The hacker subculture, as well as the seminal video game Spacewar, emanated from MIT’s Tech Model Railroad Club, a geeky student organization founded in 1946 that met in the bowels of a building where radar had been developed. Its bunker was almost completely filled by a model train board with dozens of tracks, switches, trolleys, lights, and towns, all compulsively crafted and historically accurate. Most of its members obsessed over fashioning picture-perfect pieces to display on the layout. But there was a subset of the club that was more interested in what was underneath the sprawling chest-high board. The members of the “Signals and Power Subcommittee” tended to the relays, wires, circuits, and crossbar switches, which were rigged together on the underside of the board to provide a complex hierarchy of controllers for the numerous trains. In this tangled web they saw beauty. “There were neat regimental lines of switches, and achingly regular rows of dull bronze relays, and a long, rambling tangle of red, blue, and yellow wires—twisting and twirling like a rainbow-colored explosion of Einstein’s hair,” Steven Levy wrote in Hackers, which begins with a colorful depiction of the club.2
Members of the Signals and Power Subcommittee embraced the term hacker with pride. It connoted both technical virtuosity and playfulness, not (as in more recent usage) lawless intrusions into a network. The intricate pranks devised by MIT students—putting a live cow on the roof of a dorm, a plastic cow on the Great Dome of the main building, or causing a huge balloon to emerge midfield during the Harvard-Yale game—were known as hacks. “We at TMRC use the term ‘hacker’ only in its original meaning, someone who applies ingenuity to create a clever result, called a ‘hack,’?” the club proclaimed. “The essence of a ‘hack’ is that it is done quickly, and is usually inelegant.”3
Some of the early hackers had been infused with the aspiration of creating machines that could think. Many were students at MIT’s Artificial Intelligence Lab, founded in 1959 by two professors who would become fabled: John McCarthy, a Santa Claus lookalike who coined the term artificial intelligence, and Marvin Minsky, who was so clever that he seemed a refutation of his own belief that computers would someday surpass human intelligence. The prevailing doctrine of the lab was that, given enough processing power, machines could replicate neural networks like those of the human brain and be able to interact intelligently with users. Minsky, a puckish man with twinkling eyes, had built a learning machine designed to model the brain, which he named SNARC (Stochastic Neural Analog Reinforcement Calculator), hinting that he was serious but might also be joking a bit. He had a theory that intelligence could be a product of the interaction of nonintelligent components, such as small computers connected by giant networks.
A seminal moment for the hackers of the Tech Model Railroad Club came in September 1961, when the Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) donated the prototype of its PDP-1 computer to MIT. About the size of three refrigerators, the PDP-1 was the first computer to be designed for direct interaction with the user. It could connect to a keyboard and a monitor that displayed graphics, and it could be operated easily by a single person. Like moths to a flame, a handful of hard-core hackers began to circle this new computer, and they formed a cabal to conjure up something fun to do with it. Many of the discussions took place in a rundown apartment on Hingham Street in Cambridge, so the members dubbed themselves the Hingham Institute. The high-minded name was ironic. Their goal was not to come up with some elevated use for the PDP-1 but instead to do something clever.
Previous hackers had created a few rudimentary games for earlier computers. One at MIT had a dot on a screen that represented a mouse trying to navigate a maze to find a wedge of cheese (or, in later versions, a martini); another, at the Brookhaven National Lab on Long Island, used an oscilloscope on an analog computer to simulate a tennis match. But the members of the Hingham Institute knew that with the PDP-1 they had the chance to create the first real computer video game.
The best programmer in their group was Steve Russell, who was helping Professor McCarthy create the language LISP, which was designed to facilitate artificial intelligence research. Russell was a consummate geek, brimming with passions and intellectual obsessions that ranged from steam trains to thinking machines. Short and excitable, he had thick glasses and curly hair. When he spoke, he sounded like someone had punched his fast-forward button. Although he was intense and energetic, he was prone to procrastination, earning him the nickname “Slug.”
Like most of his hacker friends, Russell was an avid fan of bad movies and pulp science fiction. His favorite author was E. E. “Doc” Smith, a failed food engineer (an expert on the bleaching of flour, he concocted doughnut mixes) who specialized in a trashy sci-fi subgenre known as space opera. It featured melodramatic adventures filled with battles against evil, interstellar travel, and cliched romance. Doc Smith “wrote with the grace and refinement of a pneumatic drill,” according to Martin Graetz, a member of the Tech Model Railroad Club and the Hingham Institute, who wrote a reminiscence about the creation of Spacewar. Graetz recalled a typical Doc Smith tale:
