Hackers

by Steven Levy

  “I had never run into anyone who could outcode me, in any sense,” Fredkin later recalled. “But it was really clear that Nelson could.” Nelson was genius-level in his computer knowledge, innovative in approach, fantastically intense in attacking problems, and capable of superhuman concentration. Fredkin did hire the young hacker on Minsky’s recommendation, and it did not take Fredkin long to realize that even in a place where exceptional programming was commonplace, Nelson was something special, a one-man human wave of programmers. Of course, since Triple-I was in Tech Square, Nelson was also able to hang out around the AI lab on the ninth floor and do the work of several programmers up there as well. But that was no cause for complaint; when Fredkin needed him, Nelson could almost always come up with magic.

  There was a programming project in particular, a task on the DEC PDP-7, that Fredkin wanted Nelson to work on, but for some reason Nelson couldn’t get motivated. Fredkin’s company also needed at the same time a design for an interface between a certain computer and a disk drive for data storage. Fredkin considered the latter a six man-month project, and wanted the other task done first. Nelson promised him that he’d get some results during the weekend. That next Monday, Nelson came in with a giant piece of paper almost completely covered with tiny scrawlings, long lines connecting one block of scribblings to another, and evidence of frantic erasing and write-overs. It was not the PDP-7 program Fredkin had asked for, but the entire disk-drive interface. Nelson had tried it as a constructive escape from the assigned task. Fredkin’s company built the piece of equipment straight from that piece of paper, and it worked.

  Fredkin was delighted, but he still wanted the PDP-7 problem done, too. So he said, “Nelson, you and I are going to sit down and program this together. You write this routine, and I’ll write that.” Since they did not have a PDP-7 around, they sat down at tables to write their predebugged assembly code. They began hacking away. Maybe it was about then that Ed Fredkin realized, once and for all, that he was not the best programmer in the world. Nelson was racing along as if it were just a matter of how fast he could get his scribbles on paper. Fredkin was finally overcome with curiosity and looked at Nelson’s program. He couldn’t believe it. It was bizarre. Totally nonobvious, a crazy quilt of interlacing subroutines. And it was clear that it would work. “Stew,” Fredkin burst out, “why on earth are you writing it this way?” Nelson explained that he had once written something similar on the PDP-6, and instead of thinking about it he was merely transliterating the previous routines, from memory, into PDP-7 code. A perfect example of the way Nelson’s mind worked. He had his own behavior down to the point where he could bum mental instructions, and minimize the work he did.

  It was clearly an approach that was better suited to working with machines than it was to human interaction. Nelson was extremely shy, and Fredkin probably acted like a father figure to the young hacker. He would later recall being startled one day when Nelson marched into his office and said, “Guess what? I’m getting married!”

  Fredkin would have judged that Nelson did not know how to go about asking a female for a date, let alone tender a proposal of marriage. “Fantastic!” he said. “Who’s the lucky girl?”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” said Nelson. “I just decided it would be a good thing to do.”

  Fifteen years later, Nelson was still in Bachelor Mode.

  While women might not have been much of a presence in his life, Nelson did have the companionship of fellow hackers. He moved into a house with Gosper and two others. Although this “Hacker House” was in nearby Belmont, then shifted to Brighton, Nelson resisted buying a car. He couldn’t stand driving. “It takes too much processing to deal with the road,” he would later explain. He would take public transportation, or get a ride from another hacker, or even take a cab. Once he got to Tech Square, he was good for hours: Nelson was among those hackers who had settled on the twenty-eight-hour-day, six-day-week routine. He didn’t worry about classes—he figured that he could get whatever job he wanted whether he had a degree or not, so he never did rematriculate.

  Nelson was completely a creature of the Hacker Ethic, and the influence of his behavior was a contributing factor to the cultural and scientific growth of the AI lab. If Minsky needed someone to point out why a certain subroutine was not working, he would go to Nelson. Meanwhile, Nelson would be all over the place. Working for Fredkin, doing systems work with Greenblatt, display hacking with Gosper, and creating all sorts of strange things. He hacked a weird connection between the Triple-I computer on the seventh floor and the PDP-6 on the ninth, which sent signals between an oscilloscope on one line and a TV camera on another. He pulled off all sorts of new phone hacks. And, again more by example than by organizing, he was a leader in the hallowed black art of lock hacking.

  • • • • • • • •

  “Lock hacking” was the skillful solution of physical locks, whether on doors, file cabinets, or safes. To some extent, the practice was an MIT tradition, especially around TMRC. But once it was combined with the Hacker Ethic, lock hacking became more of a crusade than an idle game, though the playful challenge of overcoming artificial obstacles contributed to lock hacking’s popularity.

  To a hacker, a closed door is an insult, and a locked door is an outrage. Just as information should be clearly and elegantly transported within a computer, and just as software should be freely disseminated, hackers believed people should be allowed access to files or tools which might promote the hacker quest to find out and improve the way the world works. When a hacker needed something to help him create, explore, or fix, he did not bother with such ridiculous concepts as property rights.

  Say you are working on the PDP-6 one night, and it goes down. You check its innards and discover that it needs a part. Or you may need a tool to install a part. Then you discover that what you need—a disk, a tape, a screwdriver, a soldering iron, a spare IC (integrated circuit)—is locked up somewhere. A million dollars’ worth of hardware wasted and idle, because the hardware wizard who knows how to fix it can’t get at the seventy-five-cent IC, or the oscilloscope kept in a safe. So the hackers would manage to get the keys to these lockers and these safes. So they could get hold of the parts, keep the computers working, carefully replace what they’d taken, and go back to work.

  As a hacker named David Silver later put it, it was “ultra-highly clever warfare . . . there were administrators who would have high-security locks and have vaults where they would store the keys, and have sign-out cards to issue keys. And they felt secure, like they were locking everything up and controlling things and preventing information from flowing the wrong way and things from being stolen. Then there was another side of the world where people felt everything should be available to everybody, and these hackers had pounds and pounds and pounds of keys that would get them into every conceivable place. The people who did this were very ethical and honest and they weren’t using this power to steal or injure. It was kind of a game, partly out of necessity, and partly out of ego and fun . . . At the absolute height of it, if you were in the right inside circle, you could get the combination to any safe and you’d get access to anything.”

  The basic acquisition of every lock hacker was a master key. The proper master key would unlock the doors of a building, or a floor of a building. Even better than a master key was a grandmaster key, sort of a master master-key; one of those babies could open perhaps two thirds of the doors on campus. Just like phone hacking, lock hacking required persistence and patience. So the hackers would go on late-night excursions, unscrewing and removing locks on doors. Then they would carefully dismantle the locks. Most locks could be opened by several different key combinations; so the hackers would take apart several locks in the same hallway to ascertain which combination they accepted in common. Then they would go about trying to make a key shaped in that particular combination.

  It might be that the master key had to be made from special “blanks”—unavailable to the general public. (T
his is often the case with high-security master keys, such as those used in defense work). This did not stop the hackers, because several of them had taken correspondence courses to qualify for locksmith certification; they were officially allowed to buy those restricted blank keys. Some keys were so high security that even licensed locksmiths could not buy blanks for them; to duplicate those, the hackers would make midnight calls to the machine shop—a corner work space on the ninth floor where a skilled metal craftsman named Bill Bennett worked by day on such material as robot arms. Working from scratch, several hackers made their own blanks in the machine shop.

  The master key was more than a means to an end; it was a symbol of the hacker love of free access. At one point, the TMRC hackers even considered sending an MIT master key to every incoming freshman as a recruitment enticement. The master key was a magic sword to wave away evil. Evil, of course, was a locked door. Even if no tools were behind locked doors, the locks symbolized the power of bureaucracy, a power that would eventually be used to prevent full implementation of the Hacker Ethic. Bureaucracies were always threatened by people who wanted to know how things worked. Bureaucrats knew their survival depended on keeping people in ignorance, by using artificial means—like locks—to keep people under control. So when an administrator upped the ante in this war by installing a new lock, or purchasing a Class Two safe (government certified for classified material), the hackers would immediately work to crack the lock and open the safe. In the latter case, they went to a super-ultra-techno surplus yard in Taunton, found a similar Class Two safe, took it back to the ninth floor, and opened it up with acetylene torches to find out how the locks and tumblers worked.

  With all this lock hacking, the AI lab was an administrator’s nightmare. Russ Noftsker knew; he was the administrator. He had arrived at Tech Square in 1965 with an engineering degree from the University of Mexico, an interest in artificial intelligence, and a friend who worked at Project MAC. He met Minsky, whose prime grad student-administrator, Dan Edwards, had just left the lab. Minsky, notoriously uninterested in administration, needed someone to handle the paperwork of the AI lab, which was eventually to split from Project MAC into a separate entity with its own government funding. So Marvin hired Noftsker, who in turn officially hired Greenblatt, Nelson, and Gosper as full-time hackers. Somehow, Noftsker had to keep this electronic circus in line with the values and policy of the Institute.

  Noftsker, a compactly-built blond with pursed features and blue eyes which could alternatively look dreamy or troubled, was no stranger to weird technological exploits: when he was in school, he had hacked explosives with a friend. They worked for a high-tech company and took their salaries in primacord (a highly combustible material) or dynamite, and set off explosions in caves to see how many spiders they could blow out, or see how much primacord it took to split a sixty-five-gallon drum in half. Noftsker’s friend once was melting thirty pounds of TNT late one night in his mother’s oven when it caught fire—the oven and refrigerator actually melted, and the boy was in the awkward position of having to go the next-door neighbors’ and say, “Excuse me, uh, I think it would be a good idea if you kind of, uh, moved down the street a little ways . . .” Noftsker knew he’d been lucky to survive those days; yet, according to Gosper, Noftsker later would cook up a plan for clearing snow from his sidewalk with primacord, until his wife put a stop to the idea. Noftsker also shared the hacker aversion to cigarette smoke, and would sometimes express his displeasure by shooting a jet of pure oxygen from a canister he kept for that purpose; the astonished smoker would find his or her cigarette bursting into a fierce orange blur. Obviously, Noftsker understood the concept of technological extremism to maintain a convivial environment.

  On the other hand, Noftsker was in charge, dammit, and part of his job was keeping people out of locked areas and keeping confidential information private. He would bluster, he would threaten, he would upgrade locks and order safes, but he knew that ultimately he could not prevail by force. Naive as the thought was in the real world, hackers believed that property rights were nonexistent. As far as the ninth floor was concerned, that was indeed the case. The hackers could get into anything, as Noftsker graphically saw one day when a new safe with a twenty-four-hour pick-proof lock arrived and someone inadvertently closed the safe and spun the dial before Noftsker got the combination from the manufacturer. One of the hackers who was a registered locksmith volunteered to help out, and had the safe open in twenty minutes.

  So what was Noftsker to do?

  “Erecting barriers [would raise] the level of the challenge,” Noftsker would later explain. “So the trick was to sort of have an unspoken agreement—that ‘This line, imaginary as it may be, is off limits’—to give the people who felt they had to have some privacy and security the sense that they really had some privacy and security. And if someone violated those limits, the violation would be tolerated as long as no one knew about it. Therefore, if you gained something by crawling over the wall to get into my office, you had to never say anything about it.”

  Unilateral disarmament. Give the hackers free rein to go where they wanted in their explorations, take what they wanted to aid them in their electronic meanderings and computer-science jam sessions . . . as long as they didn’t go around boasting how the bureaucratic emperor had no clothes. That way, Noftsker and the administration he represented could maintain some dignity while the hackers could pretend the administration did not exist. They went wherever they wanted, entering offices by traveling in the crawl space created by the low-hanging artificial ceiling, removing a ceiling tile, and dropping into their destinations—commandos with pencil-pals in their shirt pockets. One hacker hurt his back one night when the ceiling collapsed and he fell into Minsky’s office. But more often, the only evidence Noftsker would find was the occasional footprint on his wall. And, of course, sometimes he would enter his locked office and discover a hacker dozing on the sofa.

  Some people, though, never could tolerate the Hacker Ethic. Apparently, one of these was the machine shop craftsman Bill Bennett. Though he was a TMRC member, he was by no means a hacker: his allegiance was not to the Signals & Power faction, but to what Gosper called the “Let’s-Build-Precise-Little-Miniature-Physical-Devices Subculture.” He was a good old boy from Marietta, Georgia, and had a near-religious respect for his tools. His homeland tradition thought of tools as sanctified objects; things you nurture and preserve and ultimately hand over to your grandchildren. “I’m a fanatic,” he would later explain. “A tool should be in its right place, cleaned and ready to use.” So he not only locked up all his tools but would forbid the hackers to even enter his work space, which he cordoned off by setting up a rope fence and painting stripes on the floor.

  Bennett could not prevent the inevitable result of drawing a line and telling hackers they could not cross. He would come in and see his tools had been used, and would complain to Minsky. He would threaten to quit; Noftsker recalls him threatening to booby-trap his area. He would especially demand that Minsky take vengeance on Nelson, whom he apparently saw as the worst offender. Minsky or Noftsker might go through the motions of reprimanding Nelson, but privately they considered the drama rather amusing. Eventually Noftsker would come up with the idea of giving each hacker his own toolbox, with responsibility for his own tools, but that didn’t work out particularly well. When a hacker wants something on a machine adjusted, or wants to create a quick hardware hack, he’ll use anything available, whether it belongs to a friend or whether it is one of Bill Bennett’s pampered possessions. One time Nelson used the latter, a screwdriver, and in the course of his work marked it up somewhat. When Bennett came in the next day and found a damaged screwdriver, he went straight for Nelson.

  Nelson was normally very quiet, but at times he would explode. Gosper later described it: “Nelson was an incredible arguer. If you cornered Nelson, he would turn from this mousy little guy to a complete savage.” So, Gosper later recalled, Nelson and Bennett got into a shouting
match, and during the course of it Nelson said that the screwdriver was just about “used up,” anyway.

  Used up? It was an incredibly offensive philosophy to Bennett, “This caused smoke to come out of Bennett’s ears,” Gosper later recounted. “He just blew up.” To people like Bennett, things are not passed along from person to person until they are no longer useful. They are not like a computer program which you write and polish, then leave around so others—without asking your permission—can work on it, add new features, recast it in their own image, and then leave it for the next person to improve, the cycle repeating itself all over when someone builds from scratch a gorgeous new program to do the same thing. That might be what hackers believed, but Bill Bennett thought that tools were something you owned, something private. These hackers actually thought that a person was entitled to use a tool just because he thought he could do something useful with it. And when they were finished, they would just toss it away, saying it was . . . used up!

  Considering these diametrically opposed philosophies, it was no surprise that Bennett blew up at Nelson. Bennett would later say that his outbursts were always quick, and followed by the usual good will that existed between himself and the hackers. But Nelson would later say that at the time he had been afraid the machinist might do him physical harm.

  A few nights later Nelson wanted to perform some completely unauthorized adjustments to the power supply on a computer on the seventh floor of Tech Square and needed a large screwdriver to do it. Naturally, he went into Bennett’s locked cabinet for the tool. Somehow the breakers on the power supply were in a precarious state, and Nelson got a huge electrical jolt. Nelson survived nicely, but the shock melted the end off the screwdriver.