In the last of the three sections of Steven Levy’s Hackers, the author takes us through a deep dive of On-Line Systems, to illustrate the broader expansion of the gaming software market and how it evolved over time.

At first, this movement started with very close ties to the earlier hacker movements. Ken Williams, the founder of On-Line Systems, got his start by learning the fine details of existing systems and programming languages to break his way into the existing software industry and churn out code much faster than the existing “professional” programmers. Once he got into the game development scene, Ken and his wife Roberta set themselves apart through sheer technological innovation. After playing text adventure games with their Apple II, they had the idea to display graphics in addition to simple text (and was also much faster than others because of his use of assembly). Ken also leveraged dithering to stretch the display to show more colors than officially supported.

As On-Line Systems began to expand, they maintained a large chunk of the Hacker Ethic. Of course, the first tenant to go out the window was “all information should be free”. On-Line Systems was a business, and they made money selling their software. If you could just go out and get one of their games for free out of the drawer and make a personal copy, there would be no incentive to invest the money in making them. As the book said, there was no government organization funding this development. But ignoring this point about distribution, internally On-Line Systems maintained a bubble of hacker culture. The summer camp model was like the old true hackers of MIT finally grew up and exchanged their Coke for coke. Programmers were working for the love of the game (and money) as opposed to just trying to make a living. This era also saw people like John Harris, a superstar programmer who embodied the hacker culture more than anyone. When John wrote games like Jawbreaker and Frogger, he first had to decode the proprietary assembly code for the Atari, and then needed to pour over the assembly code he was writing to make it run absolutely efficiently - better than games written by Atari themselves.

But this obsession came at a price that his boss Ken hated to pay: time. John’s obsession for efficiency and absolute understanding allowed him to break into the Atari software market, but it was no longer critical to the operation. He didn’t know how to accept good software, he let perfection stand in the way. I agree with his boss that at the end of the day, you just need to ship software that works and is good enough. This was a lesson I had to learn at my first internship, where my boss was on me to just ship it (the colored squares love this phrase). Granted, they lack our modern luxury of continuous delivery that allows modern software development to double down on this, but operational efficiency is a balance that needs to be struck. Obsessing about details matters as long as those details matter - when they don’t need to be perfected, don’t waste time. Ken also saw the writing on the wall that the hackers making these games would start to lose their bargaining power quickly. Game development is a series of diminishing returns where the first hackers needed to solve extremely difficult problems using arcane knowledge and black magic, but each successive generation can just build on the previous generation’s work.

In a wider sense, once copy protection and early forms of DRM became widespread, software started to lose its hackability for those outside of the inner dev circle. For many who had become accustomed to it, this was a huge problem. But to answer Levy’s question “Did you really benefit from your computer if you did not program it?” - it would be ridiculous to say that we have not benefitted from software we do not control. This exists from client devices (iOS, Windows) to the entire idea of the cloud where you don’t even physically see the computer running software on your behalf. Yet we all accept this fact for the obvious benefits it provides.

So the Hacker Ethic can not truly and fully survive in a world of commercial and proprietary software because it is an artifact from a bygone era of a government funded computing bubble. But many parts of it live on in this world. You can still participate in a community judged by merit. Computers can absolutely make your life better even if you don’t fully control it. And you can absolutely still learn about computers regardless if you participate in the commercial world or not.