Hacking Away : To the ‘Wizard,’ Programming Is All That Matters
“You probably ought to go see Leo Schwab,” said the phoner, a member of Silicon Valley’s vast brotherhood of computer hackers. “He’s a wizard. Even wears a cape.”
So, off to see the wizard, following if not the Yellow Brick Road the--too good to be true--Golden Gate Bridge en route.
The wizard, capeless, opened the door of a new suburban townhouse. His lair--absent clouds of steam or a wizardly switching panel--was equipped with California wall hangings and laid-back furniture. Schwab himself, lanky-tall, whose unlined face of 24 years was framed by an auburn beard, was further deflationary:
“I’m not a wizard. Maybe a semi-wizard.”
Schwab was to demonstrate, however, that he could make a computer--essentially only an electronic box that can either say yes or no--pirouette magically under his spell.
“Computers consume almost all my waking hours,” said Schwab, whose “sleep phase” runs from about 3 a.m. to 10 a.m.
This is one of the identifying field marks of the hacker breed. Dedicated, long, oddball hours.
“I want to write software and make a lot of money (a common but not always present field mark of a hacker) and (almost an invariable hallmark of the species) have fun.”
Matter of Definition
Fun at the expense of the nation’s computer networks that transfer billions of dollars of bank money daily, monitor heartbeats in hospitals, command satellites in space, switch all those zillions of phone calls, is not what hacking is about. Hackers resent being grouped with those who maliciously plant worms and viruses that befuddle computers. Hackers call them crackers.
Schwab has been too engrossed getting a unicycle to juggle red balls on a computer screen to waste time pestering Ma Bell.
His apotheosis to semi-wizardry is not untypical.
He’s a native of the San Francisco Bay Area, where kids absorb the binary system almost before they learn to stay afloat in hot tubs. Hacking, of course, is now worldwide, but its Bethlehem was at MIT in Cambridge, Mass., and then Silicon Valley. Schwab’s father was a mechanic, his mother a housewife. They produced a son gifted with a vivid imagination.
“I talked to myself a lot and daydreamed, usually with me in the starring role.”
Different Channels
Once upon a time, wizardry at an early age was likely to become channeled into such outlets as violin lessons or differential calculus on a slide rule. Fortunately for Schwab, his birth coincided roughly with that of the personal computer, where the master could fulfill his dreams on the wondrous keyboard of an electronic slave.
If you could afford one. Schwab couldn’t.
But the Byte Shop had just become Marin County’s first computer store. Schwab became its first “pest,” or embryonic wizard, alias freeloading hacker.
“They were permissive. They let me run anything. I played Pong in color on an Apple. Amazing! It was a black art then.”
In the ninth grade Schwab was introduced to the computer lab at San Rafael High. “I spent every spare moment there. I wanted to realize things in my imagination on the screen. I had a lot of kooky ideas I couldn’t realize in other ways. I rarely achieved this because my mind was three years ahead of the technology.”
Schwab made do buying $6 disk drives for Paleozoic computers while waiting for the industry to catch up. He meanwhile devised his first computer game while daydreaming in algebra class.
“Then I graduated and suddenly was without a machine. A Computerland threw me out for the last time.”
What to Do Next?
What was an apprentice wizard to do?
Schwab had had a newspaper route. “Everyone on it found their paper precisely where they wanted it. Every day.”
Such diligence had earned him the money to buy a $1,200 Commodore computer when they first came out. Computer games had been sweeping the country, making their teen-age inventors almost as rich as rock stars or junk bond salesmen.
The computer’s combination of speed, programmability and endless permutations makes it a natural for games by quick minds. One of the first was concocted in the late 1950s by the three young programmers at Bell Laboratories in New Jersey. The idea of the game, dubbed Core War, was to wipe out the memory of an opponent’s computer. All in fun, of course.
One of the players, ironically, was Robert Morris, whose son is suspected of having infected a major computer network last fall.
In the ‘70s, computer games did for electronics what the rumble seat once did for necking. Everyone wanted to try out the new technology. By the original hacker ethic evolved first at MIT and, as described by Steven Levy in his landmark history “Hackers,” computers were a gift from the gods to man’s ingenuity and should be free. Money got its nose in, however, with the rage for game software.
Programmer Heaven
Levy describes how Ken Williams, a college dropout, came to found On-Line Systems in the Sierra foothills where pubescent and post-adolescent programmers created fun and games in an atmosphere of anarchy and funny-smelling smoke. Bob Davis, a one-time musician and hash-house cook, signed on after meeting Williams in a liquor store where he was working and taught himself to become a wizard game programmer.
John Harris, the son of a banker in San Diego, came of age just as games did and went to work for On-Line with a more generous royalty agreement than salary. One of his games at one point paid him $36,000 in royalties in a single month.
Leo Schwab just missed the gold rush.
“Those days are probably over,” he lamented. “You’d have to be very clever or very lucky to be in the right place when something explodes economically.
“I graduated just when the bottom fell out of the games market. So many people said they could make a quick buck and did, and the quality suffered. People wanted something more than shoot-and-kill games. But it’s not that simple. Every game you could think of has been done before.”
So Leo surrendered to the heresy that even wizards might benefit from higher learning. He tried a community college, but “a bad study ethic” convinced him to go to work programming.
Looking for Stability
“I decided against free-lance. I like a paycheck.”
He got a job in charge of low-level programming with a company in Corte Madera. “Anything someone couldn’t do or wouldn’t do they gave to me and I’d do it fast. In the process I’d play, develop a hack that would make the process simpler.”
After 2 1/2 years, Leo’s employer was bought out by what he calls “vulture,” not venture, capitalists. He was fired because he held to a more elastic interpretation of the free software proviso of the hacker ethic than did his new employers, regarding their copyrighted material.
After knocking around a bit, Leo now programs for $24,000 a year for a software firm in Glendale via a phone hookup.
He shares the townhouse with his girlfriend and their landlord. When they are working, Leo is home hacking. When he gets burned out, “I hop on my bike and ride around for awhile.”
Leo is asked about wizardry.
“I have a difficult time relating to my feelings, so when someone asks me a deeper question, I tend to reply on a technical level. In another time I might have been Da Vinci.”
Appropriate Dress
With that, Leo models one of his two capes, a velveteen item that has “wizard” written implicitly all over it. As do his several wands. He also wears Tudor hats, the kind European Ph.D.s wear to commencements, the floppy disks of headgear.
“I’ll make a mental note of something--a shape, a sequence--and store it. I’ll be talking to myself and will pick it out. I tend to see things three-dimensionally.”
Leo’s workspace in his bedroom is lined with stuffed toys--they are his, not his girl’s--some from childhood and some from his adulthood. He likes figures from the comic strip “Bloom County.” His computer’s cursor is a replica of the penguin-like bird from the strip.
Curiosity is essential to hacking, he says. “So is imagination, because often you’re confronted with problems that don’t yield to usual solutions. You probably have to be a little maniacal. And you have to enjoy it. If not, you’re cheating yourself.
“A lot of people would rather emulate reality rather than invent it. It’s more fun to create a world, to play God inside the works of a computer. You can put the key in your front door, put a tape on the VCR and watch it and rest content. I want to know what’s inside, how it works. It’s something of a power trip.”
IBM Is Too Slow
Leo does his creations on an Amiga desktop. “There are 10 million IBM PCs and people like them but they are slow, slow, slow.”
Leo turns on the unicycle. In full color it rides to and fro from foreground to background juggling red balls off its pedals as it goes.
“That’s the epitome of hacking. The designers say you can’t do a juggling unicycle on a computer. The hacker does it.” It took Leo 3 1/2 18-hour days to show it could be done.
The screen says, “Apocalypse Real Soon Now.” Then the unicycle crashes in a downfall of balls.
“I asked myself how can I use the tools of the machine to do this? Do I have the tools? How much trouble will it be?”
The unicycle got Leo a following. Software makers have visual proof he can do something neat. Amiga can use it to show what its computer is capable of. Plus it’s amusing. Leo estimated up to half of Amiga’s 700,000 owners have his unicycle hack.
“Designers know great things can happen with their machines, but they don’t know what. Hackers show them how their machines can sing and dance.”
