Cryptography Reference
In-Depth Information
Vernon, New York. As noted above, he first published the topic on the C
programming language [135] with Kernighan. His invention of C was for use
with the Unix OS, accomplished during his work for AT&T Bell Labs in 1969.
In 1983 he was awarded the ACM's A.M. Turing Award (see page 172), along
with Ken Thompson, who developed Unix. Moreover, in 1984 he received the
IEEE's Pioneer Award (see Footnote 9.2 on page 332).
The Third Wave
: This group of hackers were the first to be independent
of the MIT group. They arose out of northern California, especially the San
Francisco Bay area. They were different than the first two waves in that they
wanted, and in some cases built, their own computers, and hardware in general.
These were the individuals responsible for the PC revolution we know today.
Among them are Steve Dompier, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and Steve Wozniak.
(Jobs and Wozniak are shown in Figure 10.5.)
Dompier
: In the mid-1970s, at a meeting of Silicon Valley's Homebrew
Computer Club, Steve Dompier showed how he had programmed new MITS
Altair 8800 (one of the world's first personal computers) to play the Beatles'
Fool on the Hill
for which he received an unrestrained standing ovation. Even
Wozniak (see below) is known to have said that he had no intention of starting a
company when he built a computer. It was merely to “show off” to an assembly
of that club at one of their meetings. Hence, this club was the catalyst for much
ingenious activity and invention for the hacker community. In mid-1975, Louis
Solomon, technical editor of
Popular Electronics
magazine, went to Processor
Technology to ask about the development of a computer terminal about which
he could write an article in his magazine. In July of 1976, an article appeared
about a complete computer design, called the
Sol Terminal Computer
, or simply
the
Sol-10
, which used the Intel 8080A processor in kit form. “Sol” was, of
course, an abbreviation of Solomon's name. Dompier produced the OS for Sol-
10, called
CONSOL
. Dompier used the Sol-10 to write a computer game called
Target
, which consisted of a little cannon on the bottom of the screen used to
shoot down a series of alien spaceships moving across the top of the screen.
Dompier called it a “clever little hack” that he basically gave away since he
merely wanted people to have fun with it. Later, when it was presented on the
TV show
Tomorrow
, it intrigued the host Tom Snyder so much that he had to
be torn away from the game to finish the show. For more on the life of Dompier,
see [150].
Gates
: In 1975, Bill Gates wrote an interpreter for the programming lan-
guage BASIC and charged money for it, which was not done at that time. This
practice began a new approach to the idea of software development, not seen
before since such software development was seen as a hobby and not a business
enterprise. However, this was, in and of itself, a betrayal of the hacker ethic.
Thus, to many “true” hackers, Bill gates is a traitor for making money from
what they deem should be free.
Gates is the co-founder (together with Paul G. Allen) of Microsoft Corpo-
ration. Gates is currently Chairman and Chief Software Designer at Microsoft.
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