Not long after his immersion in LIFE, Gosper himself got a glimpse of the limits of the tight circle the hackers had drawn. It happened in the man-made daylight of the 1972 Apollo 17 moon shot. He was a passenger on a special cruise to the Caribbean, a “science cruise” timed for the launch, and the boat was loaded with sci-fi writers, futurists, scientists of varying stripes, cultural commentators, and, according to Gosper, “an unbelievable quantity of just completely empty-headed cruise-niks.”
Gosper was there as part of Marvin Minsky’s party. He got to engage in discussion with the likes of Norman Mailer, Katherine Anne Porter, Isaac Asimov, and Carl Sagan, who impressed Gosper with his Ping-Pong playing. For real competition, Gosper snuck in some forbidden matches with the Indonesian crewmen, who were by far the best players on the boat.
Apollo 17 was to be the first manned space shot initiated at night, and the cruise boat was sitting three miles off Cape Kennedy for an advantageous view of the launch. Gosper had heard all the arguments against going to the trouble of seeing a liftoff—why not watch it on television, since you’ll be miles away from the actual launching pad? But when he saw the damn thing actually lift off, he appreciated the distance. The night had been set ablaze, and the energy peak got to his very insides. The shirt slapped on his chest, the change in his pocket jingled, and the PA system speakers broke from their brackets on the viewing stand and dangled by their power cords. The rocket, which of course never could have held to so true a course without computers, leapt into the sky, hell-bent for the cosmos like some flaming avenger, a Spacewar nightmare; the cruise-niks were stunned into trances by the power and glory of the sight. The Indonesian crewmen went berserk. Gosper later recalled them running around in a panic and throwing their Ping-Pong equipment overboard, “like some kind of sacrifice.”
The sight affected Gosper profoundly. Before that night, Gosper had disdained NASA’s human-wave approach toward things. He had been adamant in defending the AI lab’s more individualistic form of hacker elegance in programming, and in computing style in general. But now he saw how the real world, when it got its mind made up, could have an astounding effect. NASA had not applied the Hacker Ethic, yet it had done something the lab, for all its pioneering, never could have done. Gosper realized that the ninth-floor hackers were in some sense deluding themselves, working on machines of relatively little power compared to the computers of the future—yet still trying to do it all, change the world right there in the lab. And since the state of computing had not yet developed machines with the power to change the world at large—certainly nothing to make your chest rumble as did the NASA operation—all that the hackers wound up doing was making Tools to Make Tools. It was embarrassing.
Gosper’s revelation led him to believe that the hackers could change things—just make the computers bigger, more powerful, without skimping on expense. But the problem went even deeper than that. While the mastery of the hackers had indeed made computer programming a spiritual pursuit, a magical art, and while the culture of the lab was developed to the point of a technological Walden Pond, something was essentially lacking.
The world.
As much as the hackers tried to make their own world on the ninth floor, it could not be done. The movement of key people was inevitable. And the harsh realities of funding hit Tech Square in the seventies: ARPA, adhering to the strict new Mansfield Amendment passed by Congress, had to ask for specific justification for many computer projects. The unlimited funds for basic research were drying up; ARPA was pushing some pet projects like speech recognition (which would have directly increased the government’s ability to mass-monitor phone conversations abroad and at home). Minsky thought the policy was a “losing” one, and distanced the AI lab from it. But there was no longer enough money to hire anyone who showed exceptional talent for hacking. And slowly, as MIT itself became more ensconced in training students for conventional computer studies, the Institute’s attitude to computer studies shifted focus somewhat. The AI lab began to look for teachers as well as researchers, and the hackers were seldom interested in the bureaucratic hassles, social demands, and lack of hands-on machine time that came with teaching courses.
Levy, Steven. Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution - 25th Anniversary Edition
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Factorio is hacking again. It's kludging it together to make it work. When you read things like https://wiki.factorio.com/Balancer_mechanics or the JK latch and the SR latch ( https://www.reddit.com/r/factorio/comments/92tdgm/jk_latch_s... and https://wiki.factorio.com/Tutorial:Circuit_network_cookbook#... ) and get into r/technicalfactorio/ it is reminiscent of HACKMEM ( https://archive.org/details/HAKMEM ) written by Beeler, Gosper, and Schroeppel.