Becoming A Hacker
Greenblatt enrolled in MIT in the fall of 1962, and around his second term as an undergraduate student, he found his way to MIT's famous Tech Model Railroad Club. At that time, Peter Samson had written a program in Fortran for the IBM 709 series machines, to automate the tedious business of writing the intricate timetables for the Railroad Club's vast model train layout. Greenblatt felt compelled to implement a Fortran compiler for the PDP-1, which did not have one at the time. There was no computer time available to debug the compiler, or even to type it in to the computer. Years later, elements of this compiler (combined with some ideas from fellow TMRC member Steven Piner, the author of a very early PDP-4 Fortran compiler while working for Digital Equipment Corporation) were typed in and "showed signs of life". However, the perceived need for a Fortran compiler had evaporated by then, so the compiler was not pursued further. This and other experiences at TMRC, especially the influence of Alan Kotok, who worked at DEC and was the junior partner of the design team for the PDP-6 computer, led Greenblatt to the AI Lab, where he proceeded to become a "hacker's hacker" noted for his programming acumen as described in Steven Levy's Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution, and as acknowledged by Gerald Jay Sussman and Harold Abelson when they said they were fortunate to have been apprentice programmers at the feet of Bill Gosper and Richard Greenblatt
Indeed, he spent so much time programming the PDP machines there he failed out of MIT as a first-term junior and had to take a job at the Charles Adams Associates firm until the AI Lab hired him about 6 months later.
Read more about this topic: Richard Greenblatt (programmer)
Famous quotes containing the word hacker:
“The Hacker Ethic: Access to computers—and anything which might teach you something about the way the world works—should be unlimited and total.
Always yield to the Hands-On Imperative!
All information should be free.
Mistrust authority—promote decentralization.
Hackers should be judged by their hacking, not bogus criteria such as degrees, age, race, or position.
You can create art and beauty on a computer.
Computers can change your life for the better.”
—Steven Levy, U.S. writer. Hackers, ch. 2, “The Hacker Ethic,” pp. 27-33, Anchor Press, Doubleday (1984)