The Hacker and the Ants Read Online Free PDF

language.
    The problem with Lisp was that it was not a close match for what was actually going on inside any real computer. There could, in principle, be a computer for which Lisp was right; some guy had actually designed a Lisp-based computer chip way back in the nerdly dawn of computation. Jeff Pear even had a big picture of the abandoned Lisp chip on his wall: his long-lost Promised Land. But here in the real Silicon Valley, there weren’t any Lisp chips, and running Lisp on a real computer chip was like using a phrasebook to write a letter in Chinese to a friend who doesn’t speak Chinese—and then having to mail a copy of the phrasebook with the letter. Running a Lisp program on a real machine meant doing that type of meaningless extra shit a few billion times a second.
    The language that I and most other hackers were
using was called SuperC. SuperC was a pattern-based extension of good old C++, a concise object-oriented language that was closely attuned to the architecture of the chips we were using.
    For the true killer speed necessary to keep our robots abreast of real time, even SuperC wasn’t fast enough. A big part of our Veep code was based on something called ROBOT.LIB, a library of machine-instruction-coded functions and utilities that Roger Coolidge had developed on his own. How Roger had managed to write such an amazingly tight code was something of a mystery; it seemed superhuman, preternatural. Sometimes I briefly lost sight of the fact that my SuperC robot programs wouldn’t have worked without Roger’s ROBOT.LIB, but Roger was always ready to remind me of my oversight.
    Jeff Pear was really into having meetings. At least once a week I was supposed to like physically drive to GoMotion and sit in some room with Chuck and Dick and Leonard and maybe Ken Thumb and a few others and watch while Jeff Pear drew charts on a whiteboard. A total waste of time, though I did enjoy talking to my coworkers before and after the meetings. The body has an atavistic need for physical interaction.
    But let’s get back to the day when Susan Poker woke me, the day when I first saw a cyberspace ant.
    After talking to Leonard, I drifted past the mailboxes and on down the virtual GoMotion offices’ hall. The mailboxes were buttons with people’s names on them, and if I’d pushed the Jerzy Rugby button, I would have seen a representation of all the e-mail messages waiting for me—the e-mail ranging from plain text or data, up to talking video images, possibly interactive. But just then I was more interested in finding out about the loose ant.
    Right near the mailboxes was the door leading to Trevor Sinclair, our man on the Net. He was physically
at the Sunnyvale GoMotion office every weekday. Trevor kept our machines talking to each other, and to the world at large, usually using cyberspace to do it. His virtual office was a life-size model of Stonehenge, accurate to a tolerance of one millimeter. He’d gotten the numerical specifications from some Chinese anthropologists, and he’d gotten the stone’s texture maps from a commercial database called Rock.
    There was a Wood database too, by the way, and Clouds, Fire, Water, Skin, Metal—you name it, they were all on Pixxy Textures, a subscribers-only website that GoMotion had an account for.
    Trevor’s tuxedo showed a good-looking man with short red hair and freckles. Trevor was one of the few people at GoMotion who was over forty like me. Despite his age, he was boyish in his enthusiasm for druids and magic. He viewed our work in cyberspace as a rehearsal for true mastery .
    Trevor could phreak and cryp with the best of them.
    â€œIf I can physically get to a machine, I can always get in,” he liked to say. “The secret of Net control is to come on like a physical presence.” Here he’d pause and give a quiet chuckle. “Even when you’re not there.”
    I found Trevor sitting on a wolfskin