John Carmack's adolescent years (2003)
books.google.com
books.google.com
Incidentally, Hackers was what I read after I read Masters of Doom. Here's a quote from Masters of Doom:
" Overnight, it seemed, Carmack was in a strange house, with a strange family and going to a strange school, a junior high with no gifted program or computer’s. He’d never felt so alone. Then one day he realized he wasn’t. The book Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution was a revelation. "
Edit: Donald Knuth heartily recommends it too[1].
[0] http://www.amazon.com/Hackers-Computer-Revolution-Anniversar...
Some people find his style dry, but I've found it direct and really interesting (probably because I'm already interested in the material anyway).
My favorite bomb cocktail was brake fluid, pool chlorine, and PVC. We lived in Florida on a river and we used to see how many fish we could "catch" with one of our homebrew contraptions.
I guess that would make me a "terrorist" by today's standards? I'm not sure anymore...
I remember when I learned about water electrolysis. I built an electrolysis cell with a high voltage rectifier diode and a two liter coke bottle and proceeded to fill giant punching bag balloons with a perfect stoichiometric mixture of hydrogen and oxygen gas. (Was smart enough to use a long cord and stay away while the power was on.) Then I tied them up with firework fuse. WOW were those ever loud!
Also got in trouble for hacking (black hat sense) when I was fifteen. I wasn't stealing or wrecking things though, just doing "catch and release" stuff because I was bored and had a modem.
Isn't it amazing how our inquisitive youth shields us from realizing how dangerous what we are doing really is?
I'm going to sound a little judgmental, but you don't often hear him talk about work politics or non-technical stuff, it can be a little curious. I really wonder if he ever talks about his personality or his younger years at all, or if he learned something when thinking back about it. Has he ever given his opinion or talked about this type of stuff?
I wonder if he has ever planned to write a programming or non-programming book, or anything else other than code.
Interesting, I would have hoped for a more nuanced view on social justice from such a brilliant guy.
"society as a whole would be better off with
a government that was less ambitious"
There's a nice collection of interviews[1] that Apogee did with many of the original developers a few years ago, but it's hardly enough!
The poster that Interceptor Entertainment made for the 3D Realms Anthology[2] is like a nostalgia bomb for me. :)
[1]: http://www.amazon.com/Making-Prince-Persia-Journals-1985/dp/...
There's a bunch of other id and Carmack related docs up there too if you look including the "Book of id" from the id Anthology and a few GameDevMag articles.
I also admire Carmack's way to tackle new (sometimes unknown) problems: read the literature, learn, do. And never failed following this.
I loved the parts when Romero swam across the lake to work all night with the rest of the crew, or when they invited in a stripper with pizza but Carmack wouldn't set the keyboard aside. So determined.
That was also one of my favorite passages:
"The lake house was filled with the sense of unlimited possibilities. And the bond between Carmack and Romero was becoming stronger by the day. It was like two tennis players who, alter years of destroying their competition, finally had a chance to play equals. Romero pushed Carmack to be a better programmer. Carmack pushed Romero to be a better designer. What they shared equally was their passion.
This was most clear to Carmack one late weekend night. He was sitting in the house working at his PC as lightning flashed outside. Mitzi curled lazily on top of his monitor, her legs draping over the screen. The heat of her body was causing Carmack’s heat-sensitive display to ooze its colors. He pushed Mitzi gently from the monitor, and she scurried away with a hiss.
A rainstorm had picked up, and it was mighty. Cross Lake spilled into the backyard like the prelude to a horror movie. The lake was so high that it pushed the ski boat to the top of the boathouse. Long black water moccasins slithered toward the deck. The bridge leading to Lakeshore Drive was completely washed out. When Jay arrived after having been out for the day, there was no way to get in. It was, as he described it, “a turd floater” of a storm, bringing everything from the bottom of the lake to the surface. He turned away to wait it out.
Romero arrived with a friend later to find the bridge even worse than when Jay got there. There was simply no way he was going to get his car over the flooded expanse. And there were probably alligators and moccasins now making it their home.
Back in the house, Carmack resigned himself to working on his own that night. After all these hours, he had come to appreciate Romero’s diverse range of talents, gleaned from years of making his own Apple II games. Romero had been not only a coder but an artist, a designer, and a businessman. On top of all that, he was fun. Romero didn’t just love games; in a sense, he was a game, a walking, talking, beeping, twitching human video game who never seemed to let anything get him down. Like a game character, he could always find an extra life.
Just then the door behind Carmack swung open. Mitzi dashed under his feet. Carmack turned to see Romero standing there with his big thick glasses, soaking wet up to his chest, lightning flashing behind him, a big smile on his face. It was a real moment, a moment so impressive that Carmack actually saved it in his thin file of sentimental memories. This one he wanted for future access: the night Romero waded through a stormy river to work."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o7py_FGQ5tU
Along with abandonware links to play 'em on your IIGS emu
Or for the 68kmla guys hiding out here on your original hardware :)
Also, I learned by reading it that Carmack and Romero created Commander Keen (somehow I'd never made that connection with their later games). Commander Keen was my Mario. Perhaps it was more than that. It introduced me to shareware, which led me to BBSs, and then the Internet.
It would make for one epic movie in the right hands.
When I said that this movie is more or less a Carmack movie, it's because of how teenage Carmack is described. He's arrogant, but not so much he'd surround himself with idiots. When he meets other smart programmers at Al's company, he's elated.
So yeah, it is cheesy, but it does more justice to the hacker subculture than anything else I've seen. It certainly has more to do with actual hackers than hacker news does.
These movies always age well. At that time it was lame. Now it's just a joke about itself.
He was just a kid, for one, and in the Valley, "socialized" doesn't mean respectable, it means "willing to appear to toe the party line."
Not to mention, what happens to "most" Valley startups, anyways?