Hackers were equally quick
to send a message if the mistake repeated itself. "I
was actually shown a cart with a heavy cylinder of
metal on it that had been used to break down the door
of one professor's office,"Gerald Sussman, an MIT faculty member and hacker
whose
work at the AI Lab predates Stallman's, disputes this
memory. According to Sussman, the hackers never broke
any doors to retrieve terminals.
Stallman says.
Such methods, while lacking in subtlety, served a
purpose. Although professors and administrators
outnumbered hackers two-to-one inside the AI Lab, the
hacker ethic prevailed. Indeed, by the time of
Stallman's arrival at the AI Lab, hackers and the AI
Lab administration had coevolved into something of a
symbiotic relationship. In exchange for fixing the
machines and keeping the software up and running,
hackers earned the right to work on favorite pet
projects. Often, the pet projects revolved around
improving the machines and software programs even
further. Like teenage hot-rodders, most hackers viewed
tinkering with machines as its own form of entertainment.
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