Two years after the explosion, the rate of innovation
began to exhibit dangerous side effects. The explosive
growth had provided an exciting validation of the
collaborative hacker approach, but it had also led to
over-complexity. "We had a Tower of Babel effect," says
Guy Steele.
The effect threatened to kill the spirit that had
created it, Steele says. Hackers had designed ITS to
facilitate programmers' ability to share knowledge and
improve each other's work. That meant being able to sit
down at another programmer's desk, open up a
programmer's work and make comments and modifications
directly within the software. "Sometimes the easiest
way to show somebody how to program or debug something
was simply to sit down at the terminal and do it for
them," explains Steele.
The macro feature, after its second year, began to foil
this capability. In their eagerness to embrace the new
full-screen capabilities, hackers had customized their
versions of TECO to the point where a hacker sitting
down at another hacker's terminal usually had to spend
the first hour just figuring out what macro commands
did what.
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