minow@thundr.DEC.COM (Martin Minow THUNDR::MINOW ML3-5/U26 223-9922) (02/15/88)
AIList readers might enjoy this article from the Boston Globe, Feb. 7, 1988.
ZORCHED OUT: A COMPUTER HACKER'S TALE
by Alex Beam, Boston Globe staff
Richard Greenblatt: Single-minded, unkempt, prolific, and
canonical MIT hacker who went into night phase so often
that he zorched his academic career. The hacker's hacker.
- HACKERS by Steven Levy.
CAMBRIDGE -- "Lights On!" Greenblatt yells, pushing through the
door of MIT's Model Railroad Club. "That's just in case
anybody's sleeping under the layout." He explains to a visitor.
"They might pick up a shock or something."
Happily, no one is sleeping underneath the thousand feet of
handmade track that may be the world's most sophisticated model
railway. The last person to fall asleep under the layout was
probably Greenblatt, who spent so much tinkering - "hacking" -
with the railroad's switching system, and with his other
favorite toy, computers, that he flunked out of MIT in his
sophomore year.
Greenblatt, now 44, has gone on to bigger things. After a long
career as senior researcher at MIT's Artificial Intelligence Lab,
he helped found Lisp Machine Inc., one of the first artificial
intelligence startups. Now he is president of Cambridge-based
GigaMOS, which purchased LMI's assets after it went broke last
year.
But scratching the surface of Richard Greenblatt, AI entrepreneur,
one quickly finds traces of 17-year-old Ricky Greenblatt, the
soda-pop swilling science whiz who arrived at MIT as a bewildered
freshman from Columbia, MO, in 1963.
Greenblatt still drops in on the railroad club from time to time,
and exudes boyish enthusiasm when demonstrating "the famous
Greenblatt track cleaning machine," a cleverly-engineered
locomotive that spins an abrasive grinding wheel over the
nickel-silver track.
He sheepishly explains that he is "out of phase" on a particular
day, because he spent the previous night hacking away on a
computer.
And even though he has cleaned up his presentation - friends say
he bathed so rarely as an undergraduate that they had to ambush
him with air freshener - Greenblatt still acts like an
absent-minded computer genius. Pallid-skinned from long hours of
computer work, he trundles around Cambridge in rumpled work
pants and a plaid shirt, with a digital calculator watch
protruding from his breast pocket and a cellular phone slung
across his shoulder.
Although he has earned plenty of money in his computer ventures,
he still rents a room in the same house in Belmont where he has
lived for 20 years. Why not buy a house: "It's too much
trouble," Greenblatt says. "You have to pay taxes, mow the lawn.
I don't want to bother."
"Ricky lives in a world of his own, dominated by his own genius,"
says Andy Miller, who briefly roomed with Greenblatt at MIT. "We
never saw him when he lived with us. The Sun meant absolutely
nothing to him - it happened to rise and fall in a way that
wasn't in synch with his schedule."
After two semesters on the Dean's List at MIT, Greenblatt threw
in with the small band of electronics fanatics hanging around
the Model Railroad Club. Synchronizing the model railroad's
switching system - its circuits can control five trains chugging
across the vast layout, and set the 200 switches so no crashes
occur - turned out to be a lot like programming the early
computers that were making their first appearance in MIT labs.
(It also resembled another electronic gimmick called "phone
hacking," or fooling the phone system into placing free
long-distance calls, which resulted in suspension of several of
Greenblatt's friends.)
Greenblatt and his friends often spent the daylight hours working
on the railroad, and then migrated to a neighboring lab to stay
up all night next to the PDP-1, DIGITAL EQUIPMENT CORP.'s first
computer. Fueled by the Railroad Club's private Coca-Cola
machine, Greenblatt and his fellow hackers "wrapped around" day
into night, working for 30 hours at a stretch to solve thorney
problems, either with the railway or the computer.
"To a large extent, our group wasn't interested in the normal
social events around the institute," explains fellow hacker Alan
Kotok, now a corporate consulting engineer at Digital. "The
railroad club was like a fraternity. There were people you could
talk to day or night about things of common interest.
Although no one asked him to, Greenblatt wrote a high-level
language computer program for the PDP-1, so the club's timetable
system could be stored on the new computer. Unfortunately, the
young programmer's deepening involvement in computer hacking
doomed his academic career. "I sort of zorched out on classes,"
Greenblatt admits. During one of his 30-hour work blasts,
Greenblatt slept through a final exam, and had to leave MIT.
Of course, MIT didn't get where it is today by turning away
computer talent. After a brief sojourn on Route 128, Greenblatt
landed a job as a programmer at the Artificial Intelligence Lab,
and stayed for 20 years.
Greenblatt's fame grew and grew. He and a co-worker wrote ITS,
and early minicomputer time-sharing program that is still in use
today. He was one of the early programmers to work in LISP, the
high-level language that has become the key building block for
artificial intelligence.
"He would attack problems with great vigor," remembers Donald
Eastlake, another railroad club alumnus. "Everybody was smart,
but the people who really excelled were smart and tenacious.
He was one of the primary examples of that."
An accomplished chess player, Greenblatt wrote MacHack, a chess
program for a later DIGITAL mini, the PDP-6. The program scored
an important victory for AI boosters when it defeated a
prominent critic of artificial intelligence who insisted that a
computer would never play chess well enough to beat a 10-year
old. The program later became a member of the American Chess
Federation and the Massachusetts State Chess Association.
When Greenblatt later did graduate work at MIT, administrators
hinted that if he submitted his chess program as a doctoral
thesis, he might be awarded a degree. "I never really got around
to it," Greenblatt confesses. "It just didn't seem that important."