Chapter 3 Chapter 2 The Rocket Scientist

John Carmack was a late talker, and his parents worried until one day in 1971, when the 15-month-old boy hobbled into the living room with a sponge and uttered not just a word but A complete sentence: "Dad, your bath towel." It's as if he's been scorning individual words, rather than waiting until they can be combined to form a complete sentence. "Inga," his father, Stan, said to his mother, "looks like we've got a very special little guy in our family." The Carmacks have always had a tradition of self-education.John Carmack's grandfather, John Carmack Sr., had a second-grade education, and his wife had an eighth-grade education.The housewife taught her husband to read and write, and he eventually became an electrical engineer.They raised their child, Stan, in one of the poorest parts of eastern Kentucky, and the kid worked so hard that he eventually won a college scholarship.Stein excelled at both math and engineering, eventually becoming the first in his family to go to college and work at a radio station.His wife, Ingo, grew up with parents who were pharmacists and physiotherapists, and Ingo inherited their interest in science, studying nuclear therapy techniques while pursuing a PhD in microbiology.Ingo and Stan look forward to passing on their love of learning to their children.

John Carmack Jr. was born on August 20, 1970, under the nickname Jody.His parents are very hardworking, so they have a good family background.Stein also rose to become an evening news anchor for a television station, one of the three largest in Kansas City, Missouri, before relocating to an affluent suburban area.There, John had a baby brother, Peter.That same year, John attended Our Lady of Mary Catholic Primary School, one of the best schools in the area.The skinny boy with tousled blond hair, who has worn glasses since he was one, quickly distinguished himself at school.In second grade, at the age of seven, he got perfect scores on almost every standardized test, which is equivalent to ninth grade.John also developed a very unique stuttering habit: adding short robotic hums to the end of each sentence, like a computer crunching numbers: "12 times 12 equals 144... umm Ok."

At home, John Carmack read as voraciously as his parents did, and he liked Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, or fantasy novels like that.He reads comic books by the dozen, and he likes sci-fi movies, but the one he finds most interesting is Dungeons and Dragons.More willing to create than to participate, he quickly became a unique and powerful dungeon master. Unlike other dungeon masters who relied mainly on rigid rules in the rulebook, he threw away those structures and created his own world.Every day after school, he locked himself in the cabin, buried in piles of drawings and forms.He was in third grade at the time.

Although Carmack was well off and did well academically, he still had his troubles.In an assignment where he was asked to describe the five biggest problems in his life, he twice mentioned his parents' high expectations of him.He began to feel that his stern mother was being too critical of him.In another assignment, he recounted how his mother locked the comic books in a cabinet because he refused to do extra homework, and how he simply removed the door of the cabinet. Carmack had come to loathe the school — the institutions and the dogmas, which seemed to him irrational.He started teasing the other students about their beliefs after Communion assembly every Wednesday.I remember once, when a child left, he had already said that there were question marks in his heart and tears on his face.It wasn't until one day that the teacher pushed an Apple II into the classroom that Carmack found a way to exercise his thinking ability more effectively.Although he has never used a computer, he naturally regards this thing as an extension of his own body: it speaks the language of mathematical logic, it responds to the instructions he enters, and when he sees the game , He realized that there is still a rich and colorful world in it.

By this time Carmack was arcade-obsessed, and he wasn't the best gamer around, but he loved the fast-paced combat and immediate rewards of Planet Impact and Space Invaders.There is also "Battle Zone" (BattleZone), which does not display the combat situation from a height or from the side like other games. It shows the combat screen from a first-person perspective. Carmack will feel like sitting in a tank and watching around. .Although the graphics are made up of simple green lines, it gives a three-dimensional look, and the game even caught the attention of the U.S. government, which ordered a version from manufacturer Atari for military training.Soon, Carmack also wanted to customize his own game, which is not impossible with a computer in hand.

Carmack was in fifth grade when his mother sent him to a national electronics store chain called Radio Shack to take a class on the TRS-80 computer.When he returned to school, he already had a programming book in his hand, and he began to teach himself all the knowledge he wanted to know.He read the paragraph describing computers in the encyclopedia a dozen times.With the broadening of his vision and the growth of knowledge, he wrote to the teacher and suggested: "The more reasonable thing now is to send me directly to the sixth grade." Only then can he learn more.The following year, Carmack was transferred to a "gifted class" at the Shawnee Mission Public School, one of the first nearby places with a computer lab.

Here, Carmack met some bright kids who shared his obsession with the Macintosh.They taught themselves BASIC programming, they played games together, and soon they were not satisfied with this simple fun, they began to study and modify the games by hand.Once, Carmack found the code corresponding to his character in "Genesis". He modified that paragraph and added some extra abilities to himself. This was the first time he experienced the joy of creating something out of thin air.Moreover, as a programmer, he does not need to depend on others, as long as his code logic correctly expresses the rules he defines, it will work well, everything is so reasonable.

Everything—except the parents, Carmack thought. Carmack's parents divorced suddenly when he was twelve, and they were squabbling over how to raise their children.Ingo felt that this had irreparably scarred Carmack.Just when Carmack started to have some fun at school, he and his brother Peter had to alternate between parents, switching schools.Carmack didn't like being separated from his father, and worse, he had to fend for himself when he lived with his mother. Carmack became more and more interested in computers, but Ingo felt that those computer games were meaningless. In her opinion, if a child was really interested in computers, he shouldn't just sit there and play "Universe" , but you should study hard in school, get good grades in the exam, and then enter a school like MIT, so that you can enter a company like IBM after graduation.She loves her boys and she wants them to only do what she thinks is right.But Carmack didn't think so. He just wanted to have a computer of his own and fly in that world.As he became more and more stubborn, Ingo took Carmack to a therapist to figure out why her once docile son was now running wild.

Carmack's worries were relieved when Ingo decided to move to Seattle to start a new relationship, and he moved in with his father, stepmother, and stepmother's two children.Although Stan still has a good job, the family suddenly doubles in number of people, which makes it impossible for them to maintain their original standard of living. They move to an old farm on the outskirts of the city, which is a blue-collar community in Layton Township. Carmack had never felt so alone. He lived in a strange house with a strange family and went to a strange school every day. There were no computers, no programs, no partners.

Until one day, he discovered that he was not alone. Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution is Carmack's apocalypse.He'd heard of "hackers" before, too, such as in a 1982 Disney movie called Tron, in which a game designer played by Jeff Bridges enters game of his own design.Or 1983's "WarGames," in which Matthew Broderick's young player breaks into a government computer system and narrowly escapes triggering the nuclear button.But there's one big difference between this book and those movies—it's all about real people.Written in 1984, Steven Levy explores the so-called "kid prodigies who changed our world" and their twenty-five exuberant years as they dare to break the rules. Regular computer geeks range from the pioneers of mainframe computers at MIT in the 1950s to the Homebrew clubs of Silicon Valley in the 1970s and the leaders of the computer games industry in the 1980s.There is no template to characterize these hackers, and their experiences are varied: Bill Gates, a Harvard University dropout, implemented the first BASIC language environment running on the Altair personal computer, and then Created the world's largest software company.And Steve Slugger Russell, the Williamses, game makers, and the two Steves, the founders of Apple, and so on, they're all hackers.

"Although the word 'hacker' may seem derisive to some," Levy writes in the preface, "it seems as if those people were either out-of-social nerds or 'laymen' who piled up messy 'non-standard' code." 'Programmers, and I don't think so. Beneath their humble appearance, they were pioneers, they were visionaries, they were adventurers, they were artists...they were the ones who had a clear insight into what makes computers revolutionary. tool people." The hacker ethic is like a manifesto. When Carmack lay in bed one night and read the last page of the book, he had only one thought in his mind: This is the world I should belong to! — Yes, he was a tech prodigy, but now he's stuck in this inexplicable house, going to some inexplicable school with no computers and no hacker culture. Carmack quickly met people who could relate to his exasperation.He found the Layton kids far more interesting than his old schoolmates in Kansas City, where the kids were more fringe and rebellious.Some of them were able to share Carmack's love of computers and games.Before long, Carmack became acquainted with these children.Together they discovered the BBS (Bulletin Board System: electronic bulletin board system).This is the prototype of the online community, an unnamed space, an underground world.Although there was an international computer network known as the Internet (Internet) in the 1970s, it was only used by governments and scientific research institutions such as defense departments and universities.The BBS is just the opposite of the Internet. It is a popular computer club for everyone, especially computer and game enthusiasts like Carmack. BBS was born around 1978.Two hackers, Ward Christensen and Randy Seuss, write the first software that transmits data between two computers over a phone line so that one computer can "Call" the other and exchange information.In the 1980s, BBS spread rapidly and formed the virtual community in the true sense ever, where people could swap or trade software and "talk" by posting information in the forum.Anyone with a microcomputer, plus a phone line and a modem, could run a BBS.This convenient and cheap system quickly spread around the world, in dormitory rooms, in apartments in buildings, and in computer labs.Some of them, like the WELL station in San Francisco (Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link), have become hotbeds for hackers and gamers. Carmack went to the BBS not only for games, but also for him to experience the most exciting hacker culture. There were also some illegal things. For example, he learned how to hijack telephone lines so that he could use long-distance services for free.He also saw MUD (Multi-User Dungeons), a text adventure game similar to "Dragon and Dungeons".In addition, he also saw explosives. For Carmack, dynamite is not just something exciting, he sees it as a kind of chemical engineering, a purely scientific experiment.When paired well, it can make things go bang bang bang bang.Soon he and his friends began to practice according to the recipe on the BBS. They scraped off the match head and mixed it with ammonium nitrate to get potassium nitrate, and then added sugar to get the smoke bomb.They also made thermite, a powerful plastic explosive, from ingredients they learned in their school science classes.They once ran under the bridge after school and blasted the concrete bricks of the piers.Finally one day, they felt that they should use this knowledge to do something more practical, such as getting a few computers. That night, Carmack and his friends groped to a nearby school they knew had a Macintosh.Carmack had just learned that thermite could be used to melt glass by adding some viscous substance like petroleum jelly; Just drilled in from here.One of them was having trouble, the hole was a little too small for him, so he reached in and opened the window, and managed to set off the siren connected to the nearby police station.They soon find themselves surrounded. Fourteen-year-old Carmack was sent for a psychiatric evaluation to test his statement.He walked into the room with the color on his shoulders.The interview didn't go well, and Carmack later learned what those people said about him: "This boy is like a body that can move around... and he doesn't know how to empathize with other people's feelings." During the interview, a man Playing with a pencil, he asked Carmack, "If you didn't get caught this time, do you think you would do something like this again?" "If I don't get caught this time," Carmack replied honestly, "Yeah, I think I'd do it again." The psychiatrist who later assessed Carmack told him: "You know, it's not wise to tell people that you're going to do it knowingly." "I said beforehand 'if I don't get caught this time'!" Carmack was at a loss. He was sentenced to a year's education and entered the "boys' home" in the city.Most of the kids there went in for the drugs, and Carmack for the Macintosh. ﹡﹡﹡﹡﹡﹡﹡﹡﹡﹡﹡﹡﹡﹡﹡﹡﹡﹡﹡﹡ Compared with the life in the "boys' home", the rigid and boring life I used to live with my mother was nothing at all.Here, everything goes according to a schedule: eat, bathe, rest, sleep.A little red flower is given to every chore done. Every morning, all the children are loaded into a truck and transported to the school for class. After school, they are taken back to the "Youth Home".Carmack's character began to become cold and insensitive, he became more and more cynical, and his desire to study technology grew day by day.His parents agreed to buy him a Macintosh, though they didn't know that Carmack had given some of the money to another "teenage home" kid just to hear an amusing anecdote. Carmack discovered that his favorite thing was graphic programming: creating bits of binary code and watching them animate the screen; the satisfaction of this immediate feedback was unavailable in other programming jobs.He read some books about 3D graphics, made a crude MTV logo made of only lines, and could spin around on the screen; he also realized that if he wanted to explore the world further, he had to make game.He's not one to sit around and wait for inspiration, he just picks up ideas from existing games. "Shadowforge" (Shadowforge) is his first game, which is similar to "Genesis" in many ways, but has a few very unique innovations, such as the character can attack in any direction.The battery company Nite Owl Productions bought it for $1,000, Carmack's first income, and he used the money to upgrade his Macintosh to an Apple II GS. While developing his brain power, Carmack also started exercising his body.He practiced weightlifting, judo, and wrestling.After school one day, a bully picks up Carmack's neighbors and turns out to be a punching bag for Carmack's judo practice.And other times, Carmack fought back with his wit, and someone, after forming a geology team with Carmack, asked Carmack to do all the homework alone, and Carmack agreed, and they ended up getting an F," How did you even get an F?" The guy sputtered, "You're the smartest guy here!"—Carmack did it on purpose, he sacrificed his grades to keep that goose from getting his way. Carmack's growing ego made him increasingly out of place at home, especially with his stepmother's esoteric beliefs and vegetarianism.With tension between him and his stepmother, his father rented the brothers an apartment away so they could live away from home after high school.On the first day he moved in, Carmack brought his Macintosh, taped magazine ads for the hard drive on the wall, and buried himself in writing about his game. One night in 1987, Carmack saw the ultimate game, the Holodeck that appeared at the beginning of the "Star Trek: The Next Generation" television series. Equipment, which can simulate an immersive and realistic environment, can be used for entertainment and rest, and can also be used for training.In this episode, when the door in front of the captain slowly opens to reveal a paradise tropical beach scene, Carmack is captivated.This is the virtual world, and we need to consider how to realize it. Carmack had graduated from high school, and his father had told him that he had an escrow fund that belonged to him and that he could withdraw the money when he was eighteen.And when he went to the bank, he learned that his mother had transferred all the money to her other account in Seattle. She still had the same idea: if one wants to enter the computer industry, one should first go to college—the last It's better like MIT, then get a degree, and then enter the company-preferably IBM.So she refused to let her son spend the money on things that seemed ridiculous to her—especially making games.Carmack wrote her a sharp letter: "I don't need you to tell me what to do anymore, why don't you realize it?!" But she didn't let go. Her reply was that since You are independent, so you should manage your own finances, the money can only be used for college - and she will only return the money to Carmack if her grades satisfy her, before that Carmack still has to pay for his tuition. In the fall of 1988, 18-year-old Carmack reluctantly enrolled at the University of Kansas, where his electives were all about computing.His life in school was very bleak. He had no contact with other students, and he didn't participate in any parties and social activities. What's worse, those courses were all about rote memorization. There was no challenge, no creativity. To Carmack, this wasn't just uninteresting, it was insulting.Carmack wrote to his professor on the back of a quiz: "Why can't you give us a project to work on? I can do anything you want me to do!" After two semesters of suffering, he dropped out. To make his mother even more angry, Carmack took a job as a hourly worker at a pizzeria and devoted himself to his second game, Wraith.The Apple II GS, like its predecessor, lacked a hard drive, so Carmack had to change floppy disks frequently, and that alone was a toss-up for him.When the game was finished, he crafted a description file: ghost "Devil's Resignation" For a long time, the island of Arathia has been bathed in peace. As the guardian of the Temple of Matilia in the city of Talot on the island, your job is simple and peaceful.But things began to change. An unknown force shook some believers of God Matilia. Corruption swept the entire island. It was rumored that a powerful undead ghost would give power and money to those who loyal to it. People surrendered one by one. Various monsters began to wander around the island. You, the last bastion of justice, are the last hope for the revival of Arathia Island. You prayed for strength and guidance in the night, and the god Matilia miraculously appeared.She solemnly entrusts you with the task of destroying the undead ghost, and she also asks you to beware of dangers along the way.The ghost's power comes from a magic bell, and the only way to get there is the crystal gate of Spark Castle, where the ghost guards a large number of guards. Starfire Castle is located on a small island to the northeast of Tarot City. Although it is not far away, some terrifying reefs prevent you from getting there by the usual means.All you know is that there are demons that keep coming to your present land, brainwashed by undead ghosts, but still full of greed in their hearts, if you can pay them enough money, they may even help you finish Task.God Matilia smiled and fled away, only her voice was still echoing: "Don't be afraid, be brave, my blessing protects you." You start to prepare for the task, but the people in the city are not very willing to help you, they want you to exchange money for equipment and magic scrolls.Oh, money, that's something you don't have, but the henchmen of the ghosts don't... Carmack sent the game to Nighthawk, the publisher of his previous game, Shade.They were hooked, and even though Ghost's graphics weren't all that great, still big chunks of color, it had more content than other games, and it lasted longer.Although "Ghost" did not sell as well as "Contrast", Carmack still got $2,000.He used the money for another of his hobbies: modifying his brown Jaguar (MGB). Although not yet a true freelancer, Carmack had grown fond of the lifestyle.He can spend his time freely, sleep as late as he wants, and best of all, he doesn't have to be bossed around or answered questions.He'd love to spend his life writing programs, tinkering with cars, and playing Dungeons and Dragons—it's as simple as that.He just needs to get serious about making more games. Not long after he saw another publisher, Floppy Disk in Shreveport, Louisiana, on the back of a computer magazine.He sent a tennis game with realistic ball flight paths, and the game was immediately adopted, and the editors told Carmack to keep submitting it to them.At this time, Carmack was already a very shrewd businessman. Inspired by the "Genesis" series, he suggested to the editor that instead of making a single game, it is better to make a trilogy-so that he can triple his income. . "Floppy Disk" magazine accepted his proposal and signed him to a trilogy role-playing game called "Dark Designs" (Dark Designs). Carmack also discovered a new way to make money: converting his Macintosh games to a machine called the IBM-PC.He knew next to nothing about the fledgling system, but it was a programming challenge for him.He drove to a store to pull back a PC, and a month later he not only sent Floppy Disk a copy of Dark Ideas on the Mac, but also a converted, or "ported" PC version.Working through the night, Carmack had become adept at releasing three versions simultaneously: Apple, Apple II GS, PC, and Floppy would buy all of them. Every time a new game comes out, the editors of "Floppy Disk" will ask Carmack to come to them for an interview. They wonder what kind of kid this is, who can teach himself a brand new programming in half the time of normal people. language?Carmack turned them down without hesitation at first—why go to work for the company?That would just mess up his life.But in the end, he was impressed by the persistence of the editor, and he just added some new equipment to the Jaguar, which may be a reason to travel far. After all these years alone, Carmack hardly expected to learn anything from others.