Hackers

Hackers

Steven Levy

Beijing • Cambridge • Farnham • Köln • Sebastopol • Taipei • Tokyo

Hackers
by Steven Levy

Copyright © 2010 Steven Levy. All rights reserved.

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Contents

CAMBRIDGE: The Fifties and Sixties

Preface . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ix
Who’s Who: The Wizards and Their Machines . . . . . . . . . . . xi

Part One. TRUE HACKERS

CAMBRIDGE: The Fifties and Sixties

Chapter 1
The Tech Model Railroad Club . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
Chapter 2
The Hacker Ethic . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27
Chapter 3
Spacewar . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39
Chapter 4
Greenblatt and Gosper . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61
Chapter 5
The Midnight Computer Wiring Society . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 83
Chapter 6
Winners and Losers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 101
Chapter 7
Life . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 123
vi Contents

Part Two. HARDWARE HACKERS

NORTHERN CALIFORNIA: The Seventies

Chapter 8
Revolt in 2100 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 151
Chapter 9
Every Man a God . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 179
Chapter 10
The Homebrew Computer Club . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 201
Chapter 11
Tiny BASIC . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 227
Chapter 12
Woz . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 249
Chapter 13
Secrets . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 275

Part Three. GAME HACKERS

THE SIERRAS: The Eighties

Chapter 14
The Wizard and the Princess . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 289
Chapter 15
The Brotherhood . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 313
Chapter 16
The Third Generation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 325
Chapter 17
Summer Camp . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 345
Chapter 18
Frogger . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 365
Contents vii

Chapter 19
Applefest . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 389
Chapter 20
Wizard vs. Wizards . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 413

Part Four. THE LAST OF THE TRUE HACKERS

CAMBRIDGE: 1983

The Last of the True Hackers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 437

Afterword: Ten Years After . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 455
Afterword: 2010 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 463
Notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 479
Acknowledgments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 485

Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 489
 Preface

I was first drawn to writing about hackers—those computer pro-

grammers and designers who regard computing as the most
important thing in the world—because they were such fascinating
people. Though some in the field used the term “hacker” as a
form of derision, implying that hackers were either nerdy social
outcasts or “unprofessional” programmers who wrote dirty,
“nonstandard” computer code, I found them quite different.
Beneath their often unimposing exteriors, they were adventurers,
visionaries, risk-takers, artists . . . and the ones who most clearly
saw why the computer was a truly revolutionary tool. Among
themselves, they knew how far one could go by immersion into
the deep concentration of the hacking mind-set: one could go infi-
nitely far. I came to understand why true hackers consider the
term an appellation of honor rather than a pejorative.
As I talked to these digital explorers, ranging from those who
tamed multimillion-dollar machines in the 1950s to contempo-
rary young wizards who mastered computers in their suburban
bedrooms, I found a common element, a common philosophy that
seemed tied to the elegantly flowing logic of the computer itself. It
was a philosophy of sharing, openness, decentralization, and get-
ting your hands on machines at any cost to improve the machines
and to improve the world. This Hacker Ethic is their gift to us:
something with value even to those of us with no interest at all in
computers.
x

It is an ethic seldom codified but embodied instead in the behavior

of hackers themselves. I would like to introduce you to these
people who not only saw, but lived the magic in the computer and
worked to liberate the magic so it could benefit us all. These
people include the true hackers of the MIT artificial intelligence
lab in the fifties and sixties; the populist, less sequestered hard-
ware hackers in California in the seventies; and the young game
hackers who made their mark in the personal computer of the
eighties.
This is in no way a formal history of the computer era, or of the
particular arenas I focus upon. Indeed, many of the people you
will meet here are not the most famous names (certainly not the
most wealthy) in the annals of computing. Instead, these are the
backroom geniuses who understood the machine at its most pro-
found levels and presented us with a new kind of lifestyle and a
new kind of hero.
Hackers like Richard Greenblatt, Bill Gosper, Lee Felsenstein, and
John Harris are the spirit and soul of computing itself. I believe
their story—their vision, their intimacy with the machine itself,
their experiences inside their peculiar world, and their sometimes
dramatic, sometimes absurd “interfaces” with the outside world—
is the real story of the computer revolution.
 Who’s Who: The Wizards
and Their Machines

Bob Albrecht Founder of People’s Computer Company who took

visceral pleasure in exposing youngsters to computers.
Altair 8800 The pioneering microcomputer that galvanized hard-
ware hackers. Building this kit made you learn hacking. Then you
tried to figure out what to do with it.
Apple II Steve Wozniak’s friendly, flaky, good-looking computer,
wildly successful and the spark and soul of a thriving industry.
Atari 800 This home computer gave great graphics to game
hackers like John Harris, though the company that made it was
loath to tell you how it worked.
Bob and Carolyn Box World-record-holding gold prospectors
turned software stars, working for Sierra On-Line.
Doug Carlston Corporate lawyer who chucked it all to form the
Brøderbund software company.
Bob Davis Left a job in a liquor store to become the bestselling
author of the Sierra On-Line computer game Ulysses and the
Golden Fleece. Success was his downfall.
Peter Deutsch Bad in sports, brilliant at math, Peter was still in
short pants when he stumbled on the TX-0 at MIT—and hacked it
along with the masters.
xii Who’s Who: The Wizards and Their Machines

Steve Dompier Homebrew member who first made Altair sing,

and later wrote the Target game on the Sol, which entranced Tom
Snyder.
John Draper The notorious “Captain Crunch” who fearlessly
explored phone systems, was jailed, and later hacked microcom-
puters. Cigarettes made him violent.
Mark Duchaineau The young Dungeonmaster who copy-protected
On-Line’s disks at his whim.
Chris Espinosa Fourteen-year-old follower of Steve Wozniak and
early Apple employee.
Lee Felsenstein Former “military editor” of the Berkeley Barb and
hero of an imaginary science-fiction novel, he designed computers
with a “junkyard” approach and was a central figure in Bay Area
hardware hacking in the seventies.
Ed Fredkin Gentle founder of Information International, he
thought himself the world’s greatest programmer until he met
Stew Nelson. Father figure to hackers.
Gordon French Silver-haired hardware hacker whose garage held
not cars but his homebrewed Chicken Hawk computer, then held
the first Homebrew Computer Club meeting.
Richard Garriott Astronaut’s son who, as Lord British, created the
Ultima world on computer disks.
Bill Gates Cocky wizard and Harvard dropout who wrote Altair
BASIC, and complained when hackers copied it.
Bill Gosper Horowitz of computer keyboards, master math and
LIFE hacker at MIT AI lab, guru of the Hacker Ethic, and stu-
dent of Chinese restaurant menus.
Richard Greenblatt Single-minded, unkempt, prolific, and canon-
ical MIT hacker who went into night phase so often that he
zorched his academic career. The hacker’s hacker.
John Harris The young Atari 800 game hacker who became Sierra
On-Line’s star programmer, but yearned for female companionship.
IBM PC IBM’s entry into the personal computer market, which
amazingly included a bit of the Hacker Ethic and took over.
Who’s Who: The Wizards and Their Machines xiii

IBM 704 IBM was The Enemy and this was its machine, the
Hulking Giant computer in MIT’s Building 26. Later modified into
the IBM 709, then the IBM 7090. Batch-processed and intolerable.
Jerry Jewell Vietnam vet turned programmer who founded Sirius
Software.
Steven Jobs Visionary, beaded, nonhacking youngster who took
Wozniak’s Apple II, made lots of deals, and formed a company
that would make a billion dollars.
Tom Knight At sixteen, an MIT hacker who would name the
Incompatible Time-sharing System. Later, a Greenblatt nemesis
over the LISP machine schism.
Alan Kotok The chubby MIT student from Jersey who worked
under the rail layout at TMRC, learned the phone system at
Western Electric, and became a legendary TX-0 and PDP-1 hacker.
Efrem Lipkin Hacker-activist from New York who loved
machines but hated their uses. Cofounded Community Memory;
friend of Felsenstein.
LISP Machine The ultimate hacker computer, invented mostly by
Greenblatt and subject of a bitter dispute at MIT.
“Uncle” John McCarthy Absentminded but brilliant MIT (later
Stanford) professor who helped pioneer computer chess, artificial
intelligence, LISP.
Bob Marsh Berkeley-ite and Homebrewer who shared garage with
Felsenstein and founded Processor Technology, which made the
Sol computer.
Roger Melen Homebrewer who cofounded Cromemco company
to make circuit boards for Altair. His “Dazzler” played LIFE pro-
gram on his kitchen table.
Louis Merton Pseudonym for the AI chess hacker whose tendency
to go catatonic brought the hacker community together.
Jude Milhon Met Lee Felsenstein through a classified ad in the
Berkeley Barb and became more than a friend—a member of the
Community Memory collective.
Marvin Minsky Playful and brilliant MIT professor who headed
AI lab and allowed the hackers to run free.
xiv Who’s Who: The Wizards and Their Machines

Fred Moore Vagabond pacifist who hated money, loved tech-

nology, and cofounded Homebrew Club.
Stewart Nelson Buck-toothed, diminutive, but fiery AI lab hacker
who connected the PDP-1 computer to hack the phone system.
Later cofounded Systems Concepts company.
Ted Nelson Self-described “innovator” and noted curmudgeon
who self-published the influential Computer Lib book.
Russell Noftsker Harried administrator of MIT AI lab in late six-
ties; later president of Symbolics company.
Adam Osborne Bangkok-born publisher-turned-computer-
manufacturer who considered himself a philosopher. Founded
Osborne Computer Company to make “adequate” machines.
PDP-1 Digital Equipment’s first minicomputer and in 1961 an
interactive godsend to the MIT hackers and a slap in the face to
IBM fascism.
PDP-6 Designed in part by Kotok, this mainframe computer was
the cornerstone of the AI lab, with its gorgeous instruction set and
sixteen sexy registers.
Tom Pittman The religious Homebrew hacker who lost his wife
but kept the faith with his Tiny BASIC.
Ed Roberts Enigmatic founder of MITS company who shook the
world with his Altair computer. He wanted to help people build
mental pyramids.
Steve (Slug) Russell McCarthy’s “coolie” who hacked the
Spacewar program, first videogame, on the PDP-1. Never made a
dime from it.
Peter Samson MIT hacker (one of the first), who loved systems,
trains, TX-0, music, parliamentary procedure, pranks, and
hacking.
Bob Saunders Jolly, balding TMRC hacker who married early,
hacked til late at night eating “lemon gunkies,” and mastered the
“CBS strategy” on Spacewar.
Warren Schwader Big blond hacker from rural Wisconsin who
went from the assembly line to software stardom, but couldn’t
reconcile the shift with his devotion to Jehovah’s Witnesses.
Who’s Who: The Wizards and Their Machines xv

David Silver Left school at fourteen to be mascot of AI lab; maker

of illicit keys and builder of a tiny robot that did the impossible.
Dan Sokol Long-haired prankster who reveled in revealing techno-
logical secrets at Homebrew Club. Helped “liberate” Altair BASIC
program on paper tape.
Sol Computer Lee Felsenstein’s terminal-and-computer, built in
two frantic months, almost the computer that turned things
around. Almost wasn’t enough.
Les Solomon Editor of Popular Electronics, the puller of strings
who set the computer revolution into motion.
Marty Spergel The Junk Man, the Homebrew member who sup-
plied circuits and cables and could make you a deal for anything.
Richard Stallman The Last of the Hackers, he vowed to defend the
principles of hackerism to the bitter end. Remained at MIT until
there was no one to eat Chinese food with.
Jeff Stephenson Thirty-year-old martial arts veteran and hacker
who was astounded that joining Sierra On-Line meant enrolling in
Summer Camp.
Jay Sullivan Maddeningly calm wizard-level programmer at Infor-
matics who impressed Ken Williams by knowing the meaning of
the word “any.”
Dick Sunderland Chalk-complexioned MBA who believed that
firm managerial bureaucracy was a worthy goal, but as president
of Sierra On-Line found that hackers didn’t think that way.
Gerry Sussman Young MIT hacker branded “loser” because he
smoked a pipe and “munged” his programs; later became
“winner” by algorithmic magic.
Margot Tommervik With her husband Al, long-haired Margot
parlayed her gameshow winnings into a magazine that deified the
Apple Computer.
Tom Swift Terminal Lee Felsenstein’s legendary, never-to-be-built
computer terminal, which would give the user ultimate leave to
get his hands on the world.
TX-0 Filled a small room, but in the late fifties, this $3 million
machine was world’s first personal computer—for the community
of MIT hackers that formed around it.
xvi Who’s Who: The Wizards and Their Machines

Jim Warren Portly purveyor of “techno-gossip” at Homebrew, he

was first editor of hippie-styled Dr. Dobbs Journal, later started
the lucrative Computer Faire.
Randy Wigginton Fifteen-year-old member of Steve Wozniak’s
kiddie corps, he helped Woz trundle the Apple II to Homebrew.
Still in high school when he became Apple’s first software
employee.
Ken Williams Arrogant and brilliant young programmer who saw
the writing on the CRT and started Sierra On-Line to make a killing
and improve society by selling games for the Apple computer.
Roberta Williams Ken Williams’ timid wife who rediscovered her
own creativity by writing Mystery House, the first of her many
bestselling computer games.
Stephen “Woz” Wozniak Openhearted, technologically daring
hardware hacker from San Jose suburbs, Woz built the Apple
Computer for the pleasure of himself and friends.
 PART ONE

0. TRUE HACKERS

Cambridge:
0.

The Fifties and Sixties

 Chapter 1 CHAPTER 1

The Tech Model

Railroad Club

Just why Peter Samson was wandering around in Building 26 in

the middle of the night is a matter that he would find difficult to
explain. Some things are not spoken. If you were like the people
whom Peter Samson was coming to know and befriend in this, his
freshman year at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the
winter of 1958–59, no explanation would be required. Wan-
dering around the labyrinth of laboratories and storerooms,
searching for the secrets of telephone switching in machine rooms,
tracing paths of wires or relays in subterranean steam tunnels—
for some, it was common behavior, and there was no need to jus-
tify the impulse, when confronted with a closed door with an
unbearably intriguing noise behind it, to open the door uninvited.
And then, if there was no one to physically bar access to whatever
was making that intriguing noise, to touch the machine, start
flicking switches and noting responses, and eventually to loosen a
screw, unhook a template, jiggle some diodes, and tweak a few
connections. Peter Samson and his friends had grown up with a
specific relationship to the world, wherein things had meaning
only if you found out how they worked. And how would you go
about that if not by getting your hands on them?
It was in the basement of Building 26 that Samson and his friends
discovered the EAM room. Building 26 was a long glass-and-steel
structure, one of MIT’s newer buildings, contrasting with the vener-
able pillared structures that fronted the Institute on Massachusetts
4 Chapter 1

Avenue. In the basement of this building void of personality, the

EAM room. Electronic Accounting Machinery. A room that
housed machines that ran like computers.
Not many people in 1959 had even seen a computer, let alone
touched one. Samson, a wiry, curly-haired redhead with a way of
extending his vowels so that it would seem he was racing through
lists of possible meanings of statements in mid-word, had viewed
computers on his visits to MIT from his hometown of Lowell,
Massachusetts, less than thirty miles from campus. This made him
a “Cambridge urchin,” one of dozens of science-crazy high
schoolers in the region who were drawn, as if by gravitational
pull, to the Cambridge campus. He had even tried to rig up his
own computer with discarded parts of old pinball machines: they
were the best source of logic elements he could find.
Logic elements: the term seems to encapsulate what drew Peter
Samson, son of a mill machinery repairman, to electronics. The
subject made sense. When you grow up with an insatiable curi-
osity as to how things work, the delight you find upon discov-
ering something as elegant as circuit logic, where all connections
have to complete their loops, is profoundly thrilling. Peter
Samson, who early on appreciated the mathematical simplicity of
these things, could recall seeing a television show on Boston’s
public TV channel, WGBH, which gave a rudimentary introduc-
tion to programming a computer in its own language. It fired his
imagination; to Peter Samson, a computer was surely like
Aladdin’s lamp—rub it, and it would do your bidding. So he tried
to learn more about the field, built machines of his own, entered
science project competitions and contests, and went to the place
that people of his ilk aspired to: MIT. The repository of the very
brightest of those weird high school kids with owl-like glasses and
underdeveloped pectorals who dazzled math teachers and flunked
PE, who dreamed not of scoring on prom night, but of getting to
the finals of the General Electric Science Fair competition. MIT,
where he would wander the hallways at two o’clock in the
morning, looking for something interesting, and where he would
indeed discover something that would help draw him deeply into a
new form of creative process and a new lifestyle, and would put
him into the forefront of a society envisioned only by a few science-
fiction writers of mild disrepute. He would discover a computer
that he could play with.
The Tech Model Railroad Club 5

The EAM room that Samson had chanced upon was loaded with
large keypunch machines the size of squat file cabinets. No one
was protecting them: the room was staffed only by day, when a
select group who had attained official clearance were privileged
enough to submit long manila cards to operators who would then
use these machines to punch holes in them according to what data
the privileged ones wanted entered on the cards. A hole in the card
would represent some instruction to the computer, telling it to put
a piece of data somewhere, or perform a function on a piece of
data, or move a piece of data from one place to another. An entire
stack of these cards made one computer program, a program
being a series of instructions which yielded some expected result,
just as the instructions in a recipe, when precisely followed, lead
to a cake. Those cards would be taken to yet another operator
upstairs who would feed the cards into a “reader” that would
note where the holes were and dispatch this information to the
IBM 704 computer on the first floor of Building 26: the Hulking
Giant.
The IBM 704 cost several million dollars, took up an entire room,
needed constant attention from a cadre of professional machine
operators, and required special air conditioning so that the
glowing vacuum tubes inside it would not heat up to data-
destroying temperatures. When the air conditioning broke down—
a fairly common occurrence—a loud gong would sound, and three
engineers would spring from a nearby office to frantically take
covers off the machine so its innards wouldn’t melt. All these
people in charge of punching cards, feeding them into readers, and
pressing buttons and switches on the machine were what was
commonly called a Priesthood, and those privileged enough to
submit data to those most holy priests were the official acolytes. It
was an almost ritualistic exchange.
Acolyte: Oh machine, would you accept my offer of information
so you may run my program and perhaps give me a computation?

Priest (on behalf of the machine): We will try. We promise

nothing.

As a general rule, even these most privileged of acolytes were not

allowed direct access to the machine itself, and they would not be
able to see for hours, sometimes for days, the results of the
machine’s ingestion of their “batch” of cards.
6 Chapter 1

This was something Samson knew, and of course it frustrated the

hell out of Samson, who wanted to get at the damn machine. For
this was what life was all about.
What Samson did not know, and was delighted to discover, was
that the EAM room also had a particular keypunch machine
called the 407. Not only could it punch cards, but it could also
read cards, sort them, and print them on listings. No one seemed
to be guarding these machines, which were computers, sort of. Of
course, using them would be no picnic: one needed to actually
wire up what was called a plug board, a two-inch-by-two-inch
plastic square with a mass of holes in it. If you put hundreds of
wires through the holes in a certain order, you would get some-
thing that looked like a rat’s nest but would fit into this electro-
mechanical machine and alter its personality. It could do what you
wanted it to do.
So, without any authorization whatsoever, that is what Peter
Samson set out to do, along with a few friends of his from an MIT
organization with a special interest in model railroading. It was a
casual, unthinking step into a science-fiction future, but that was
typical of the way that an odd subculture was pulling itself up by
its bootstraps and growing to underground prominence—to
become a culture that would be the impolite, unsanctioned soul of
computerdom. It was among the first computer hacker escapades
of the Tech Model Railroad Club, or TMRC.

• • • • • • • •

Peter Samson had been a member of the Tech Model Railroad

Club since his first week at MIT in the fall of 1958. The first event
that entering MIT freshmen attended was a traditional welcoming
lecture, the same one that had been given for as long as anyone at
MIT could remember. Look at the person to your left . . . look at
the person to your right . . . one of you three will not graduate
from the Institute. The intended effect of the speech was to create
that horrid feeling in the back of the collective freshman throat that
signaled unprecedented dread. All their lives, these freshmen
had been almost exempt from academic pressure. The exemption had
been earned by virtue of brilliance. Now each of them had a
The Tech Model Railroad Club 7

person to the right and a person to the left who was just as smart.
Maybe even smarter.
But to certain students this was no challenge at all. To these
youngsters, classmates were perceived in a sort of friendly haze:
maybe they would be of assistance in the consuming quest to find
out how things worked and then to master them. There were
enough obstacles to learning already—why bother with stupid
things like brown-nosing teachers and striving for grades? To stu-
dents like Peter Samson, the quest meant more than the degree.
Sometime after the lecture came Freshman Midway. All the
campus organizations—special-interest groups, fraternities, and
such—put up booths in a large gymnasium to try to recruit new
members. The group that snagged Peter was the Tech Model Rail-
road Club. Its members, bright-eyed and crew-cut upperclassmen
who spoke with the spasmodic cadences of people who want
words out of the way in a hurry, boasted a spectacular display of
HO gauge trains they had in a permanent clubroom in Building
20. Peter Samson had long been fascinated by trains, especially
subways. So he went along on the walking tour to the building, a
shingle-clad temporary structure built during World War II. The
hallways were cavernous, and even though the clubroom was on
the second floor, it had the dank, dimly lit feel of a basement.
The clubroom was dominated by the huge train layout. It just
about filled the room, and if you stood in the little control area
called “the notch” you could see a little town, a little industrial
area, a tiny working trolley line, a papier-mâché mountain, and of
course a lot of trains and tracks. The trains were meticulously
crafted to resemble their full-scale counterparts, and they chugged
along the twists and turns of the track with picture-book perfection.
And then Peter Samson looked underneath the chest-high boards
that held the layout. It took his breath away. Underneath this
layout was a more massive matrix of wires and relays and
crossbar switches than Peter Samson had ever dreamed existed.
There were neat regimental lines of switches, achingly regular
rows of dull bronze relays, and a long, rambling tangle of red,
blue, and yellow wires—twisting and twirling like a rainbow-
colored explosion of Einstein’s hair. It was an incredibly compli-
cated system, and Peter Samson vowed to find out how it worked.
8 Chapter 1

The Tech Model Railroad Club awarded its members a key to the
clubroom after they logged forty hours of work on the layout.
Freshman Midway had been on a Friday. By Monday, Peter
Samson had his key.

• • • • • • • •

There were two factions of TMRC. Some members loved the idea
of spending their time building and painting replicas of certain
trains with historical and emotional value, or creating realistic
scenery for the layout. This was the knife-and-paintbrush contin-
gent, and it subscribed to railroad magazines and booked the club
for trips on aging train lines. The other faction centered on the
Signals and Power Subcommittee of the club, and it cared far
more about what went on under the layout. This was The System,
which worked something like a collaboration between Rube Gold-
berg and Wernher von Braun, and it was constantly being
improved, revamped, perfected, and sometimes “gronked”—in
club jargon, screwed up. S&P people were obsessed with the way
The System worked, its increasing complexities, how any change
you made would affect other parts, and how you could put those
relationships between the parts to optimal use.
Many of the parts for The System had been donated by the
Western Electric College Gift Plan, directly from the phone com-
pany. The club’s faculty advisor was also in charge of the campus
phone system, and had seen to it that sophisticated phone equip-
ment was available for the model railroaders. Using that equip-
ment as a starting point, the railroaders had devised a scheme that
enabled several people to control trains at once, even if the trains
were at different parts of the same track. Using dials appropriated
from telephones, the TMRC “engineers” could specify which
block of track they wanted control of, and run a train from there.
This was done by using several types of phone company relays,
including crossbar executors and step switches that let you actu-
ally hear the power being transferred from one block to another
by an otherworldly chunka-chunka-chunka sound.
It was the S&P group that devised this fiendishly ingenious
scheme, and it was the S&P group that harbored the kind of rest-
less curiosity that led them to root around campus buildings in
The Tech Model Railroad Club 9

search of ways to get their hands on computers. They were life-

long disciples of a Hands-On Imperative. Head of S&P was an
upperclassman named Bob Saunders, with ruddy, bulbous fea-
tures, an infectious laugh, and a talent for switch gear. As a child
in Chicago, he had built a high-frequency transformer for a high
school project; it was his six-foot-high version of a Tesla coil,
something devised by an engineer in the 1800s that was supposed
to send out furious waves of electrical power. Saunders said his
coil project managed to blow out television reception for blocks
around. Another person who gravitated to S&P was Alan Kotok,
a plump, chinless, thick-spectacled New Jerseyite in Samson’s
class. Kotok’s family could recall him, at age three, prying a plug
out of a wall with a screwdriver and causing a hissing shower of
sparks to erupt. When he was six, he was building and wiring
lamps. In high school he had once gone on a tour of the Mobil
Research Lab in nearby Haddonfield and saw his first computer—
the exhilaration of that experience helped him decide to enter
MIT. In his freshman year, he earned a reputation as one of
TMRC’s most capable S&P people.
The S&P people were the ones who spent Saturdays going to Eli
Heffron’s junkyard in Somerville scrounging for parts, who would
spend hours on their backs resting on little rolling chairs they
called “bunkies” to get underneath tight spots in the switching
system, who would work through the night making the wholly
unauthorized connection between the TMRC phone and the East
Campus. Technology was their playground.
The core members hung out at the club for hours, constantly
improving The System, arguing about what could be done next,
and developing a jargon of their own that seemed incomprehen-
sible to outsiders who might chance on these teen-aged fanatics,
with their checked short-sleeve shirts, pencils in their pockets,
chino pants, and, always, a bottle of Coca-Cola by their side.
(TMRC purchased its own Coke machine for the then forbidding
sum of $165; at a tariff of five cents a bottle, the outlay was
replaced in three months; to facilitate sales, Saunders built a
change machine for Coke buyers that was still in use a decade
later.) When a piece of equipment wasn’t working, it was
“losing”; when a piece of equipment was ruined, it was “munged”
(mashed until no good); the two desks in the corner of the room
were not called the office, but the “orifice”; one who insisted on
10 Chapter 1

studying for courses was a “tool”; garbage was called “cruft”; and
a project undertaken or a product built not solely to fulfill some
constructive goal, but with some wild pleasure taken in mere
involvement, was called a “hack.”
This latter term may have been suggested by ancient MIT lingo—the
word “hack” had long been used to describe the elaborate college
pranks that MIT students would regularly devise, such as covering
the dome that overlooked the campus with reflecting foil. But as
the TMRC people used the word, there was serious respect
implied. While someone might call a clever connection between
relays a “mere hack,” it would be understood that, to qualify as a
hack, the feat must be imbued with innovation, style, and tech-
nical virtuosity. Even though one might self-deprecatingly say he
was “hacking away at The System” (much as an axe-wielder
hacks at logs), the artistry with which one hacked was recognized
to be considerable.
The most productive people working on S&P called themselves
“hackers” with great pride. Within the confines of the clubroom
in Building 20, and of the “Tool Room” (where some study and
many techno bull sessions took place), they had unilaterally
endowed themselves with the heroic attributes of Icelandic legend.
This is how Peter Samson saw himself and his friends in a Sandburg-
esque poem in the club newsletter:
Switch Thrower for the World,

Fuze Tester, Maker of Routes,

Player with the Railroads and the System’s Advance Chopper;

Grungy, hairy, sprawling,

Machine of the Point-Function Line-o-lite:

They tell me you are wicked and I believe them; for I have
seen your painted light bulbs under the lucite luring the system
coolies . . .

Under the tower, dust all over the place, hacking with bifur-
cated springs

Hacking even as an ignorant freshman acts who has never lost

occupancy and has dropped out
The Tech Model Railroad Club 11

Hacking the M-Boards, for under its locks are the switches, and
under its control the advance around the layout,

Hacking!

Hacking the grungy, hairy, sprawling hacks of youth; uncabled,

frying diodes, proud to be Switchthrower, Fuze-tester, Maker of
Routes, Player with Railroads, and Advance Chopper to the
System.

Whenever they could, Samson and the others would slip off to the
EAM room with their plug boards, trying to use the machine to
keep track of the switches underneath the layout. Just as impor-
tant, they were seeing what the electromechanical counter could
do, taking it to its limit.
That spring of 1959, a new course was offered at MIT. It was the
first course in programming a computer that freshmen could take.
The teacher was a distant man with a wild shock of hair and an
equally unruly beard—John McCarthy. A master mathematician,
McCarthy was a classically absent-minded professor; stories
abounded about his habit of suddenly answering a question hours,
sometimes even days after it was first posed to him. He would
approach you in the hallway and with no salutation would begin
speaking in his robotically precise diction, as if the pause in con-
versation had been only a fraction of a second, and not a week.
Most likely, his belated response would be brilliant.
McCarthy was one of a very few people working in an entirely
new form of scientific inquiry with computers. The volatile and
controversial nature of his field of study was obvious from the
very arrogance of the name that McCarthy had bestowed upon it:
Artificial Intelligence. This man actually thought that computers
could be smart. Even at such a science-intensive place as MIT,
most people considered the thought ridiculous: they considered
computers to be useful, if somewhat absurdly expensive, tools for
number-crunching huge calculations and for devising missile
defense systems (as MIT’s largest computer, the Whirlwind, had
done for the early-warning SAGE system), but scoffed at the
thought that computers themselves could actually be a scientific
field of study. Computer Science did not officially exist at MIT in
the late fifties, and McCarthy and his fellow computer specialists
worked in the Electrical Engineering Department, which offered
12 Chapter 1

the course, No. 641, that Kotok, Samson, and a few other TRMC
members took that spring.
McCarthy had started a mammoth program on the IBM 704—the
Hulking Giant—that would give it the extraordinary ability to
play chess. To critics of the budding field of Artificial Intelligence,
this was just one example of the boneheaded optimism of people
like John McCarthy. But McCarthy had a certain vision of what
computers could do, and playing chess was only the beginning.
All fascinating stuff, but not the vision that was driving Kotok and
Samson and the others. They wanted to learn how to work the
damn machines, and while this new programming language called
LISP that McCarthy was talking about in 641 was interesting, it
was not nearly as interesting as the act of programming, or that
fantastic moment when you got your printout back from the
Priesthood—word from the source itself!—and could then spend
hours poring over the results of the program, what had gone
wrong with it, how it could be improved. The TMRC hackers
were devising ways to get into closer contact with the IBM 704,
which soon was upgraded to a newer model called the 709. By
hanging out at the Computation Center in the wee hours of the
morning, and by getting to know the Priesthood, and by bowing
and scraping the requisite number of times, people like Kotok
were eventually allowed to push a few buttons on the machine
and watch the lights as it worked.
There were secrets to those IBM machines that had been painstak-
ingly learned by some of the older people at MIT with access to
the 704 and friends among the Priesthood. Amazingly, a few of
these programmers, grad students working with McCarthy, had
even written a program that utilized one of the rows of tiny lights:
the lights would be lit in such an order that it looked like a little
ball was being passed from right to left: if an operator hit a switch
at just the right time, the motion of the lights could be reversed—
computer Ping-Pong! This obviously was the kind of thing that
you’d show off to impress your peers, who would then take a look
at the actual program you had written to see how it was done.
To top the program, someone else might try to do the same thing
with fewer instructions—a worthy endeavor, since there was so
little room in the small “memory” of the computers of those days
that not many instructions could fit into them. John McCarthy
The Tech Model Railroad Club 13

had once noticed that his graduate students who loitered around
the 704 would work over their computer programs to get the most
out of the fewest instructions, and get the program compressed so
that fewer cards would need to be fed to the machine. Shaving off
an instruction or two was almost an obsession with them.
McCarthy compared these students to ski bums. They got the
same kind of primal thrill from “maximizing code” as fanatic
skiers got from swooshing frantically down a hill. So the practice
of taking a computer program and trying to cut off instructions
without affecting the outcome came to be called “program bum-
ming,” and you would often hear people mumbling things like,
“Maybe I can bum a few instructions out and get the octal correc-
tion card loader down to three cards instead of four.”
In 1959, McCarthy was turning his interest from chess to a new
way of talking to the computer, the whole new “language” called
LISP. Alan Kotok and his friends were more than eager to take
over the chess project. Working on the batch-processed IBM, they
embarked on the gargantuan project of teaching the 704, and later
the 709, and even after that its replacement the 7090, how to play
the game of kings. Eventually Kotok’s group became the largest
users of computer time in the entire MIT Computation Center.
Still, working with the IBM machine was frustrating. There was
nothing worse than the long wait between the time you handed in
your cards and the time your results were handed back to you. If
you had misplaced as much as one letter in one instruction, the pro-
gram would crash, and you would have to start the whole process
over again. It went hand in hand with the stifling proliferation of
goddamn rules that permeated the atmosphere of the Computation
Center. Most of the rules were designed to keep crazy young com-
puter fans like Samson and Kotok and Saunders physically distant
from the machine itself. The most rigid rule of all was that no one
should be able to actually touch or tamper with the machine itself.
This, of course, was what those S&P people were dying to do
more than anything else in the world, and the restrictions drove
them mad.
One priest—a low-level sub-priest, really—on the late-night shift
was particularly nasty in enforcing this rule, so Samson devised a
suitable revenge. While poking around at Eli’s electronic junk
shop one day, he chanced upon an electrical board precisely like
14 Chapter 1

the kind of board holding the clunky vacuum tubes that resided
inside the IBM. One night, sometime before 4 A.M., this
particular sub-priest stepped out for a minute; when he returned,
Samson told him that the machine wasn’t working, but they’d
found the trouble—and held up the totally smashed module from
the old 704 he’d gotten at Eli’s.
The sub-priest could hardly get the words out. “W-where did you
get that?”
Samson, who had wide green eyes that could easily look mani-
acal, slowly pointed to an open place on the machine rack where,
of course, no board had ever been, but the space still looked sadly
bare.
The sub-priest gasped. He made faces that indicated his bowels
were about to give out. He whimpered exhortations to the deity.
Visions, no doubt, of a million-dollar deduction from his pay-
check began flashing before him. Only after his supervisor, a high
priest with some understanding of the mentality of these young
wiseguys from the Model Railroad Club, came and explained the
situation did he calm down.
He was not the last administrator to feel the wrath of a hacker
thwarted in the quest for access.

• • • • • • • •

One day a former TMRC member who was now on the MIT fac-
ulty paid a visit to the clubroom. His name was Jack Dennis.
When he had been an undergraduate in the early 1950s, he had
worked furiously underneath the layout. Dennis lately had been
working a computer that MIT had just received from Lincoln Lab,
a military development laboratory affiliated with the Institute. The
computer was called the TX-0, and it was one of the first transistor-
run computers in the world. Lincoln Lab had used it specifically to
test a giant computer called the TX-2, which had a memory so
complex that only with this specially built little brother could its
ills be capably diagnosed. Now that its original job was over, the
three-million-dollar TX-0 had been shipped over to the Institute
on “long-term loan,” and apparently no one at Lincoln Lab had
The Tech Model Railroad Club 15

marked a calendar with a return date. Dennis asked the S&P

people at TMRC whether they would like to see it.
Hey you nuns! Would you like to meet the Pope?
The TX-0 was in Building 26, in the second-floor Research Labo-
ratory of Electronics (RLE), directly above the first-floor Compu-
tation Center, which housed the hulking IBM 704. The RLE lab
resembled the control room of an antique spaceship. The TX-0, or
Tixo, as it was sometimes called, was for its time a midget
machine, since it was one of the first computers to use finger-size
transistors instead of hand-size vacuum tubes. Still, it took up
much of the room, along with its fifteen tons of supporting air-
conditioning equipment. The TX-0 workings were mounted on
several tall, thin chassis, like rugged metal bookshelves, with tan-
gled wires and neat little rows of tiny, bottle-like containers in
which the transistors were inserted. Another rack had a solid
metal front speckled with grim-looking gauges. Facing the racks
was an L-shaped console, the control panel of this H.G. Wells
spaceship, with a blue countertop for your elbows and papers. On
the short arm of the L stood a Flexowriter, which resembled a
typewriter converted for tank warfare, its bottom anchored in a
military gray housing. Above the top were the control panels, box-
like protrusions painted an institutional yellow. On the sides of
the boxes that faced the user were a few gauges, several lines of
quarter-inch blinking lights, a matrix of steel toggle switches the
size of large grains of rice, and, best of all, an actual cathode ray
tube display, round and smoke-gray.
The TMRC people were awed. This machine did not use cards.
The user would first punch in a program onto a long, thin paper
tape with a Flexowriter (there were a few extra Flexowriters in an
adjoining room), then sit at the console, feed in the program by
running the tape through a reader, and be able to sit there while
the program ran. If something went wrong with the program, you
knew immediately, and you could diagnose the problem by using
some of the switches or checking out which of the lights were
blinking or lit. The computer even had an audio output: while the
program ran, a speaker underneath the console would make a sort
of music, like a poorly tuned electric organ whose notes would
vibrate with a fuzzy, ethereal din. The chords on this “organ”
would change, depending on what data the machine was reading
16 Chapter 1

at any given microsecond; after you were familiar with the tones,
you could actually hear which part of your program the computer
was working on. You would have to discern this, though, over the
clacking of the Flexowriter, which could make you think you were
in the middle of a machine-gun battle.
Even more amazing was that, because of these “interactive” capa-
bilities, and also because users seemed to be allowed blocks of
time to use the TX-0 all by themselves, you could even modify a
program while sitting at the computer. A miracle!
There was no way in hell that Kotok, Saunders, Samson, and the
others were going to be kept away from that machine. Fortu-
nately, there didn’t seem to be the kind of bureaucracy sur-
rounding the TX-0 that there was around the IBM 704. No cadre
of officious priests. The technician in charge was a canny, white-
haired Scotsman named John McKenzie. While he made sure that
graduate students and those working on funded projects—
Officially Sanctioned Users—maintained access to the machine,
McKenzie tolerated the crew of TMRC madmen who began to
hang out in the RLE lab, where the TX-0 stood.
Samson, Kotok, Saunders, and a freshman named Bob Wagner
soon figured out that the best time of all to hang out in Building
26 was at night, when no person in his right mind would have
signed up for an hour-long session on the piece of paper posted
every Friday beside the air conditioner in the RLE lab. The TX-0
as a rule was kept running twenty-four hours a day—computers
back then were too expensive for their time to be wasted by
leaving them idle through the night, and besides, it was a hairy
procedure to get the thing up and running once it was turned off.
So the TMRC hackers, who soon were referring to themselves as
TX-0 hackers, changed their lifestyles to accommodate the com-
puter. They laid claim to what blocks of time they could, and
would “vulture time” with nocturnal visits to the lab on the off
chance that someone who was scheduled for a 3 A.M. session
might not show up.
“Oh!” Samson would say delightedly, a minute or so after
someone failed to show up at the time designated in the logbook.
“Make sure it doesn’t go to waste!”
The Tech Model Railroad Club 17

It never seemed to, because the hackers were there almost all the
time. If they weren’t in the RLE lab waiting for an opening to
occur, they were in the classroom next to the TMRC clubroom,
the Tool Room, playing a Hangman-style word game that Samson
had devised called Come Next Door, waiting for a call from
someone who was near the TX-0, monitoring it to see if someone
had not shown up for a session. The hackers recruited a network
of informers to give advance notice of potential openings at the
computer—if a research project was not ready with its program in
time, or a professor was sick, the word would be passed to TMRC
and the hackers would appear at the TX-0, breathless and ready
to jam into the space behind the console.
Though Jack Dennis was theoretically in charge of the operation,
Dennis was teaching courses at the time and preferred to spend
the rest of his time actually writing code for the machine. Dennis
played the role of benevolent godfather to the hackers: he would
give them a brief hands-on introduction to the machine, point
them in certain directions, and be amused at their wild program-
ming ventures. He had little taste for administration, though, and
was just as happy to let John McKenzie run things. McKenzie rec-
ognized early on that the interactive nature of the TX-0 was
inspiring a new form of computer programming, and the hackers
were its pioneers. So he did not lay down too many edicts.
The atmosphere was loose enough in 1959 to accommodate the
strays—science-mad people whose curiosity burned like a hunger,
who like Peter Samson would be exploring the uncharted maze of
laboratories at MIT. The noise of the air conditioning, the audio
output, and the drill-hammer Flexowriter would lure these wan-
derers, who would poke their heads into the lab like kittens
peering into baskets of yarn.
One of those wanderers was an outsider named Peter Deutsch.
Even before discovering the TX-0, Deutsch had developed a fasci-
nation for computers. It began one day when he picked up a
manual that someone had discarded—a manual for an obscure
form of computer language for doing calculations. Something
about the orderliness of the computer instructions appealed to
him: he would later describe the feeling as the same kind of eerily
transcendent recognition that an artist experiences when he dis-
covers the medium that is absolutely right for him. This is where I
18 Chapter 1

belong. Deutsch tried writing a small program, and, signing up for

time under the name of one of the priests, ran it on a computer.
Within weeks, he had attained a striking proficiency in program-
ming. He was only twelve years old.
He was a shy kid, strong in math and unsure of most everything
else. He was uncomfortably overweight, deficient in sports, but an
intellectual star performer. His father was a professor at MIT, and
Peter used that as his entree to explore the labs.
It was inevitable that he would be drawn to the TX-0. He first
wandered into the small “Kluge Room” (a “kluge” is a piece of
inelegantly constructed equipment that seems to defy logic by
working properly), where three offline Flexowriters were avail-
able for punching programs onto paper tape that would later be
fed into the TX-0. Someone was busy punching in a tape. Peter
watched for a while, then began bombarding the poor soul with
questions about that weird-looking little computer in the next
room. Then Peter went up to the TX-0 itself and examined it
closely, noting how it differed from other computers: it was
smaller and had a CRT display and other neat toys. He decided
right then to act as if he had a perfect right to be there. He got
hold of a manual and soon was startling people by spouting actual
make-sense computer talk, and eventually was allowed to sign up
for night and weekend sessions, and to write his own programs.
McKenzie worried that someone might accuse him of running some
sort of summer camp, with this short-pants little kid, barely tall
enough to stick his head over the TX-0 console, staring at the code
that an Officially Sanctioned User, perhaps some self-important
graduate student, would be hammering into the Flexowriter, and
saying in his squeaky, preadolescent voice something like, “Your
problem is that this credit is wrong over here . . . you need this
other instruction over there,” and the self-important grad student
would go crazy—who is this little worm?—and start screaming at
him to go out and play somewhere. Invariably, though, Peter
Deutsch’s comments would turn out to be correct. Deutsch would
also brazenly announce that he was going to write better programs
than the ones currently available, and he would go and do it.
Samson, Kotok, and the other hackers accepted Peter Deutsch:
by virtue of his computer knowledge he was worthy of equal
treatment. Deutsch was not such a favorite with the Officially
The Tech Model Railroad Club 19

Sanctioned Users, especially when he sat behind them ready to

spring into action when they made a mistake on the Flexowriter.
These Officially Sanctioned Users appeared at the TX-0 with the
regularity of commuters. The programs they ran were statistical
analyses, cross correlations, simulations of an interior of the
nucleus of a cell. Applications. That was fine for Users, but it was
sort of a waste in the minds of the hackers. What hackers had in
mind was getting behind the console of the TX-0 much in the
same way as getting in behind the throttle of a plane. Or, as Peter
Samson, a classical music fan, put it, computing with the TX-0
was like playing a musical instrument: an absurdly expensive
musical instrument upon which you could improvise, compose,
and, like the beatniks in Harvard Square a mile away, wail like a
banshee with total creative abandon.
One thing that enabled them to do this was the programming
system devised by Jack Dennis and another professor, Tom
Stockman. When the TX-0 arrived at MIT, it had been stripped
down since its days at Lincoln Lab: the memory had been reduced
considerably, to 4,096 “words” of eighteen bits each. (A “bit” is a
binary digit, either a 1 or 0. These binary numbers are the only
things computers understand. A series of binary numbers is called
a “word.”) And the TX-0 had almost no software. So Jack
Dennis, even before he introduced the TMRC people to the TX-0,
had been writing “systems programs”—the software to help users
utilize the machine.
The first thing Dennis worked on was an assembler. This was
something that translated assembly language—which used three-
letter symbolic abbreviations that represented instructions to the
machine—into machine language, which consisted of the binary
numbers 0 and 1. The TX-0 had a rather limited assembly lan-
guage: since its design allowed only 2 bits of each 18-bit word to
be used for instructions to the computer, only four instructions
could be used (each possible 2-bit variation—00, 01, 10, and 11—
represented an instruction). Everything the computer did could be
broken down to the execution of one of those four instructions: it
took one instruction to add two numbers, but a series of perhaps
twenty instructions to multiply two numbers. Staring at a long list
of computer commands written as binary numbers—for example,
10011001100001—could make you into a babbling mental case
20 Chapter 1

in a matter of minutes. But the same command in assembly lan-

guage might look like this: ADD Y. After loading the computer
with the assembler that Dennis wrote, you could write programs
in this simpler symbolic form, and wait smugly while the com-
puter did the translation into binary for you. Then you’d feed that
binary “object” code back into the computer. The value of this
was incalculable: it enabled programmers to write in something
that looked like code, rather than an endless, dizzying series of 1s
and 0s.
The other program that Dennis worked on with Stockman was
something even newer—a debugger. The TX-0 came with a
debugging program called UT-3, which enabled you to talk to the
computer while it was running by typing commands directly into
the Flexowriter. But it had terrible problems—for one thing, it
only accepted typed-in code that used the octal numeric system.
“Octal” is a base-8 number system (as opposed to binary, which is
base 2, and Arabic—ours—which is base 10), and it is a difficult
system to use. So Dennis and Stockman decided to write some-
thing better than UT-3 that would enable users to use the sym-
bolic, easier-to-work-with assembly language. This came to be
called FLIT, and it allowed users to actually find program bugs
during a session, fix them, and keep the program running. (Dennis
would explain that “FLIT” stood for Flexowriter Interrogation
Tape, but clearly the name’s real origin was the insect spray with
that brand name.) FLIT was a quantum leap forward, since it lib-
erated programmers to actually do original composing on the
machine—just like musicians composing on their musical instru-
ments. With the use of the debugger, which took up one third of
the 4,096 words of the TX-0 memory, hackers were free to create
a new, more daring style of programming.
And what did these hacker programs do? Well, sometimes, it
didn’t matter much at all what they did. Peter Samson hacked the
night away on a program that would instantly convert Arabic
numbers to Roman numerals, and Jack Dennis, after admiring the
skill with which Samson had accomplished this feat, said, “My
God, why would anyone want to do such a thing?” But Dennis
knew why. There was ample justification in the feeling of power
and accomplishment Samson got when he fed in the paper tape,
monitored the lights and switches, and saw what were once plain
The Tech Model Railroad Club 21

old blackboard Arabic numbers coming back as the numerals the

Romans had hacked with.
In fact, it was Jack Dennis who suggested to Samson that there
were considerable uses for the capability of the TX-0 to send noise
to the audio speaker. While there were no built-in controls for
pitch, amplitude, or tone character, there was a way to control the
speaker—sounds would be emitted depending on the state of the
14th bit in the 18-bit words the TX-0 had in its accumulator in a
given microsecond. The sound was on or off depending on
whether bit 14 was a 1 or 0. So Samson set about writing pro-
grams that varied the binary numbers in that slot in different ways
to produce different pitches.
At that time, only a few people in the country had been experi-
menting with using a computer to output any kind of music, and
the methods they had been using required massive computations
before the machine would so much as utter a note. Samson, who
reacted with impatience to those who warned he was attempting
the impossible, wanted a computer playing music right away. So
he learned to control that one bit in the accumulator so adeptly
that he could command it with the authority of Charlie Parker on
the saxophone. In a later version of this music compiler, Samson
rigged it so that if you made an error in your programming
syntax, the Flexowriter would switch to a red ribbon and print,
“To err is human to forgive divine.”
When outsiders heard the melodies of Johann Sebastian Bach in a
single-voice, monophonic square wave, no harmony, they were
universally unfazed. Big deal! Three million dollars for this giant
hunk of machinery, and why shouldn’t it do at least as much as a
five-dollar toy piano? It was no use to explain to these outsiders
that Peter Samson had virtually bypassed the process by which
music had been made for eons. Music had always been made by
directly creating vibrations that were sound. What happened in
Samson’s program was that a load of numbers, bits of informa-
tion fed into a computer, comprised a code in which the music
resided. You could spend hours staring at the code, and not be
able to divine where the music was. It only became music while
millions of blindingly brief exchanges of data were taking place in
the accumulator sitting in one of the metal, wire, and silicon racks
that comprised the TX-0. Samson had asked the computer, which
22 Chapter 1

had no apparent knowledge of how to use a voice, to lift itself in

song, and the TX-0 had complied.
So it was that a computer program was not only metaphorically a
musical composition—it was literally a musical composition! It
looked like—and was—the same kind of program that yielded
complex arithmetical computations and statistical analyses. These
digits that Samson had jammed into the computer were a uni-
versal language that could produce anything—a Bach fugue or an
antiaircraft system.
Samson did not say any of this to the outsiders who were unim-
pressed by his feat. Nor did the hackers themselves discuss this—it
is not even clear that they analyzed the phenomenon in such cosmic
terms. Peter Samson did it, and his colleagues appreciated it,
because it was obviously a neat hack. That was justification
enough.

• • • • • • • •

To hackers like Bob Saunders—balding, plump, and merry dis-

ciple of the TX-0, president of TMRC’s S&P group, student of
systems—it was a perfect existence. Saunders had grown up in the
suburbs of Chicago, and for as long as he could remember, the
workings of electricity and telephone circuitry had fascinated him.
Before beginning MIT, Saunders had landed a dream summer job,
working for the phone company installing central office equip-
ment. He would spend eight blissful hours with soldering iron and
pliers in hand, working in the bowels of various systems, an idyll
broken by lunch hours spent in deep study of phone company
manuals. It was the phone company equipment underneath the
TMRC layout that had convinced Saunders to become active in
the Model Railroad Club.
Saunders, being an upperclassman, had come to the TX-0 later in
his college career than Kotok and Samson: he had used the
breathing space to actually lay the foundation for a social life,
which included courtship of and eventual marriage to Marge
French, who had done some nonhacking computer work for a
research project. Still, the TX-0 was the center of his college
career, and he shared the common hacker experience of seeing his
The Tech Model Railroad Club 23

grades suffer from missed classes. It didn’t bother him much,

because he knew that his real education was occurring in Room
240 of Building 26, behind the Tixo console. Years later he would
describe himself and the others as “an elite group. Other people
were off studying, spending their days up on four-floor buildings
making obnoxious vapors or off in the physics lab throwing parti-
cles at things or whatever it is they do. And we were simply not
paying attention to what other folks were doing because we had
no interest in it. They were studying what they were studying and
we were studying what we were studying. And the fact that much
of it was not on the officially approved curriculum was by and
large immaterial.”
The hackers came out at night. It was the only way to take full
advantage of the crucial “off-hours” of the TX-0. During the day,
Saunders would usually manage to make an appearance in a class
or two. Then some time spent performing “basic maintenance”
things like eating and going to the bathroom. He might see Marge
for a while. But eventually he would filter over to Building 26. He
would go over some of the programs of the night before, printed
on the nine-and-a-half-inch-wide paper that the Flexowriter used.
He would annotate and modify the listing to update the code to
whatever he considered the next stage of operation. Maybe then
he would move over to the Model Railroad Club, and he’d swap
his program with someone, checking simultaneously for good
ideas and potential bugs. Then back to Building 26, to the Kluge
Room next to the TX-0, to find an offline Flexowriter on which to
update his code. All the while, he’d be checking to see if someone
had canceled a one-hour session on the machine; his own session
was scheduled at something like two or three in the morning. He’d
wait in the Kluge Room, or play some bridge back at the Rail-
road Club, until the time came.
Sitting at the console, facing the metal racks that held the com-
puter’s transistors, each transistor representing a location that
either held or did not hold a bit of memory, Saunders would set
up the Flexowriter, which would greet him with the word
“WALRUS.” This was something Samson had hacked, in honor of
Lewis Carroll’s poem with the line “The time has come, the
Walrus said . . .” Saunders might chuckle at that as he went into
the drawer for the paper tape that held the assembler program and
fed that into the tape reader. Now the computer would be ready
24 Chapter 1

to assemble his program, so he’d take the Flexowriter tape he’d

been working on and send that into the computer. He’d watch
the lights go on as the computer switched his code from “source”
(the symbolic assembly language) to “object” code (binary),
which the computer would punch out into another paper tape.
Since that tape was in the object code that the TX-0 understood,
he’d feed it in, hoping that the program would run magnificently.
There would most probably be a few fellow hackers kibitzing
behind him, laughing and joking and drinking Cokes and eating
some junk food they’d extracted from the machine downstairs.
Saunders preferred the lemon jelly wedges that the others called
“lemon gunkies.” But at four in the morning, anything tasted
good. They would all watch as the program began to run, the
lights going on, the whine from the speaker humming in high or
low register depending on what was in Bit 14 in the accumulator,
and the first thing he’d see on the CRT display after the program
had been assembled and run was that the program had crashed.
So he’d reach into the drawer for the tape with the FLIT debugger
and feed that into the computer. The computer would then be a
debugging machine, and he’d send the program back in. Now he
could start trying to find out where things had gone wrong, and
maybe if he was lucky he’d find out and change things by putting
in some commands by flicking some of the switches on the console
in precise order, or hammering in some code on the Flexowriter.
Once things got running—and it was always incredibly satisfying
when something worked, when he’d made that roomful of transis-
tors and wires and metal and electricity all meld together to create
a precise output that he’d devised—he’d try to add the next
advance to it. When the hour was over—someone already itching
to get on the machine after him—Saunders would be ready to
spend the next few hours figuring out what the heck had made the
program go belly-up.
The peak hour itself was tremendously intense, but during the
hours before, and even during the hours afterward, a hacker
attained a state of pure concentration. When you programmed a
computer, you had to be aware of where all the thousands of bits
of information were going from one instruction to the next, and
be able to predict—and exploit—the effect of all that movement.
The Tech Model Railroad Club 25

When you had all that information glued to your cerebral being, it
was almost as if your own mind had merged into the environment
or the computer. Sometimes it took hours to build up to the point
where your thoughts could contain that total picture, and when
you did get to that point, it was such a shame to waste it that you
tried to sustain it by marathon bursts, alternately working on the
computer or poring over the code that you wrote on one of the
offline Flexowriters in the Kluge Room. You would sustain that
concentration by “wrapping around” to the next day.
Inevitably, that frame of mind spilled over to what random shards
of existence the hackers had outside of computing. The knife-and-
paintbrush contingent at TMRC was not pleased at all by the
infiltration of Tixo-mania into the club: they saw it as a sort of
Trojan horse for a switch in the club focus, from railroading to
computing. And if you attended one of the club meetings held
every Tuesday at 5:15 P.M., you could see the concern: the
hackers would exploit every possible thread of parliamentary pro-
cedure to create a meeting as convoluted as the programs they
were hacking on the TX-0. Motions were made to make motions
to make motions, and objections ruled out of order as if they were
so many computer errors. A note in the minutes of the meeting on
November 24, 1959, suggests that “we frown on certain members
who would do the club a lot more good by doing more S&P-ing
and less reading Robert’s Rules of Order.” Samson was one of the
worst offenders, and at one point an exasperated TMRC member
made a motion “to purchase a cork for Samson’s oral diarrhea.”
Hacking parliamentary procedure was one thing, but the logical
mind-frame required for programming spilled over into more
commonplace activities. You could ask a hacker a question and
sense his mental accumulator processing bits until he came up with
a precise answer to the question you asked. Marge Saunders would
drive to the Safeway every Saturday morning in the Volkswagen
and upon her return ask her husband, “Would you like to help me
bring in the groceries?” Bob Saunders would reply, “No.”
Stunned, Marge would drag in the groceries herself. After the
same thing occurred a few times, she exploded, hurling curses at
him and demanding to know why he said no to her question.
26 Chapter 1

“That’s a stupid question to ask,” he said. “Of course I won’t like

to help you bring in the groceries. If you ask me if I’ll help you
bring them in, that’s another matter.”
It was as if Marge had submitted a program into the TX-0, and
the program, as programs do when the syntax is improper, had
crashed. It was not until she debugged her question that Bob
Saunders would allow it to run successfully on his own mental
computer.
 Chapter 2 CHAPTER 2

The Hacker Ethic

Something new was coalescing around the TX-0: a new way of life
with a philosophy, an ethic, and a dream.
There was no one moment when it started to dawn on the TX-0
hackers that by devoting their technical abilities to computing
with a devotion rarely seen outside of monasteries, they were the
vanguard of a daring symbiosis between man and machine. With a
fervor like that of young hot-rodders fixated on souping up
engines, they came to take their almost unique surroundings for
granted. Even as the elements of a culture were forming, as leg-
ends began to accrue, as their mastery of programming started to
surpass any previous recorded levels of skill, the dozen or so
hackers were reluctant to acknowledge that their tiny society, on
intimate terms with the TX-0, had been slowly and implicitly
piecing together a body of concepts, beliefs, and mores.
The precepts of this revolutionary Hacker Ethic were not so much
debated and discussed as silently agreed upon. No manifestos
were issued. No missionaries tried to gather converts. The com-
puter did the converting, and those who seemed to follow the
Hacker Ethic most faithfully were people like Samson, Saunders,
and Kotok, whose lives before MIT seemed to be mere preludes to
that moment when they fulfilled themselves behind the console of
the TX-0. Later there would come hackers who took the implicit
Ethic even more seriously than the TX-0 hackers did, hackers like
the legendary Greenblatt or Gosper, though it would be some
28 Chapter 2

years yet before the tenets of hackerism would be explicitly

delineated.
Still, even in the days of the TX-0, the planks of the platform were
in place. The Hacker Ethic:
Access to computers—and anything that might teach you some-
thing about the way the world works—should be unlimited and
total. Always yield to the Hands-On Imperative!

Hackers believe that essential lessons can be learned about the

systems—about the world—from taking things apart, seeing how
they work, and using this knowledge to create new and even more
interesting things. They resent any person, physical barrier, or law
that tries to keep them from doing this.
This is especially true when a hacker wants to fix something that
(from his point of view) is broken or needs improvement. Imper-
fect systems infuriate hackers, whose primal instinct is to debug
them. This is one reason why hackers generally hate driving cars—
the system of randomly programmed red lights and oddly laid out
one-way streets cause delays that are so goddamned unnecessary
that the impulse is to rearrange signs, open up traffic-light control
boxes . . . redesign the entire system.
In a perfect hacker world, anyone pissed off enough to open up a
control box near a traffic light and take it apart to make it work
better should be perfectly welcome to make the attempt. Rules
that prevent you from taking matters like that into your own
hands are too ridiculous to even consider abiding by. This atti-
tude helped the Model Railroad Club start, on an extremely
informal basis, something called the Midnight Requisitioning
Committee. When TMRC needed a set of diodes or some extra
relays to build some new feature into The System, a few S&P
people would wait until dark and find their way into the places
where those things were kept. None of the hackers, who were as a
rule scrupulously honest in other matters, seemed to equate this
with “stealing.” A willful blindness.
All information should be free.

If you don’t have access to the information you need to improve

things, how can you fix them? A free exchange of information,
particularly when the information was in the form of a computer
The Hacker Ethic 29

program, allowed for greater overall creativity. When you were

working on a machine like the TX-0, which came with almost no
software, everyone would furiously write systems programs to
make programming easier—Tools to Make Tools, kept in the
drawer by the console for easy access by anyone using the machine.
This prevented the dreaded, time-wasting ritual of reinventing the
wheel: instead of everybody writing his own version of the same
program, the best version would be available to everyone, and
everyone would be free to delve into the code and improve on that.
A world studded with feature-full programs, bummed to the min-
imum, debugged to perfection.
The belief, sometimes taken unconditionally, that information
should be free was a direct tribute to the way a splendid com-
puter, or computer program, works—the binary bits moving in
the most straightforward, logical path necessary to do their com-
plex job. What was a computer but something that benefited from
a free flow of information? If, say, the accumulator found itself
unable to get information from the input/output (I/O) devices like
the tape reader or the switches, the whole system would collapse.
In the hacker viewpoint, any system could benefit from that easy
flow of information.
Mistrust Authority—Promote Decentralization.

The best way to promote this free exchange of information is to

have an open system, something that presents no boundaries
between a hacker and a piece of information or an item of equip-
ment that he needs in his quest for knowledge, improvement, and
time online. The last thing you need is a bureaucracy. Bureaucra-
cies, whether corporate, government, or university, are flawed
systems, dangerous in that they cannot accommodate the explor-
atory impulse of true hackers. Bureaucrats hide behind arbitrary
rules (as opposed to the logical algorithms by which machines and
computer programs operate): they invoke those rules to consoli-
date power, and perceive the constructive impulse of hackers as a
threat.
The epitome of the bureaucratic world was to be found at a very
large company called International Business Machines—IBM. The
reason its computers were batch-processed Hulking Giants was
only partially because of vacuum tube technology. The real reason
30 Chapter 2

was that IBM was a clumsy, hulking company that did not under-
stand the hacking impulse. If IBM had its way (so the TMRC
hackers thought), the world would be batch processed, laid out on
those annoying little punch cards, and only the most privileged of
priests would be permitted to actually interact with the computer.
All you had to do was look at someone in the IBM world and note
the button-down white shirt, the neatly pinned black tie, the hair
carefully held in place, and the tray of punch cards in hand. You
could wander into the Computation Center, where the 704, the
709, and later the 7090 were stored—the best IBM had to offer—
and see the stifling orderliness, down to the roped-off areas
beyond which unauthorized people could not venture. And you
could compare that to the extremely informal atmosphere around
the TX-0, where grungy clothes were the norm and almost anyone
could wander in.
Now, IBM had done and would continue to do many things to
advance computing. By its sheer size and mighty influence, it had
made computers a permanent part of life in America. To many
people, the words “IBM” and “computer” were virtually synony-
mous. IBM’s machines were reliable workhorses, worthy of the
trust that businessmen and scientists invested in them. This was
due in part to IBM’s conservative approach: it would not make
the most technologically advanced machines, but would rely on
proven concepts and careful, aggressive marketing. As IBM’s dom-
inance of the computer field was established, the company became
an empire unto itself, secretive and smug.
What really drove the hackers crazy was the attitude of the IBM
priests and sub-priests, who seemed to think that IBM had the
only “real” computers, and the rest were all trash. You couldn’t
talk to those people—they were beyond convincing. They were
batch-processed people, and it showed not only in their prefer-
ence of machines, but in their ideas about the way a computation
center, and a world, should be run. Those people could never
understand the obvious superiority of a decentralized system, with
no one giving orders—a system where people could follow their
interests, and if along the way they discovered a flaw in the
system, they could embark on ambitious surgery. No need to get a
requisition form. Just a need to get something done.
The Hacker Ethic 31

This antibureaucratic bent coincided neatly with the personalities

of many of the hackers, who since childhood had grown accus-
tomed to building science projects while the rest of their class-
mates were banging their heads together and learning social skills
on the field of sport. These young adults who were once outcasts
found the computer a fantastic equalizer, experiencing a feeling,
according to Peter Samson, “like you opened the door and walked
through this grand new universe . . .” Once they passed through
that door and sat behind the console of a million-dollar com-
puter, hackers had power. So it was natural to distrust any force
that might try to limit the extent of that power.
Hackers should be judged by their hacking, not bogus criteria
such as degrees, age, race, or position.

The ready acceptance of twelve-year-old Peter Deutsch in the TX-0

community (though not by nonhacker graduate students) was a
good example. Likewise, people who trotted in with seemingly
impressive credentials were not taken seriously until they proved
themselves at the console of a computer. This meritocratic trait
was not necessarily rooted in the inherent goodness of hacker
hearts—it was mainly that hackers cared less about someone’s
superficial characteristics than they did about his potential to
advance the general state of hacking, to create new programs
to admire, to talk about that new feature in the system.
You can create art and beauty on a computer.

Samson’s music program was an example. But to hackers, the art

of the program did not reside in the pleasing sounds emanating
from the online speaker. The code of the program held a beauty of
its own. (Samson, though, was particularly obscure in refusing to
add comments to his source code explaining what he was doing at
a given time. One well-distributed program Samson wrote went
on for hundreds of assembly-language instructions, with only one
comment beside an instruction that contained the number 1750.
The comment was RIPJSB, and people racked their brains about
its meaning until someone figured out that 1750 was the year
Bach died, and that Samson had written an abbreviation for Rest
In Peace Johann Sebastian Bach.)
32 Chapter 2

A certain esthetic of programming style had emerged. Because of

the limited memory space of the TX-0 (a handicap that extended
to all computers of that era), hackers came to deeply appreciate
innovative techniques that allowed programs to do complicated
tasks with very few instructions. The shorter a program was, the
more space you had left for other programs, and the faster a pro-
gram ran. Sometimes when you didn’t need much speed or space,
and you weren’t thinking about art and beauty, you’d hack
together an ugly program, attacking the problem with “brute
force” methods. “Well, we can do this by adding twenty num-
bers,” Samson might say to himself, “and it’s quicker to write
instructions to do that than to think out a loop in the beginning
and the end to do the same job in seven or eight instructions.” But
the latter program might be admired by fellow hackers, and some
programs were bummed to the fewest lines so artfully that the
author’s peers would look at it and almost melt with awe.
Sometimes program bumming became competitive, a macho con-
test to prove oneself so much in command of the system that one
could recognize elegant shortcuts to shave off an instruction or
two, or, better yet, rethink the whole problem and devise a new
algorithm that would save a whole block of instructions. (An algo-
rithm is a specific procedure which one can apply to solve a com-
plex computer problem; it is sort of a mathematical skeleton key.)
This could most emphatically be done by approaching the
problem from an offbeat angle that no one had ever thought of
before, but that in retrospect made total sense. There was defi-
nitely an artistic impulse residing in those who could utilize this
genius-from-Mars technique—a black-magic, visionary quality
that enabled them to discard the stale outlook of the best minds
on earth and come up with a totally unexpected new algorithm.
This happened with the decimal print routine program. This was a
subroutine—a program within a program that you could some-
times integrate into many different programs—to translate binary
numbers that the computer gave you into regular decimal num-
bers. In Saunders’ words, this problem became the “pawn’s ass of
programming—if you could write a decimal print routine which
worked, you knew enough about the computer to call yourself a
programmer of sorts.” And if you wrote a great decimal print rou-
tine, you might be able to call yourself a hacker. More than a
The Hacker Ethic 33

competition, the ultimate bumming of the decimal print routine

became a sort of hacker Holy Grail.
Various versions of decimal print routines had been around for
some months. If you were being deliberately stupid about it, or if
you were a genuine moron—an out-and-out “loser”—it might
take you a hundred instructions to get the computer to convert
machine language to decimal. But any hacker worth his salt could
do it in less, and finally, by taking the best of the programs, bum-
ming an instruction here and there, the routine was diminished to
about fifty instructions.
After that, things got serious. People would work for hours,
seeking a way to do the same thing in fewer lines of code. It
became more than a competition; it was a quest. For all the effort
expended, no one seemed to be able to crack the fifty-line barrier.
The question arose whether it was even possible to do it in less.
Was there a point beyond which a program could not be
bummed?
Among the people puzzling with this dilemma was a fellow named
Jensen, a tall, silent hacker from Maine who would sit quietly in
the Kluge Room and scribble on printouts with the calm
demeanor of a backwoodsman whittling. Jensen was always
looking for ways to compress his programs in time and space—his
code was a completely bizarre sequence of intermingled Boolean
and arithmetic functions, often causing several different compu-
tations to occur in different sections of the same eighteen-bit
“word.” Amazing things, magical stunts.
Before Jensen, there had been general agreement that the only log-
ical algorithm for a decimal print routine would have the machine
repeatedly subtracting, using a table of the powers of ten to keep
the numbers in proper digital columns. Jensen somehow figured
that a powers-of-ten table wasn’t necessary; he came up with an
algorithm that was capable of converting the digits in a reverse
order, but, by some digital sleight of hand, print them out in the
proper order. There was a complex mathematical justification to it
that was clear to the other hackers only when they saw Jensen’s
program posted on a bulletin board, his way of telling them that he
had taken the decimal print routine to its limit. Forty-six instruc-
tions. People would stare at the code and their jaws would drop.
34 Chapter 2

Marge Saunders remembers the hackers being unusually quiet for

days afterward.
“We knew that was the end of it,” Bob Saunders later said. “That
was Nirvana.”
Computers can change your life for the better.

This belief was subtly manifest. Rarely would a hacker try to

impose a view of the myriad advantages of the computer way of
knowledge to an outsider. Yet, this premise dominated the
everyday behavior of the TX-0 hackers, as well as the generations
of hackers that came after them.
Surely the computer had changed their lives, enriched their lives,
given their lives focus, made their lives adventurous. It had made
them masters of a certain slice of fate. Peter Samson later said,
“We did it twenty-five to thirty percent for the sake of doing it
because it was something we could do and do well, and sixty per-
cent for the sake of having something which was in its metaphor-
ical way alive, our offspring, which would do things on its own
when we were finished. That’s the great thing about program-
ming, the magical appeal it has . . . Once you fix a behavioral
problem [a computer or program] has, it’s fixed forever, and it is
exactly an image of what you meant.”
Like Aladdin’s lamp, you could get it to do your bidding.
Surely everyone could benefit from experiencing this power. Surely
everyone could benefit from a world based on the Hacker Ethic.
This was the implicit belief of the hackers, and the hackers irrever-
ently extended the conventional point of view of what computers
could and should do—leading the world to a new way of looking
and interacting with computers.
This was not easily done. Even at such an advanced institution as
MIT, some professors considered a manic affinity for computers
as frivolous, even demented. TMRC hacker Bob Wagner once had
to explain to an engineering professor what a computer was.
Wagner experienced this clash of computer versus anticomputer
even more vividly when he took a Numerical Analysis class in
which the professor required each student to do homework using
rattling, clunky electromechanical calculators. Kotok was in the
same class, and both of them were appalled at the prospect of
The Hacker Ethic 35

working with those low-tech machines. “Why should we,” they

asked, “when we’ve got this computer?”
So Wagner began working on a computer program that would
emulate the behavior of a calculator. The idea was outrageous. To
some, it was a misappropriation of valuable machine time.
According to the standard thinking on computers, their time was
so precious that one should only attempt things that took max-
imum advantage of the computer, things that otherwise would
take roomfuls of mathematicians days of mindless calculating.
Hackers felt otherwise: anything that seemed interesting or fun
was fodder for computing—and using interactive computers, with
no one looking over your shoulder and demanding clearance for
your specific project, you could act on that belief. After two or
three months of tangling with intricacies of floating-point arith-
metic (necessary to allow the program to know where to place the
decimal point) on a machine that had no simple method to per-
form elementary multiplication, Wagner had written three thou-
sand lines of code that did the job. He had made a ridiculously
expensive computer perform the function of a calculator that was
one thousandth the price. To honor this irony, he called the pro-
gram “Expensive Desk Calculator,” and proudly did the home-
work for his class on it.
His grade—zero. “You used a computer!” the professor told him.
“This can’t be right.”
Wagner didn’t even bother to explain. How could he convey to his
teacher that the computer was making realities out of what were
once incredible possibilities? Or that another hacker had even
written a program called “Expensive Typewriter” that converted
the TX-0 to something you could write text on, could process
your writing in strings of characters and print it out on the Flexo-
writer—could you imagine a professor accepting a classwork
report written by the computer? How could that professor—how
could, in fact, anyone who hadn’t been immersed in this
uncharted man-machine universe—understand how Wagner and
his fellow hackers were routinely using the computer to simulate,
according to Wagner, “strange situations which one could scarcely
envision otherwise”? The professor would learn in time, as would
everyone, that the world opened up by the computer was a limit-
less one.
36 Chapter 2

If anyone needed further proof, you could cite the project that
Kotok was working on in the Computation Center, the chess pro-
gram that bearded AI professor “Uncle” John McCarthy, as he
was becoming known to his hacker students, had begun on the
IBM 704. Even though Kotok and the several other hackers
helping him on the program had only contempt for the IBM
batch-processing mentality that pervaded the machine and the
people around it, they had managed to scrounge some late-night
time to use it interactively, and had been engaging in an informal
battle with the systems programmers on the 704 to see which
group would be known as the biggest consumer of computer time.
The lead would bounce back and forth, and the white-shirt-and-
black-tie 704 people were impressed enough to actually let Kotok
and his group touch the buttons and switches on the 704: rare
sensual contact with a vaunted IBM beast.
Kotok’s role in bringing the chess program to life was indicative of
what was to become the hacker role in Artificial Intelligence: a
Heavy Head like McCarthy or his colleague Marvin Minsky
would begin a project or wonder aloud whether something might
be possible, and the hackers, if it interested them, would set about
doing it.
The chess program had been started using FORTRAN, one of the
early computer languages. Computer languages look more like
English than assembly language, are easier to write with, and do
more things with fewer instructions; however, each time an
instruction is given in a computer language like FORTRAN, the
computer must first translate that command into its own binary
language. A program called a “compiler” does this, and the com-
piler takes up time to do its job, as well as occupying valuable
space within the computer. In effect, using a computer language
puts you an extra step away from direct contact with the com-
puter, and hackers generally preferred assembly or, as they called
it, “machine” language to less elegant, “higher-level” languages
like FORTRAN.
Kotok, though, recognized that because of the huge amounts of
numbers that would have to be crunched in a chess program, part
of the program would have to be done in FORTRAN, and part in
assembly. They hacked it part by part, with “move generators,”
basic data structures, and all kinds of innovative algorithms for
The Hacker Ethic 37

strategy. After feeding the machine the rules for moving each
piece, they gave it some parameters by which to evaluate its posi-
tion, consider various moves, and make the move that would
advance it to the most advantageous situation. Kotok kept at it for
years, the program growing as MIT kept upgrading its IBM com-
puters, and one memorable night a few hackers gathered to see the
program make some of its first moves in a real game. Its opener
was quite respectable, but after eight or so exchanges there was
real trouble, with the computer about to be checkmated. Every-
body wondered how the computer would react. It took a while
(everyone knew that during those pauses the computer was actu-
ally “thinking,” if your idea of thinking included mechanically
considering various moves, evaluating them, rejecting most, and
using a predefined set of parameters to ultimately make a choice).
Finally, the computer moved a pawn two squares forward, ille-
gally jumping over another piece. A bug! But a clever one—it got
the computer out of check. Maybe the program was figuring out
some new algorithm with which to conquer chess.
At other universities, professors were making public proclama-
tions that computers would never be able to beat a human being
in chess. Hackers knew better. They would be the ones who
would guide computers to greater heights than anyone expected.
And the hackers, by fruitful, meaningful association with the com-
puter, would be foremost among the beneficiaries.
But they would not be the only beneficiaries. Everyone could gain
something by the use of thinking computers in an intellectually
automated world. And wouldn’t everyone benefit even more by
approaching the world with the same inquisitive intensity, skepti-
cism toward bureaucracy, openness to creativity, unselfishness in
sharing accomplishments, urge to make improvements, and desire
to build as those who followed the Hacker Ethic? By accepting
others on the same unprejudiced basis by which computers
accepted anyone who entered code into a Flexowriter? Wouldn’t
we benefit if we learned from computers the means of creating a
perfect system, and set about emulating that perfection in a
human system? If everyone could interact with computers with the
same innocent, productive, creative impulse that hackers did, the
Hacker Ethic might spread through society like a benevolent
ripple, and computers would indeed change the world for the
better.
38 Chapter 2

In the monastic confines of the Massachusetts Institute of Tech-

nology, people had the freedom to live out this dream—the hacker
dream. No one dared suggest that the dream might spread.
Instead, people set about building, right there at MIT, a hacker
Xanadu, the likes of which might never be duplicated.