Part 2 (1/2)

Many of the parts for The Systee Gift Plan, directly from the phone coe of the campus phone system, and had seen to it that sophisticated phone equip that equip point, the Railroaders had devised a scheme which enabled several people to control trains at once, even if the trains were at different parts of the sa dials appropriated froineers” could specify which block of track they wanted control of, and run a train fro several types of phone co crossbar executors and step switches which let you actually hear the power being transferred from one block to another by an other-worldly chunka-chunka-chunka sound

It was the S&P group who devised this fiendishly ingenious scheroup who harbored the kind of restless curiosity which led theet their hands on co disciples of a Hands-On Imperative Head of S&P was an upperclassman named Bob Saunders, with ruddy, bulbous features, an infectious laugh, and a talent for switch gear As a child in Chicago, he had built a high-frequency transforh version of a Tesla coil, soineer in the 1800s which was supposed to send out furious waves of electrical power Saunders said his coil project ed 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 Sae three, prying a plug out of a ith a screwdriver and causing a hissing shower of sparks to erupt When he was six, he was building and wiring laone 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 So for parts, ould spend hours on their backs resting on little rolling chairs they called ”bunkies” to get underneath tight spots in the switching syste the wholly unauthorized connection between the TMRC phone and the East Caround

The coreThe Systeon of their own that seeht chance on these teen-aged fanatics, with their checked short-sleeve shi+rts, pencils in their pockets, chino pants, and, always, a bottle of Coca-Cola by their side

(TMRC purchased its own cokesum of 165; at a tariff of five cents a bottle, the outlay was replaced in three e machine for coke buyers that was still in use a decade later) When a piece of equip”; when a piece of equiped”

(Mash Until No Good); the two desks in the corner of the room were not called the office, but the ”orifice”; one who insisted on studying for courses was a ”tool”; garbage was called ”cruft”; and a project undertaken or a product built not solely to fulfill sooal, but with some wild pleasure taken in mere involvement, was called a ”hack”

This latter tero-- the word ”hack” had long been used to describe the elaborate college pranks that MIT students would regularly devise, such as covering the do foil But as the TMRC people used the word, there was serious respect iht 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 technical virtuosity Even though oneaway at The Systes), the artistry hich one hacked was recognized to be considerable

The nals and Power called thereat pride Within the confines of the clubroo 20, and of the ”Tool Room” (where some study and many techno bull sessions took place), they had unilaterally endowed theend This is how Peter Sa-esque poem in the club newsletter:

Switch Thrower for the World, Fuze Tester, Maker of Routes, Player with the Railroads and the Syste, Machine of the Point-Function Line-o-lite: They tell me you are wicked and I believe theht 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 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 Switch-thrower, 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 roo to use the machine to keep track of the switches underneath the layout Just as i what the electro it to its li of 1959, a new course was offered at MIT It was the first course in progra 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 conversation 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 froance of the naence This ht that computers could be SMART Even at such a science-intensive place as MIT, ht ridiculous: they considered computers to be useful, if soe calculations and for devising est co SAGE systeht 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 co Department, which offered the course, No 641, that Kotok, Sa

McCarthy had started aGiant--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 co

All fascinating stuff, but not the vision that was driving Kotok and Samson and the others They wanted to learn how to WORK the dae called LISP that McCarthy was talking about in 641 was interesting, it was not nearly as interesting as the act of prograot your printout back from the Priesthood--word fro over the results of the progra with it, how it could be iet into closer contact with the IBM 704, which soon was upgraded to a newerout at the coetting 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 hts as it worked

There were secrets to those IBM ly learned by some of the older people at MIT with access to the 704 and friends arad students working with McCarthy, had even written a prograhts would be lit in such an order that it looked like a little ball was being passed froht ti-Pong! This obviously was the kind of thing that you'd show off to impress your peers, ould then take a look at the actual program you had written and see hoas done

To top the progra 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 theraduate students who loitered around the 704 would work over their coet the ram compressed so that fewer cards would need to be fed to theoff an instruction or tas almost an obsession with them

McCarthy coot the sa code” as fanatic skiers got fro frantically down a hill So the practice of taking a co to cut off instructions without affecting the outco,” and you would often hear people s like ”Maybe I can buet the octal correction card loader down to three cards instead of four”

McCarthy in 1959 was turning his interest fro to the coe” called LISP

Alan Kotok and his friends wereon the batch-processed IBM, they e the 704, and later the 709, and even after that its replaces Eventually Kotok's group becaest users of computer ti with the IBMwait between the time you handed in your cards and the time your results were handed back to you If you had ram 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 coned to keep crazy young computer fans like Samson and Kotok and Saunders physically distant froid rule of all was that no one should be able to actually touch or tamper with the nals and Power people were dying to doelse in the world, and the restrictions drove them mad

One priest--a low-level sub-priest, really--on the late-night shi+ft was particularly nasty in enforcing this rule, so Sa around at Eli's electronic junk shop one day, he chanced upon an electrical board precisely like the kind of board holding the clunky vacuuht, sometime before 4 AM, this particular sub-priest stepped out for a minute; when he returned, Sa, but they'd found the trouble--and held up the totally sotten at Eli's

The sub-priest could hardly get the words out ”W-where did you get that?”