Part 2 (2/2)

Sareen eyes that could easily look maniacal, 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 ive out He whimpered exhortations to the deity Visions, no doubt, of abefore hih priest with souys 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 as now on the MIT faculty paid a visit to the clubrooraduate in the early 1950s, he had worked furiously underneath the layout Dennis lately had been working a computer which 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 shi+pped over to the Institute on ”long-term loan,” and apparently no one at Lincoln Lab had 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 to26, in the second-floor Radio Laboratory of Electronics (RLE), directly above the first-floor Co IBM 704 The RLE lab resembled the control room of an antique spaceshi+p The TX-0, or Tixo, as it was soet er-size transistors instead of hand-size vacuu with its fifteen tons of supporting air-conditioning equips were ed led wires and neat little rows of tiny, bottle-like containers in which the transistors were inserted Another rack had a solidthe racks was an L-shaped console, the control panel of this H G Wells spaceshi+p, 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 botto Above the top were the control panels, boxlike protrusions painted an institutional yellow On the sides of the boxes which faced the user were a few gauges, several lines of quarter-inch blinking lights, a rains of rice, and, best of all, an actual cathode ray tube display, round and sray

The TMRC people were awed THIS MACHINE DID NOT USE CARDS The user would first punch in a progra, thin paper tape with a Flexowriter (there were a few extra Flexowriters in an adjoining roo the tape through a reader, and be able to sit there while the prograranose the proble out which of the lights were blinking or lit The coram ran, a speaker underneath the console would an whose notes would vibrate with a fuzzy, ethereal din The chords on this ”organ” would change, depending on what data the iven microsecond; after you were familiar with the tones, you could actually HEAR what part of your progra on You would have to discern this, though, over the clacking of the Flexowriter, which could un battle Evenwas that, because of these ”interactive” capabilities, and also because users seemed to be allowed blocks of time to use the TX-0 all by theram WHILE SITTING AT THE COMPUTER A miracle!

There was no way in hell that Kotok, Saunders, Sa to be kept away from that machine

Fortunately, there didn't see the TX-0 that there was around the IBM 704 No cadre of officious priests The technician in charge was a canny white-haired Scotsraduate students and those working on funded projects-- Officially Sanctioned Users--maintained access to the an to hang out in the RLE lab, where the TX-0 stood

Saner soon figured out that the best tiht, when no person in his rightsession 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 tiht, 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 theed their life-style to accommodate the computer 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 soht not show up

”Oh!” Sahtedly, a nated in the logbook ”Make sure it doesn't go to waste!”

It never seemed to, because the hackers were there al for an opening to occur, they were in the classrooa for a call fro it to see if someone had not shown up for a session The hackers recruited a network of infors at the coram in time, or a professor was sick, the ould be passed to TMRC and the hackers would appear at the TX-0, breathless and ready to jah Jack Dennis was theoretically in charge of the operation, Dennis was teaching courses at the time, and preferred to spend the rest of his ti 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 the ventures He had little taste for adh, and was just as happy to let John McKenzie run things

McKenzie early on recognized that the interactive nature of the TX-0 was inspiring a new for, and the hackers were its pioneers So he did not lay down too h in 1959 to accommodate the strays--science-er, who like Peter Sa the uncharted , the audio output, and the drill-hammer Flexowriter would lure these wanderers, who'd poke their heads into the lab like kittens peering into baskets of yarn

One of those wanderers was an outsider na the TX-0, Deutsch had developed a fascination for coan one day when he picked up a manual that someone had discarded, acalculations So about the orderliness of the computer instructions appealed to hi as the sanition that an artist experiences when he discovers the ht for hi a s up for time under the name of one of the priests, ran it on a co proficiency in progra He was only twelve years old

He was a shy kid, strong inelse He was uncoht, 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 santly constructed equip properly), where three off-line Flexowriters were available for punching programs onto paper tape which would later be fed into the TX-0 So in a tape

Peter watched for a while, then began bo little computer in the next room Then Peter went up to the TX-0 itself, exa how it differed from other computers: it was sht then to act as if he had a perfect right to be there He got hold of aactual n up for night and weekend sessions, and to write his own prograht accuse hi some sort of suh to stick his head over the TX-O's console, staring at the code that an Officially Sanctioned User, perhaps so into the Flexowriter, and saying in his squeaky, preadolescent voice so over hereyou need this other instruction over there,” and the self-io crazy--WHO IS THIS LITTLE WORM?--and start screao out and play soh, Peter Deutsch's comments would turn out to be correct Deutsch would also brazenly announce that he was going to write better prograo and do it

Samson, Kotok, and the other hackers accepted Peter Deutsch: by virtue of his coe he orthy of equal treatment Deutsch was not such a favorite with the Officially Sanctioned Users, especially when he sat behind the into action when they made a mistake on the Flexowriter

These Officially Sanctioned Users appeared at the TX-0 with the regularity of corams 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 thebehind the console of the TX-0in behind the throttle of a plane, Or, as Peter Sa 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 aail like a banshee with total creative abandon

One thing that enabled the 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 hteen bits each (A ”bit” is a BInary digiT, either a one or zero These binary nu 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 ”systerams”--the software to help users utilize theDennis worked on was an assee--which used three- letter symbolic abbreviations that represented instructions to the e, which consisted of the binary nuuage: since its design allowed only two bits of each eighteen-bit word to be used for instructions to the computer, only four instructions could be used (each possible two-bit variation--00, 0 1, 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 tolist of computer commands written as binary numbers--for exa mental case in a ethe computer with the asseraly while the computer did the translation into binary for you, Then you'd feed that binary ”object” code back into the cora that LOOKED like code, rather than an endless, dizzying series of ones and zeros

The other progra even newer--a debugger The TX-0 caram called UT-3, which enabled you to talk to the co commands directly into the Flexowriter, But it had terrible proble, it only accepted typed-in code that used the octal nuht number system (as opposed to binary, which is base two, and Arabic--ours-which is base ten), and it is a difficult syste better than UT-3 which would enable users to use the sye This came to be called FLIT, and it allowed users to actually find prograra

(Dennis would explain that ”FLIT” stood for FLexowriter Interrogation Tape, but clearly the nain was the insect spray with that brand nara on theon their er, which took up one third of the 4,096 words of the TX-O'sstyle of prograrams DO? Well, sometimes, it didn't ht away on a program that would instantly convert Arabic nu the skill hich Samson had accomplished this feat, said, ”My God, ould anyone want to do such a thing?” But Dennis knehy There was a of power and accoot when he fed in the paper tape, hts and switches, and saere once plain old blackboard Arabic nu back as the numerals the Romans had hacked with