Part 3 (1/2)

In fact it was Jack Dennis who suggested to Samson that there were considerable uses for the TX-O's ability 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 ehteen-bit words the TX-0 had in its accuivenon whether bit fourteen was a one or zero So Sarams that varied the binary numbers in that slot in different ways to produce different pitches

At that ti with using a computer to output any kind ofrequired massive computations before the machine would so much as utter a note, Samson, who reacted with i the iht 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 ed it so that if yousyntax, the Flexowriter would switch to a red ribbon and print ”To err is huive divine”

When outsiders heard the le-voice, monophonic square wave, no har deal! Three iant 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 beenvibrations that were sound What happened in Saram was that a load of numbers, bits of information fed into a computer, comprised a code in which theat the code, and not be able to divine where the ly brief exchanges of data were taking place in the accu in one of the metal, wire, and silicon racks that comprised the TX-0 Sae of how to use a voice, to lift itself in song--and the TX-0 had coram was not only metaphorically a musical composition--it was LITERALLY a musical coram which yielded complex arithmetical coits that Sae which could produce ANYTHING--a Bach fugue or an anti-aircraft system

Samson did not say any of this to the outsiders ere unimpressed by his feat Nor did the hackers themselves discuss this--it is not even clear that they analyzed the phenomenon in such cosues appreciated it, because it was obviously a neat hack That was justification enough

To hackers like Bob Saunders--balding, pluroup, student of systerown up in the suburbs of Chicago, and for as long as he could res of electricity and telephone circuitry had fascinated hi MIT, Saunders had landed a drea central office equip 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 beco an upperclasse career than Kotok and Sa space to actually lay the foundation for a social life, which included courtshi+p of and eventualcomputer work for a research project Still, the TX-0 was the center of his college career, and he shared the corades suffer from missed classes It didn't bother hi in Roo 26, behind the Tixo console Years later he would describe hiroup Other people were off studying, spending their days up on four-floor buildingsparticles at things or whatever it is they do And ere si because we had no interest in it They were studying what they were studying and ere studying ere studying And the fact that much of it was not on the officially approved curriculue iht It was the only way to take full advantage of the crucial ”off-hours” of the TX-0 During the day, Saunders would usually e to make an appearance in a class or two Then sos like eating and going to the bathrooe for a while But eventually he would filter over to Building 26 He would go over soht before, printed on the nine-and-a-half-inch-wide paper that the Flexowriter used He would annotate andto update the code to whatever he considered the next stage of operation Maybe then he would raood ideas and potential bugs Then back to Building 26, to the Kluge Room next to the TX-0, to find an off-line 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 thelike two or three in the e back at the Railroad Club, until the ti the metal racks that held the co a location that either held or did not hold a bit of reet hi Samson had hacked, in honor of Lewis Carroll's poem with the line ”The tiht chuckle at that as he went into the drawer for the paper tape which held the asseram and fed that into the tape reader Now the cora on and send that into the coo on as the computer switched his code froe) 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 progranificently

There wouldbehind hi some junk food they'd extracted from the machine downstairs

Saunders preferred the leunkies” But at four in the ood They would all watch as the progra on, the whine fro on as in Bit 14 in the accu he'd see on the CRT display after the prograram had crashed So he'd reach into the drawer for the tape with the FLIT debugger and feed THAT into the co ras had gone wrong, and s by putting in so some of the switches on the console in precise order, or haot running--and it was always incredibly satisfying when so worked, when he'd made that roomful of transistors and wires and ether to create a precise output that he'd devised--he'd try to add the next advance to it When the hour was over--soet on the machine after hiuring out what the heck had o belly-up

The peak hour itself was tre 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 infor from one instruction to the next, and be able to predict--and exploit--the effect of all that lued to your cerebral being, it was aled into the environment of the computer Sometihts 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 byon the co over the code that you wrote on one of the off-line Flexowriters in the Kluge Roo around” to the next day

Inevitably, that frame of mind spilled over to what rando The knife-and-paintbrush contingent at TMRC were 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, fro And if you attended one of the club s held every Tuesday at five-fifteen, you could see the concern: the hackers would exploit every possible thread of parlia as convoluted as the progra on the TX-0 Motions were made to make motions to make motions, and objections ruled out of order as if they were soon Noveests that ”we frown on certainRobert'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 Sa parliaicalspilled over into more commonplace activities You could ask a hacker a question and sense hisbits until he cae Saunders would drive to the Safeway every Saturday en and upon her return ask her husband, ”Would you like to help roceries?” Bob Saunders would reply, ”No” Stunned, Marge would drag in the groceries herself After the sa curses at hi to knohy he said no to her question

”That's a stupid question to ask,” he said ”Of course I won't LIKE to help you bring in the groceries If you askthee had subrams do when the syntax is ied her question that Bob Saunders would allow it to run successfully on his own mental co neas coalescing around the TX-0: a neay 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 co with a devotion rarely seen outside ofsymbiosis betweenhot-rodders fixated on souping up engines, they caranted, Even as the elean to accrue, as theirstarted to surpass any previous recorded levels of skill, the dozen or so hackers were reluctant to acknowledge that their tiny society, on intimate terether a body of concepts, beliefs, and mores

The precepts of this revolutionary Hacker Ethic were not so reed upon No ather converts The co, 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 endary Greenblatt or Gosper, though it would be some 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 WHICH MIGHT TEACH YOU SOMETHING 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 syste how they work, and using this knowledge to create new and even s They resent any person, physical barrier, or law that tries to keep the this

This is especially true when a hacker wants to fix so that (from his point of view) is broken or needs improvement

Imperfect syste the cars--the systehts and oddly laid out one-way streets causes delays which are so Goddans, open up traffic-light control boxes redesign the entire systeh to open up a control box near a traffic light and take it apart to make it work better should be perfectly welcome tomatters like that into your own hands are too ridiculous to even consider abiding by This attitude helped the Model Railroad Club start, on an extreht 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, ere as a rule scrupulously honest in other ” A willful blindness

ALL INFORMATION SHOULD BE FREE