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 faculty 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 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 shipped 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 to meet the Pope?
The TX-0 was in Building 26, in the second-floor Radio Laboratory of Electronics (RLE), directly above the first-floor Computation 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-O's workings were mounted on several tall, thin chassis, like rugged metal bookshelves, with tangled 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, 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 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 at any given microsecond; after you were familiar with the tones, you could actually HEAR what 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" capabilities, 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. Fortunately, there didn't seem to be the kind of bureaucracy surrounding 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 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 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!"
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.