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 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 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 emitted depending on the state of the fourteenth bit in the eighteen-bit words the TX-0 had in its accumulator in a given microsecond. The sound was on or off depending on whether bit fourteen was a one or zero. So Samson set about writing programs 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 experimenting 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 information 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 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 which yielded complex arithmetical computations and statistical analyses. These digits that Samson had jammed into the computer were a universal language which could produce ANYTHING—a Bach fugue or an anti-aircraft system.

Samson did not say any of this to the outsiders who were unimpressed 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 disciple 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 equipment, 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 non-hacking 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 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 particles 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 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 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 Railroad Club, until the time came.