Sitting at the console, facing the metal racks that held the computer's transistors, each transistor representing a location that either held or did not hold a bit of memory, Saunders would set up the Flexowriter, which would greet him with the word "WALRUS." This was something Samson had hacked, in honor of Lewis Carroll's poem with the line "The time has come, the Walrus said . . ." Saunders might chuckle at that as he went into the drawer for the paper tape which held the assembler program and fed that into the tape reader. Now the computer would be ready to assemble his program, so he'd take the Flexowriter tape he'd been working on and send that into the computer. He'd watch the lights go on as the computer switched his code from "source" (the symbolic assembly language) 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 program would run magnificently.

There would most probably be a few fellow hackers kibitzing behind him, laughing and joking and drinking Cokes and eating some junk food they'd extracted from the machine downstairs. Saunders preferred the lemon jelly wedges that the others called "lemon gunkies." But at four in the morning, anything tasted good. They would all watch as the program began to run, the lights going on, the whine from the speaker humming in high or low register depending on what was in Bit 14 in the accumulator, and the first thing he'd see on the CRT display after the program had been assembled and run was that the program had crashed. So he'd reach into the drawer for the tape with the FLIT debugger and feed THAT into the computer. The computer would then be a debugging machine, and he'd send the program back in. Now he could start trying to find out where things had gone wrong, and maybe if he was lucky he'd find out, and change things by putting in some commands by flicking some of the switches on the console in precise order, or hammering in some code on the Flexowriter. Once things got running—and it was always incredibly satisfying when something worked, when he'd made that roomful of transistors and wires and metal and electricity all meld together to create a precise output that he'd devised—he'd try to add the next advance to it. When the hour was over—someone already itching to get on the machine after him—Saunders would be ready to spend the next few hours figuring out what the heck had made the program go belly-up.

The peak hour itself was tremendously intense, but during 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 information were going from one instruction to the next, and be able to predict—and exploit—the effect of all that movement. When you had all that information glued to your cerebral being, it was almost as if your own mind had merged into the environment of the computer. Sometimes it took hours to build up to the point where your thoughts 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 by marathon bursts, alternatively working on the computer or poring over the code that you wrote on one of the off-line Flexowriters in the Kluge Room. You would sustain that concentration by "wrapping around" to the next day.

Inevitably, that frame of mind spilled over to what random shards of existence the hackers had outside of computing. 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, from railroading to computing. And if you attended one of the club meetings held every Tuesday at five-fifteen, you could see the concern: the hackers would exploit every possible thread of parliamentary procedure to create a meeting as convoluted as the programs they were hacking on the TX-0. Motions were made to make motions to make motions, and objections ruled out of order as if they were so many computer errors. A note in the minutes of the meeting on November 24, 1959, suggests that "we frown on certain members who would do the club a lot more good by doing more S&P-ing and less reading Robert'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 Samson's oral diarrhea."

Hacking parliamentary procedure was one thing, but the logical mind-frame required for programming spilled over into more commonplace activities. You could ask a hacker a question and sense his mental accumulator processing bits until he came up with a precise answer to the question you asked. Marge Saunders would drive to the Safeway every Saturday morning in the Volkswagen and upon her return ask her husband, "Would you like to help me bring in the groceries?" Bob Saunders would reply, "No." Stunned, Marge would drag in the groceries herself. After the same thing occurred a few times, she exploded, hurling curses at him and demanding to know why 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 ask me if I'll help you bring them in, that's another matter."

It was as if Marge had submitted a program into the TX-0, and the program, as programs do when the syntax is improper, had crashed. It was not until she debugged her question that Bob Saunders would allow it to run successfully on his own mental computer.

CHAPTER 2 THE HACKER ETHIC

Something new was coalescing around the TX-0: a new way 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 computing with a devotion rarely seen outside of monasteries they were the vanguard of a daring symbiosis between man and machine. With a fervor like that of young hot-rodders fixated on souping up engines, they came to take their almost unique surroundings for granted, Even as the elements of a culture were forming, as legends began to accrue, as their mastery of programming started to surpass any previous recorded levels of skill, the dozen or so hackers were reluctant to acknowledge that their tiny society, on intimate terms with the TX-0, had been slowly and implicitly piecing together a body of concepts, beliefs, and mores.