Hackers, Heroes of the Computer Revolution | Page 8

used the word, there was serious respect implied. While
someone might call a clever connection between relays a "mere hack," it would be
understood that, to qualify as a hack, the feat must be imbued with innovation, style, and
technical virtuosity. Even though one might self-deprecatingly say he was "hacking away
at The System" (much as an axe-wielder hacks at logs), the artistry with which one
hacked was recognized to be considerable.
The most productive people working on Signals and Power called themselves "hackers"
with great pride. Within the confines of the clubroom in Building 20, and of the "Tool
Room" (where some study and many techno bull sessions took place), they had
unilaterally endowed themselves with the heroic attributes of Icelandic legend. This is
how Peter Samson saw himself and his friends in a Sandburg-esque poem in the club
newsletter:
Switch Thrower for the World, Fuze Tester, Maker of Routes, Player with the Railroads
and the System's Advance Chopper; Grungy, hairy, sprawling, Machine of the
Point-Function Line-o-lite: They tell me you are wicked and I believe them; for I have
seen your painted light bulbs under the lucite luring the system coolies . . . Under the
tower, dust all over the place, hacking with bifur- cated springs . . . Hacking even as an
ignorant freshman acts who has never lost occupancy and has dropped out Hacking the
M-Boards, for under its locks are the switches, and under its control the advance around
the layout, Hacking! Hacking the grungy, hairy, sprawling hacks of youth; uncabled,
frying diodes, proud to be Switch-thrower, Fuze- tester, Maker of Routes, Player with
Railroads, and Advance Chopper to the System.
Whenever they could, Samson and the others would slip off to the EAM room with their
plug boards, trying to use the machine to keep track of the switches underneath the layout.
Just as important, they were seeing what the electromechanical counter could do, taking it
to its limit.
That spring of 1959, a new course was offered at MIT. It was the first course in
programming a computer that freshmen could take. The teacher was a distant man with a
wild shock of hair and an equally unruly beard--John McCarthy. A master mathematician,
McCarthy was a classically absent-minded professor; stories abounded about his habit of
suddenly answering a question hours, sometimes even days after it was first posed to him.
He would approach you in the hallway, and with no salutation would begin speaking in
his robotically precise diction, as if the pause in conversation had been only a fraction of

a second, and not a week. Most likely, his belated response would be brilliant.
McCarthy was one of a very few people working in an entirely new form of scientific
inquiry with computers. The volatile and controversial nature of his field of study was
obvious from the very arrogance of the name that McCarthy had bestowed upon it:
Artificial Intelligence. This man actually thought that computers could be SMART. Even
at such a science-intensive place as MIT, most people considered the thought ridiculous:
they considered computers to be useful, if somewhat absurdly expensive, tools for
number-crunching huge calculations and for devising missile defense systems (as MIT's
largest computer, the Whirlwind, had done for the early-warning SAGE system), but
scoffed at the thought that computers themselves could actually be a scientific field of
study, Computer Science did not officially exist at MIT in the late fifties, and McCarthy
and his fellow computer specialists worked in the Electrical Engineering Department,
which offered the course, No. 641, that Kotok, Samson, and a few other TRMC members
took that spring.
McCarthy had started a mammoth program on the IBM 704--the Hulking Giant--that
would give it the extraordinary ability to play chess. To critics of the budding field of
Artificial Intelligence, this was just one example of the boneheaded optimism of people
like John McCarthy. But McCarthy had a certain vision of what computers could do, and
playing chess was only the beginning.
All fascinating stuff, but not the vision that was driving Kotok and Samson and the others.
They wanted to learn how to WORK the damn machines, and while this new
programming language called LISP that McCarthy was talking about in 641 was
interesting, it was not nearly as interesting as the act of programming, or that fantastic
moment when you got your printout back from the Priesthood--word from the source
itself!--and could then spend hours poring over the results of the program, what had gone
wrong with it, how it could be improved. The TMRC hackers were devising ways to get
into closer contact with the IBM 704, which soon was upgraded to a newer model called
the 709. By hanging out at the computation center in the wee hours of the morning, and