Hackers, Heroes of the Computer Revolution | Page 5

so that it would seem he
was racing through lists of possible meanings of statements in mid-word, had viewed
computers on his visits to MIT from his hometown of Lowell, Massachusetts, less than
thirty miles from campus. This made him a "Cambridge urchin," one of dozens of
science-crazy high schoolers in the region who were drawn, as if by gravitational pull, to
the Cambridge campus. He had even tried to rig up his own computer with discarded
parts of old pinball machines: they were the best source of logic elements he could find.
LOGIC ELEMENTS: the term seems to encapsulate what drew Peter Samson, son of a
mill machinery repairman, to electronics. The subject made sense. When you grow up
with an insatiable curiosity as to how things work, the delight you find upon discovering
something as elegant as circuit logic, where all connections have to complete their loops,
is profoundly thrilling. Peter Samson, who early on appreciated the mathematical
simplicity of these things, could recall seeing a television show on Boston's public TV
channel, WGBH, which gave a rudimentary introduction to programming a computer in
its own language. It fired his imagination: to Peter Samson, a computer was surely like
Aladdin's lamp--rub it, and it would do your bidding. So he tried to learn more about the
field, built machines of his own, entered science project competitions and contests, and
went to the place that people of his ilk aspired to: MIT. The repository of the very
brightest of those weird high school kids with owl-like glasses and underdeveloped
pectorals who dazzled math teachers and flunked PE, who dreamed not of scoring on
prom night, but of getting to the finals of the General Electric Science Fair competition.
MIT, where he would wander the hallways at two o'clock in the morning, looking for
something interesting, and where he would indeed discover something that would help
draw him deeply into a new form of creative process, and a new life-style, and would put

him into the forefront of a society envisioned only by a few science-fiction writers of
mild disrepute. He would discover a computer that he could play with.
The EAM room which Samson had chanced on was loaded with large keypunch
machines the size of squat file cabinets. No one was protecting them: the room was
staffed only by day, when a select group who had attained official clearance were
privileged enough to submit long manila cards to operators who would then use these
machines to punch holes in them according to what data the privileged ones wanted
entered on the cards. A hole in the card would represent some instruction to the computer,
telling it to put a piece of data somewhere, or perform a function on a piece of data, or
move a piece of data from one place to another. An entire stack of these cards made one
computer program, a program being a series of instructions which yield some expected
result, just as the instructions in a recipe, when precisely followed, lead to a cake. Those
cards would be taken to yet another operator upstairs who would feed the cards into a
"reader" that would note where the holes were and dispatch this information to the IBM
704 computer on the first floor of Building 26. The Hulking Giant.
The IBM 704 cost several million dollars, took up an entire room, needed constant
attention from a cadre of professional machine operators, and required special
air-conditioning so that the glowing vacuum tubes inside it would not heat up to
data-destroying temperatures. When the air-conditioning broke down--a fairly common
occurrences--a loud gong would sound, and three engineers would spring from a nearby
office to frantically take covers off the machine so its innards wouldn't melt. All these
people in charge of punching cards, feeding them into readers, and pressing buttons and
switches on the machine were what was commonly called a Priesthood, and those
privileged enough to submit data to those most holy priests were the official acolytes. It
was an almost ritualistic exchange. ACOLYTE: Oh machine, would you accept my offer
of information so you may run my program and perhaps give me a computation?
PRIEST (on behalf of the machine): We will try. We promise nothing.
As a general rule, even these most privileged of acolytes were not allowed direct access
to the machine itself, and they would not be able to see for hours, sometimes for days, the
results of the machine's ingestion of their "batch" of cards.
This was something Samson knew, and of course it frustrated the hell out of Samson,
who wanted to get at the damn machine. For this was what life was all about.
What Samson did not know, and was delighted to discover, was that the EAM room