Hackers, Heroes of the Computer Revolution | Page 9

by getting to know the Priesthood, and by bowing and scraping the requisite number of
times, people like Kotok were eventually allowed to push a few buttons on the machine,
and watch the lights as it worked.
There were secrets to those IBM machines that had been painstakingly learned by some
of the older people at MIT with access to the 704 and friends among the Priesthood.
Amazingly, a few of these programmers, grad students working with McCarthy, had even
written a program that utilized one of the rows of tiny lights: the lights would be lit in
such an order that it looked like a little ball was being passed from right to left: if an
operator hit a switch at just the right time, the motion of the lights could be
reversed--Computer Ping-Pong! This obviously was the kind of thing that you'd show off
to impress your peers, who would then take a look at the actual program you had written
and see how it was done.
To top the program, someone else might try to do the same thing with fewer
instructions--a worthy endeavor, since there was so little room in the small "memory" of
the computers of those days that not many instructions could fit into them, John
McCarthy had once noticed how his graduate students who loitered around the 704 would
work over their computer programs to get the most out of the fewest instructions, and get
the program compressed so that fewer cards would need to be fed to the machine.

Shaving off an instruction or two was almost an obsession with them. McCarthy
compared these students to ski bums. They got the same kind of primal thrill from
"maximizing code" as fanatic skiers got from swooshing frantically down a hill. So the
practice of taking a computer program and trying to cut off instructions without affecting
the outcome came to be called "program bumming," and you would often hear people
mumbling things like "Maybe I can bum a few instructions out and get the octal
correction card loader down to three cards instead of four."
McCarthy in 1959 was turning his interest from chess to a new way of talking to the
computer, the whole new "language" called LISP. Alan Kotok and his friends were more
than eager to take over the chess project. Working on the batch-processed IBM, they
embarked on the gargantuan project of teaching the 704, and later the 709, and even after
that its replacement the 7090, how to play the game of kings. Eventually Kotok's group
became the largest users of computer time in the entire MIT computation center.
Still, working with the IBM machine was frustrating. There was nothing worse than the
long wait between the time you handed in your cards and the time your results were
handed back to you. If you had misplaced as much as one letter in one instruction, the
program would crash, and you would have to start the whole process over again. It went
hand in hand with the stifling proliferation of goddamn RULES that permeated the
atmosphere of the computation center. Most of the rules were designed to keep crazy
young computer fans like Samson and Kotok and Saunders physically distant from the
machine itself. The most rigid rule of all was that no one should be able to actually touch
or tamper with the machine itself. This, of course, was what those Signals and Power
people were dying to do more than anything else in the world, and the restrictions drove
them mad.
One priest--a low-level sub-priest, really--on the late-night shift was particularly nasty in
enforcing this rule, so Samson devised a suitable revenge. While poking around at Eli's
electronic junk shop one day, he chanced upon an electrical board precisely like the kind
of board holding the clunky vacuum tubes which resided inside the IBM. One night,
sometime before 4 A.M., this particular sub-priest stepped out for a minute; when he
returned, Samson told him that the machine wasn't working, but they'd found the
trouble--and held up the totally smashed module from the old 704 he'd gotten at Eli's.
The sub-priest could hardly get the words out. "W-where did you get that?"
Samson, who had wide green eyes that could easily look maniacal, slowly pointed to an
open place on the machine rack where, of course, no board had ever been, but the space
still looked sadly bare. The sub-priest gasped. He made faces that indicated his bowels
were about to give out. He whimpered exhortations to the deity. Visions, no doubt, of a
million-dollar deduction from his paycheck began flashing before him. Only after his
supervisor, a high priest with some understanding of the mentality of these young
wiseguys from the Model Railroad Club, came and explained