The Tech Model Railroad Club

This chapter introduces Peter Samson and the other students of the Tech Model Railroad Club. It also introduces the concept of hacking. It tells the story of how TMRC S&P members would interact with the various computers around the Institute, and how they would write programs and interact with computers whenever possible. It also briefly introduces Levy's thesis, the "hacker ethic".

Peter Deutsch was a young 12-year-old local student who was the son of an MIT professor. He started hanging out by the TX-0 and very quickly became adept at programming it. He would often correct the code of people who were trying to get real work done.

p13 - "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 the situation did he calm down.

He was not the last administrator to feel the wrath of a hacker thwarted in the quest for access."

p25 - "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."

The Hacker Ethic

p27 - "Access to computers--and anything which might teach you something about the way the world works--should be unlimited and total. Always yield to the Hands-On Imperative!"

Levy argues that the culture of sharing and openness came into place organically; there was no explicit intent to create such a culture. The TMRC hackers even went so far as to create an organization called the "Midnight Requisitioning Committee" that would effectively steal electronic components from labs around MIT.

p27 - "All information should be free"

p28 - "Mistrust Authority--Promote Decentralization"

Hackers were very anti-bureaucracy.

IBM batch-processed priests looked down upon other computers; they believed that IBM made the only real computers. Hackers hated this.

p30 - "Hackers should be judged by their hacking, not bogus criteria such as degrees, age, race, or position."

p30 - "You can create art and beauty on a computer"

Program bumming was the concept of simplifying and shortening code without removing functionality. Computers of the day were extremely limited in storage, so program and memory size needed to be optimized.

"Jenson, a tall, silent hacker from Maine who would sit quietly in the Kluge Room and scribble on printouts with the calm demeanor of a backwoodsman whittling" was able to create a decimal-printing routine that was 46 instructions. There was a competition to get it below 50 instructions, and no one else was able to come close. His 46 instructions immediately ended the contest.

p33 - "Computers can change your life for the better."

Hackers - naïvely - believed that all information should be free; in a sense, they were communists, though Levy doesn't ever attempt to apply that label. In another sense, they were hippies living in a commune - everything was meant to be shared, and everyone was willing to help each other. The picture of the "Hacking Ethic" that Levy paints is one of an academic "Nirvana".

Levy also suggests that Institute staff - professors and priests - did not originally like the hackers or believe that what they were doing was worthwhile, but that they slowly were coming around.

Spacewar

Summer of 1961, the PDP-1 arrived at MIT

Levy interjects a discussion of how TMRC was very interested in phone company equipment, before returning to the PDP-1

Levy says the PDP-1 was the first computer that was designed to be used by a hacker. He talks about how DEC actually 'got it'.

When the new computer arrived, it had very little software. Jack Dennis, in charge of the PDP-1 and TX-0, wanted to borrow the assembler that BBN, another PDP-1 owner, had written. But Kotok wanted to write a better one, and he wagered with Dennis that he could write one in a weekend. Dennis calculated that it would cost under $500. Six hackers worked starting on a Friday night, nonstop, to convert the TX-0 assembler to the PDP-1. They worked "around two hundred and fifty man-hours that weekend". "It was a programming orgy". When Dennis arrived on Monday morning, the assembler was loaded and ready to go. Levy says that the Hacker Ethic made this possible - that it never would have been done in the world of corporate computing with "requisitions, studies, meetings, and executive vacillating".

Samson updated his music compiler for the three-voice audio capabilities of the PDP-1, and gave it to DEC so they could give it out to clients.

Three itinerate programmers living in a tenement building on Higham Street decided that the best thing they could do with the PDP-1 was to create a visual demonstration with its CRT screen. Slug Russell created "Spacewar". He was not very motivated, though, so it took the other hackers' urging. Slug once said that he needed to figure out how to write sine/cosine routines to calculate motion, but Kotok used the hacker ethic and borrowed the routines from a programmer at DEC.

DEC actually shipped Spacewar on their PDP-1s; they left it running when they shut the machines down, and their salespeople would demonstrate it when they turned the computer on.

Ends with an introduction of Richard Greenblatt

Greenblatt and Gosper

Greenblatt worked on the new PDP-1 in Tech Square, but he completely failed his classes and was kicked out of MIT.

Gosper was a math genius who was attracted due to the ability of the computer to solve math problems.

p71 - "Hacking had replaced sex in their lives"

This chapter continues to introduce individual hackers. It talks about the penchant that TMRC hackers had for Chinese food - and about Sweet-and-Sour Bitter Melon, a dish that they created and ordered on April 1. It keeps reinforcing that DEC was good and IBM and Univac were bad.

The Midnight Computer Wiring Society

p80 - "Greenblatt was hacker of systems and visionary of application; Gosper was metaphysical explorer and handyman of the esoteric. Together they were two legs of a techno-cultural triangle which would serve as the Hacker Ethic's foundation in its rise to cultural supremacy at MIT in the coming years. The third leg of the triangle arrived in the fall of 1963, and his name was Stewart Nelson."

Phone phreaking!

Stew Nelson used the PDP-6 and PDP-1 to interrogate the phone company's system; they were effectively blue boxes. Stew caused so much trouble that Minsky asked his friend Ed Fredkin to hire him and give him something to do.

The hackers also loved to attack locks; a locked door was an affront on their reason. So there was an unwritten code that AI Lab students followed, where it was okay if they did whatever they wanted as long as they didn't brag about it.

Winners and Losers

The chapter's title describes the schism between people at the AI Lab. The "winners" were the people who were hackers and who had the hacker ethic. The "losers" were the people who were just trying to get their work done; mostly grad students. The hackers saw the losers as being unskilled and stupid.

p107 - Jerry Sussman!

They built the Incompatible Timesharing System for the PDP-6. It had a command "KILL SYSTEM" that would cause the system to crash, as a way of discouraging people from trying to crash the system. There were no passwords and everyone could access everyone else's files. It was a hacker-controlled timesharing system.

Life

In the 1970s, Levy suggests that the AI Lab culture both spread out around the country and started to fade back at MIT. He talks about the founding of the Stanford AI Lab, in only a page or two. This discussion of SAIL seemed rather short to me. He also talks about the anti-war riots that caused the AI Lab to put bulletproof glass and locks on their entrance.

p124 - "While they had created a lock-less, democratic system within the lab, the hackers were so alienated from the outside world that they had to use those same hated locks, barricades, and bureaucrat-compiled lists to control access to this idealistic environment."