Levy_S-Hackers-Heroes-Computer-Revolution

you were being deliberately stupid about it, or if you were a genuine moron an outand-out"loser" it might take you a hundred instructions to get the computer toconvert machine language to decimal. But any hacker worth his salt could do it inless, and finally, by taking the best of the programs, bumming an instruction hereand there, the routine was diminished to about fifty instructions.After that, things got serious. People would work for hours, seeking a way to dothe same thing in fewer lines of code. It be came more than a competition; it was aquest. For all the effort expended, no one seemed to be able to crack the fifty-linebarrier. The question arose whether it was even possible to do it in less. Was therea point beyond which a program could not be bummed?Among the people puzzling with this dilemma was a fellow named Jensen, a tall,silent hacker from Maine who would sit quietly in the Kluge Room and scribble onprintouts with the calm demeanor of a backwoodsman whittling. Jensen wasalways looking for ways to compress his programs in time and space his code wasa completely bizarre sequence of intermingled Boolean and arithmetic functions,often causing several different computations to occur in different sections of thesame eighteen-bit "word." Amazing things, magical stunts.Before Jensen, there had been general agreement that the only logical algorithmfor a decimal print routine would have the machine repeatedly subtracting, using atable of the powers of ten to keep the numbers in proper digital columns. Jensensomehow figured that a powers-of-ten table wasn't necessary; he came up with analgorithm that was able to convert the digits in a reverse order but, by some digitalsleight of hand, print them out in the proper order. There was a complexmathematical justification to it that was clear to the other hackers only when theysaw Jensen's program posted on a bulletin board, his way of telling them that hehad taken the decimal print routine to its limit. Forty-six instructions. Peoplewould stare at the code and their jaws would drop. Marge Saunders remembers thehackers being unusually quiet for days afterward."We knew that was the end of it," Bob Saunders later said. "That was Nirvana."Computers can change your life for the better.This belief was subtly manifest. Rarely would a hacker try to impose a view of themyriad advantages of the computer way of knowledge to an outsider. Yet thispremise dominated the everyday behavior of the TX-0 hackers, as well as thegenerations of hackers that came after them.Surely the computer had changed their lives, enriched their lives, given their lives