Levy_S-Hackers-Heroes-Computer-Revolution

Dennis had written the original of and that twelve-year-old Peter Deutsch, amongothers, had revamped. They wouldn't change inputs or outputs, and they wouldn'tredesign algorithms; each hacker would take a section of the TX-0 program andconvert it to PDP-1 code. And they wouldn't sleep. Six hackers worked aroundtwo hundred and fifty man-hours that weekend, writing code, debugging, andwashing down take-out Chinese food with massive quantities of Coca-Colashipped over from the TMRC clubroom. It was a programming orgy, and whenJack Dennis came in that Monday he was astonished to find an assembler loadedinto the PDP-1, which as a demonstration was assembling its own code intobinary.By sheer dint of hacking, the TX-0 no, the PDP-1 hackers had turned out aprogram in a weekend that it would have taken the computer industry weeks,maybe even months to pull off. It was a project that would probably not beundertaken by the computer industry without a long and tedious process ofrequisitions, studies, meetings, and executive vacillating, most likely withconsiderable compromise along the way. It might never have been done at all. Theproject was a triumph for the Hacker Ethic.The hackers were given even more access to this new machine than they hadmanaged to get on the TX-0, and almost all of them switched their operations tothe Kluge Room. A few stubbornly stuck to the Tixo, and to the PDP-1 hackersthis was grounds for some mild ridicule. To rub it in, the PDP-1 hackers developeda little demonstration based on the mnemonics of the instruction set of this boldnew machine, which included such exotic instructions as DAC (DepositAccumulator), LIO (Load Input-Output), DPY (Deplay), and JMP. The PDP-1group would stand in a line and shout in unison:LAC,DAC,DIPPY DAP,LIO,DIO,JUMP!When they chanted that last word "Jump!" they would all jump to the right. Whatwas lacking in choreography was more than compensated for by enthusiasm: theywere supercharged by the beauty of the machine, by the beauty of computers.The same kind of enthusiasm was obvious in the even more spontaneousprogramming occurring on the PDP-1, ranging from serious systems programs, toprograms to control a primitive robot arm, to whimsical hacks. One of the latter