Levy_S-Hackers-Heroes-Computer-Revolution

The TMRC hackers were not the only ones who had been devising plans for thenew PDP-1. During that summer of 1961, a plan for the most elaborate hack yet avirtual showcase of what could come out of a rigorous application of the HackerEthic was being devised. The scene of these discussions was a tenement buildingon Higham Street in Cambridge, and the original perpetrators were three itinerantprogrammers in their mid-twenties who'd been hanging around variouscomputation centers for years. Two of the three lived in the tenement, so in honorof the pompous proclamations emanating from nearby Harvard University the triomockingly referred to the building as the Higham Institute.One of the Fellows of this bogus institution was Steve Russell, nicknamed, forunknown reasons, Slug. He had that breathless-chipmunk speech pattern socommon among hackers, along with thick glasses, modest height, and a fanatictaste for computers, bad movies, and pulp science fiction. All three interests wereshared by the resident attendees at those bull sessions on Higham Street.Russell had long been a "coolie" (to use a TMRC term) of Uncle John McCarthy.McCarthy had been trying to design and implement a higher-level language thatmight be sufficient for artificial intelligence work. He thought he had found it inLISP. The language was named for its method of List Processing; by simple yetpowerful commands, LISP could do many things with few lines of code; it couldalso perform powerful recursions references to things within itself which wouldallow programs written in that language to actually "learn" from what happened asthe program ran. The problem with LISP at that time was that it took up an awfulamount of space on a computer, ran very slowly, and generated voluminousamounts of extra code as the programs ran, so much so that it needed its own"garbage collection" program to periodically clean out the computer memory.Russell was helping Uncle John write a LISP interpreter for the Hulking GiantIBM 704. It was, in his words, "a horrible engineering job," mostly due to thebatch-processing tedium of the 704.Compared to that machine, the PDP-1 looked like the Promised Land to SlugRussell. More accessible than the TX-0, and no batch-processing! Although itdidn't seem big enough to do LISP, it had other marvelous capabilities, some ofwhich were objects of discussion of the Higham Institute. What particularlyintrigued Russell and his friends was the prospect of making up some kind ofelaborate "display hack" on the PDP-1, using the CRT screen. After considerablemidnight discourse, the three-man Higham Institute put itself on record as insistingthat the most effective demonstration of the computer's magic would be a visually