It was the S&P group who devised this fiendishly ingenious scheme, and it was the S&P group who harbored the kind of restless curiosity which led them to root around campus buildings in search of ways to get their hands on computers. They were lifelong disciples of a Hands-On Imperative. Head of S&P was an upperclassman named Bob Saunders, with ruddy, bulbous features, an infectious laugh, and a talent for switch gear. As a child in Chicago, he had built a high-frequency transformer for a high school project; it was his six-foot-high version of a Tesla coil, something devised by an engineer in the 1800s which was supposed to send out furious waves of electrical power. Saunders said his coil project managed to blow out television reception for blocks around. Another person who gravitated to S&P was Alan Kotok, a plump, chinless, thick-spectacled New Jerseyite in Samson's class. Kotok's family could recall him, at age three, prying a plug out of a wall with a screwdriver and causing a hissing shower of sparks to erupt. When he was six, he was building and wiring lamps. In high school he had once gone on a tour of the Mobil Research Lab in nearby Haddonfield, and saw his first computer--the exhilaration of that experience helped him decide to enter MIT. In his freshman year, he earned a reputation as one of TMRC's most capable S&P people. The S&P people were the ones who spent Saturdays going to Eli Heffron's junkyard in Somerville scrounging for parts, who would spend hours on their backs resting on little rolling chairs they called "bunkies" to get underneath tight spots in the switching system, who would work through the night making the wholly unauthorized connection between the TMRC phone and the East Campus. Technology was their playground. The core members hung out at the club for hours; constantly improving The System, arguing about what could be done next, developing a jargon of their own that seemed incomprehensible to outsiders who might chance on these teen-aged fanatics, with their checked short-sleeve shirts, pencils in their pockets, chino pants, and, always, a bottle of Coca-Cola by their side. (TMRC purchased its own Coke machine for the then forbidding sum of $165; at a tariff of five cents a bottle, the outlay was replaced in three months; to facilitate sales, Saunders built a change machine for Coke buyers that was still in use a decade later.) When a piece of equipment wasn't working, it was "losing"; when a piece of equipment was ruined, it was "munged" (Mash Until No Good); the two desks in the corner of the room were not called the office, but the "orifice"; one who insisted on studying for courses was a "tool"; garbage was called "cruft"; and a project undertaken or a product built not solely to fulfill some constructive goal, but with some wild pleasure taken in mere involvement, was called a "hack."