"Oh!" Samson would say delightedly, a minute or so after someone failed to show up at the time designated in the logbook. "Make sure it doesn't go to waste!" It never seemed to, because the hackers were there almost all the time. If they weren't in the RLE lab waiting for an opening to occur, they were in the classroom next to the TMRC clubroom, the Tool Room, playing a "hangman"-style word game that Samson had devised called "Come Next Door," waiting for a call from someone who was near the TX-0, monitoring it to see if someone had not shown up for a session. The hackers recruited a network of informers to give advance notice of potential openings at the computer--if a research project was not ready with its program in time, or a professor was sick, the word would be passed to TMRC and the hackers would appear at the TX-0, breathless and ready to jam into the space behind the console. Though Jack Dennis was theoretically in charge of the operation, Dennis was teaching courses at the time, and preferred to spend the rest of his time actually writing code for the machine. Dennis played the role of benevolent godfather to the hackers: he would give them a brief hands-on introduction to the machine, point them in certain directions, be amused at their wild programming ventures. He had little taste for administration, though, and was just as happy to let John McKenzie run things. McKenzie early on recognized that the interactive nature of the TX-0 was inspiring a new form of computer programming, and the hackers were its pioneers. So he did not lay down too many edicts. The atmosphere was loose enough in 1959 to accommodate the strays--science-mad people whose curiosity burned like a hunger, who like Peter Samson would be exploring the uncharted maze of laboratories at MIT. The noise of the air-conditioning, the audio output, and the drill-hammer Flexowriter would lure these wanderers, who'd poke their heads into the lab like kittens peering into baskets of yarn. One of those wanderers was an outsider named Peter Deutsch. Even before discovering the TX-0, Deutsch had developed a fascination for computers. It began one day when he picked up a manual that someone had discarded, a manual for an obscure form of computer language for doing calculations. Something about the orderliness of the computer instructions appealed to him: he would later describe the feeling as the same kind of eerily transcendent recognition that an artist experiences when he discovers the medium that is absolutely right for him. THIS IS WHERE I BELONG. Deutsch tried writing a small program, and, signing up for time under the name of one of the priests, ran it on a computer. Within weeks, he had attained a striking proficiency in programming. He was only twelve years old.