He was a shy kid, strong in math and unsure of most everything else. He was uncomfortably overweight, deficient in sports, but an intellectual star performer. His father was a professor at MIT, and Peter used that as his entree to explore the labs. It was inevitable that he would be drawn to the TX-0. He first wandered into the small "Kluge Room" (a "kluge" is a piece of inelegantly constructed equipment that seems to defy logic by working properly), where three off-line Flexowriters were available for punching programs onto paper tape which would later be fed into the TX-0. Someone was busy punching in a tape. Peter watched for a while, then began bombarding the poor soul with questions about that weird-looking little computer in the next room. Then Peter went up to the TX-0 itself, examined it closely, noting how it differed from other computers: it was smaller, had a CRT display, and other neat toys. He decided right then to act as if he had a perfect right to be there. He got hold of a manual and soon was startling people by spouting actual make-sense computer talk, and eventually was allowed to sign up for night and weekend sessions, and to write his own programs. McKenzie worried that someone might accuse him of running some sort of summer camp, with this short-pants little kid, barely tall enough to stick his head over the TX-O's console, staring at the code that an Officially Sanctioned User, perhaps some self-important graduate student, would be hammering into the Flexowriter, and saying in his squeaky, preadolescent voice something like "Your problem is that this credit is wrong over here . . . you need this other instruction over there," and the self-important grad student would go crazy--WHO IS THIS LITTLE WORM?--and start screaming at him to go out and play somewhere. Invariably, though, Peter Deutsch's comments would turn out to be correct. Deutsch would also brazenly announce that he was going to write better programs than the ones currently available, and he would go and do it.