Samson, Kotok, and the other hackers accepted Peter Deutsch: by virtue of his computer knowledge he was worthy of equal treatment. Deutsch was not such a favorite with the Officially Sanctioned Users, especially when he sat behind them ready to spring into action when they made a mistake on the Flexowriter. These Officially Sanctioned Users appeared at the TX-0 with the regularity of commuters. The programs they ran were statistical analyses, cross correlations, simulations of an interior of the nucleus of a cell. Applications. That was fine for Users, but it was sort of a waste in the minds of the hackers. What hackers had in mind was getting behind the console of the TX-0 much in the same way as getting in behind the throttle of a plane, Or, as Peter Samson, a classical music fan, put it, computing with the TX-0 was like playing a musical instrument: an absurdly expensive musical instrument upon which you could improvise, compose, and, like the beatniks in Harvard Square a mile away, wail like a banshee with total creative abandon. One thing that enabled them to do this was the programming system devised by Jack Dennis and another professor, Tom Stockman. When the TX-0 arrived at MIT, it had been stripped down since its days at Lincoln Lab: the memory had been reduced considerably, to 4,096 "words" of eighteen bits each. (A "bit" is a BInary digiT, either a one or zero. These binary numbers are the only thing computers understand. A series of binary numbers is called a "word.") And the TX-0 had almost no software. So Jack Dennis, even before he introduced the TMRC people to the TX-0, had been writing "systems programs"--the software to help users utilize the machine.