And what did these hacker programs DO? Well, sometimes, it didn't matter much at all what they did. Peter Samson hacked the night away on a program that would instantly convert Arabic numbers to Roman numerals, and Jack Dennis, after admiring the skill with which Samson had accomplished this feat, said, "My God, why would anyone want to do such a thing?" But Dennis knew why. There was ample justification in the feeling of power and accomplishment Samson got when he fed in the paper tape, monitored the lights and switches, and saw what were once plain old blackboard Arabic numbers coming back as the numerals the Romans had hacked with. In fact it was Jack Dennis who suggested to Samson that there were considerable uses for the TX-O's ability to send noise to the audio speaker. While there were no built-in controls for pitch, amplitude, or tone character, there was a way to control the speaker--sounds would be emitted depending on the state of the fourteenth bit in the eighteen-bit words the TX-0 had in its accumulator in a given microsecond. The sound was on or off depending on whether bit fourteen was a one or zero. So Samson set about writing programs that varied the binary numbers in that slot in different ways to produce different pitches. At that time, only a few people in the country had been experimenting with using a computer to output any kind of music, and the methods they had been using required massive computations before the machine would so much as utter a note, Samson, who reacted with impatience to those who warned he was attempting the impossible, wanted a computer playing music right away. So he learned to control that one bit in the accumulator so adeptly that he could command it with the authority of Charlie Parker on the saxophone. In a later version of this music compiler, Samson rigged it so that if you made an error in your programming syntax, the Flexowriter would switch to a red ribbon and print "To err is human to forgive divine."