When outsiders heard the melodies of Johann Sebastian Bach in a single-voice, monophonic square wave, no harmony, they were universally unfazed. Big deal! Three million dollars for this giant hunk of machinery, and why shouldn't it do at least as much as a five-dollar toy piano? It was no use to explain to these outsiders that Peter Samson had virtually bypassed the process by which music had been made for eons. Music had always been made by directly creating vibrations that were sound. What happened in Samson's program was that a load of numbers, bits of information fed into a computer, comprised a code in which the music resided. You could spend hours staring at the code, and not be able to divine where the music was. It only became music while millions of blindingly brief exchanges of data were taking place in the accumulator sitting in one of the metal, wire, and silicon racks that comprised the TX-0. Samson had asked the computer, which had no apparent knowledge of how to use a voice, to lift itself in song--and the TX-0 had complied. So it was that a computer program was not only metaphorically a musical composition--it was LITERALLY a musical composition! It looked like--and was--the same kind of program which yielded complex arithmetical computations and statistical analyses. These digits that Samson had jammed into the computer were a universal language which could produce ANYTHING--a Bach fugue or an anti-aircraft system. Samson did not say any of this to the outsiders who were unimpressed by his feat. Nor did the hackers themselves discuss this--it is not even clear that they analyzed the phenomenon in such cosmic terms. Peter Samson did it, and his colleagues appreciated it, because it was obviously a neat hack. That was justification enough. * * * To hackers like Bob Saunders--balding, plump, and merry disciple of the TX-0, president of TMRC's S&P group, student of systems-- it was a perfect existence. Saunders had grown up in the suburbs of Chicago, and for as long as he could remember the workings of electricity and telephone circuitry had fascinated him. Before beginning MIT, Saunders had landed a dream summer job, working for the phone company installing central office equipment, He would spend eight blissful hours with soldering iron and pliers in hand, working in the bowels of various systems, an idyll broken by lunch hours spent in deep study of phone company manuals. It was the phone company equipment underneath the TMRC layout that had convinced Saunders to become active in the Model Railroad Club.