Saunders, being an upperclassman, had come to the TX-0 later in his college career than Kotok and Samson: he had used the breathing space to actually lay the foundation for a social life, which included courtship of and eventual marriage to Marge French, who had done some non-hacking computer work for a research project. Still, the TX-0 was the center of his college career, and he shared the common hacker experience of seeing his grades suffer from missed classes. It didn't bother him much, because he knew that his real education was occurring in Room 240 of Building 26, behind the Tixo console. Years later he would describe himself and the others as "an elite group. Other people were off studying, spending their days up on four-floor buildings making obnoxious vapors or off in the physics lab throwing particles at things or whatever it is they do. And we were simply not paying attention to what other folks were doing because we had no interest in it. They were studying what they were studying and we were studying what we were studying. And the fact that much of it was not on the officially approved curriculum was by and large immaterial." The hackers came out at night. It was the only way to take full advantage of the crucial "off-hours" of the TX-0. During the day, Saunders would usually manage to make an appearance in a class or two. Then some time spent performing "basic maintenance"--things like eating and going to the bathroom. He might see Marge for a while. But eventually he would filter over to Building 26. He would go over some of the programs of the night before, printed on the nine-and-a-half-inch-wide paper that the Flexowriter used. He would annotate and modify the listing to update the code to whatever he considered the next stage of operation. Maybe then he would move over to the Model Railroad Club, and he'd swap his program with someone, checking simultaneously for good ideas and potential bugs. Then back to Building 26, to the Kluge Room next to the TX-0, to find an off-line Flexowriter on which to update his code. All the while he'd be checking to see if someone had canceled a one-hour session on the machine; his own session was scheduled at something like two or three in the morning. He'd wait in the Kluge Room, or play some bridge back at the Railroad Club, until the time came.