Sitting at the console, facing the metal racks that held the computer's transistors, each transistor representing a location that either held or did not hold a bit of memory, Saunders would set up the Flexowriter, which would greet him with the word "WALRUS." This was something Samson had hacked, in honor of Lewis Carroll's poem with the line "The time has come, the Walrus said . . ." Saunders might chuckle at that as he went into the drawer for the paper tape which held the assembler program and fed that into the tape reader. Now the computer would be ready to assemble his program, so he'd take the Flexowriter tape he'd been working on and send that into the computer. He'd watch the lights go on as the computer switched his code from "source" (the symbolic assembly language) to "object" code (binary), which the computer would punch out into another paper tape. Since that tape was in the object code that the TX-0 understood, he'd feed it in, hoping that the program would run magnificently. There would most probably be a few fellow hackers kibitzing behind him, laughing and joking and drinking Cokes and eating some junk food they'd extracted from the machine downstairs. Saunders preferred the lemon jelly wedges that the others called "lemon gunkies." But at four in the morning, anything tasted good. They would all watch as the program began to run, the lights going on, the whine from the speaker humming in high or low register depending on what was in Bit 14 in the accumulator, and the first thing he'd see on the CRT display after the program had been assembled and run was that the program had crashed. So he'd reach into the drawer for the tape with the FLIT debugger and feed THAT into the computer. The computer would then be a debugging machine, and he'd send the program back in. Now he could start trying to find out where things had gone wrong, and maybe if he was lucky he'd find out, and change things by putting in some commands by flicking some of the switches on the console in precise order, or hammering in some code on the Flexowriter. Once things got running--and it was always incredibly satisfying when something worked, when he'd made that roomful of transistors and wires and metal and electricity all meld together to create a precise output that he'd devised--he'd try to add the next advance to it. When the hour was over--someone already itching to get on the machine after him--Saunders would be ready to spend the next few hours figuring out what the heck had made the program go belly-up.