It was as if Marge had submitted a program into the TX-0, and the program, as programs do when the syntax is improper, had crashed. It was not until she debugged her question that Bob Saunders would allow it to run successfully on his own mental computer. CHAPTER 2 THE HACKER ETHIC Something new was coalescing around the TX-0: a new way of life, with a philosophy, an ethic, and a dream. There was no one moment when it started to dawn on the TX-0 hackers that by devoting their technical abilities to computing with a devotion rarely seen outside of monasteries they were the vanguard of a daring symbiosis between man and machine. With a fervor like that of young hot-rodders fixated on souping up engines, they came to take their almost unique surroundings for granted, Even as the elements of a culture were forming, as legends began to accrue, as their mastery of programming started to surpass any previous recorded levels of skill, the dozen or so hackers were reluctant to acknowledge that their tiny society, on intimate terms with the TX-0, had been slowly and implicitly piecing together a body of concepts, beliefs, and mores. The precepts of this revolutionary Hacker Ethic were not so much debated and discussed as silently agreed upon. No manifestos were issued. No missionaries tried to gather converts. The computer did the converting, and those who seemed to follow the Hacker Ethic most faithfully were people like Samson, Saunders, and Kotok, whose lives before MIT seemed to be mere preludes to that moment when they fulfilled themselves behind the console of the TX-0. Later there would come hackers who took the implicit Ethic even more seriously than the TX-0 hackers did, hackers like the legendary Greenblatt or Gosper, though it would be some years yet before the tenets of hackerism would be explicitly delineated. Still, even in the days of the TX-0, the planks of the platform were in place. The Hacker Ethic: ACCESS TO COMPUTERS--AND ANYTHING WHICH MIGHT TEACH YOU SOMETHING ABOUT THE WAY THE WORLD WORKS--SHOULD BE UNLIMITED AND TOTAL. ALWAYS YIELD TO THE HANDS-ON IMPERATIVE! Hackers believe that essential lessons can be learned about the systems--about the world--from taking things apart, seeing how they work, and using this knowledge to create new and even more interesting things. They resent any person, physical barrier, or law that tries to keep them from doing this. This is especially true when a hacker wants to fix something that (from his point of view) is broken or needs improvement. Imperfect systems infuriate hackers, whose primal instinct is to debug them. This is one reason why hackers generally hate driving cars--the system of randomly programmed red lights and oddly laid out one-way streets causes delays which are so goddamned UNNECESSARY that the impulse is to rearrange signs, open up traffic-light control boxes . . .redesign the entire system.