A certain esthetic of programming style had emerged. Because of the limited memory space of the TX-0 (a handicap that extended to all computers of that era), hackers came to deeply appreciate innovative techniques which allowed programs to do complicated tasks with very few instructions. The shorter a program was, the more space you had left for other programs, and the faster a program ran. Sometimes when you didn't need speed or space much, and you weren't thinking about art and beauty, you'd hack together an ugly program, attacking the problem with "brute force" methods. "Well, we can do this by adding twenty numbers," Samson might say to himself, "and it's quicker to write instructions to do that than to think out a loop in the beginning and the end to do the same job in seven or eight instructions." But the latter program might be admired by fellow hackers, and some programs were bummed to the fewest lines so artfully that the author's peers would look at it and almost melt with awe. Sometimes program bumming became competitive, a macho contest to prove oneself so much in command of the system that one could recognize elegant shortcuts to shave off an instruction or two, or, better yet, rethink the whole problem and devise a new algorithm which would save a whole block of instructions. (An algorithm is a specific procedure which one can apply to solve a complex computer problem; it is sort of a mathematical skeleton key.) This could most emphatically be done by approaching the problem from an offbeat angle that no one had ever thought of before but that in retrospect made total sense. There was definitely an artistic impulse residing in those who could utilize this genius-from-Mars techniques black-magic, visionary quality which enabled them to discard the stale outlook of the best minds on earth and come up with a totally unexpected new algorithm. This happened with the decimal print routine program. This was a subroutines program within a program that you could sometimes integrate into many different programs--to translate binary numbers that the computer gave you into regular decimal numbers. In Saunders' words, this problem became the "pawn's ass of programming--if you could write a decimal print routine which worked you knew enough about the computer to call yourself a programmer of sorts." And if you wrote a GREAT decimal print routine, you might be able to call yourself a hacker. More than a competition, the ultimate bumming of the decimal print routine became a sort of hacker Holy Grail.