Various versions of decimal print routines had been around for some months. If you were being deliberately stupid about it, or if you were a genuine moron--an out-and-out "loser"--it might take you a hundred instructions to get the computer to convert machine language to decimal. But any hacker worth his salt could do it in less, and finally, by taking the best of the programs, bumming an instruction here and there, the routine was diminished to about fifty instructions. After that, things got serious. People would work for hours, seeking a way to do the same thing in fewer lines of code. It became more than a competition; it was a quest. For all the effort expended, no one seemed to be able to crack the fifty-line barrier. The question arose whether it was even possible to do it in less. Was there a point beyond which a program could not be bummed? Among the people puzzling with this dilemma was a fellow named Jenson, a tall, silent hacker from Maine who would sit quietly in the Kluge Room and scribble on printouts with the calm demeanor of a backwoodsman whittling. Jenson was always looking for ways to compress his programs in time and space--his code was a completely bizarre sequence of intermingled Boolean and arithmetic functions, often causing several different computations to occur in different sections of the same eighteen-bit "word." Amazing things, magical stunts. Before Jenson, there had been general agreement that the only logical algorithm for a decimal print routine would have the machine repeatedly subtracting, using a table of the powers of ten to keep the numbers in proper digital columns. Jenson somehow figured that a powers-of-ten table wasn't necessary; he came up with an algorithm that was able to convert the digits in a reverse order but, by some digital sleight of hand, print them out in the proper order. There was a complex mathematical justification to it that was clear to the other hackers only when they saw Jenson's program posted on a bulletin board, his way of telling them that he had taken the decimal print routine to its limit. FORTY-SIX INSTRUCTIONS. People would stare at the code and their jaws would drop. Marge Saunders remembers the hackers being unusually quiet for days afterward. "We knew that was the end of it," Bob Saunders later said. "That was Nirvana." COMPUTERS CAN CHANGE YOUR LIFE FOR THE BETTER. This belief was subtly manifest. Rarely would a hacker try to impose a view of the myriad advantages of the computer way of knowledge to an outsider. Yet this premise dominated the everyday behavior of the TX-0 hackers, as well as the generations of hackers that came after them.