Surely the computer had changed THEIR lives, enriched their lives, given their lives focus, made their lives adventurous. It had made them masters of a certain slice of fate. Peter Samson later said, "We did it twenty-five to thirty percent for the sake of doing it because it was something we could do and do well, and sixty percent for the sake of having something which was in its metaphorical way alive, our offspring, which would do things on its own when we were finished. That's the great thing about programming, the magical appeal it has . . . Once you fix a behavioral problem [a computer or program] has, it's fixed forever, and it is exactly an image of what you meant." LIKE ALADDIN'S LAMP, YOU COULD GET IT TO DO YOUR BIDDING. Surely everyone could benefit from experiencing this power. Surely everyone could benefit from a world based on the Hacker Ethic. This was the implicit belief of the hackers, and the hackers irreverently extended the conventional point of view of what computers could and should do--leading the world to a new way of looking and interacting with computers. This was not easily done. Even at such an advanced institution as MIT, some professors considered a manic affinity for computers as frivolous, even demented. TMRC hacker Bob Wagner once had to explain to an engineering professor what a computer was. Wagner experienced this clash of computer versus anti-computer even more vividly when he took a Numerical Analysis class in which the professor required each student to do homework using rattling, clunky electromechanical calculators. Kotok was in the same class, and both of them were appalled at the prospect of working with those lo-tech machines. "Why should we," they asked, "when we've got this computer?" So Wagner began working on a computer program that would emulate the behavior of a calculator. The idea was outrageous. To some, it was a misappropriation of valuable machine time. According to the standard thinking on computers, their time was too precious that one should only attempt things which took maximum advantage of the computer, things that otherwise would take roomfuls of mathematicians days of mindless calculating. Hackers felt otherwise: anything that seemed interesting or fun was fodder for computing--and using interactive computers, with no one looking over your shoulder and demanding clearance for your specific project, you could act on that belief. After two or three months of tangling with intricacies of floating-point arithmetic (necessary to allow the program to know where to place the decimal point) on a machine that had no simple method to perform elementary multiplication, Wagner had written three thousand lines of code that did the job. He had made a ridiculously expensive computer perform the function of a calculator that cost a thousand times less. To honor this irony, he called the program Expensive Desk Calculator, and proudly did the homework for his class on it.