His grade--zero. "You used a computer!" the professor told him. "This CAN'T be right." Wagner didn't even bother to explain. How could he convey to his teacher that the computer was making realities out of what were once incredible possibilities? Or that another hacker had even written a program called Expensive Typewriter that converted the TX-0 to something you could write text on, could process your writing in strings of characters and print it out on the Flexowriter--could you imagine a professor accepting a classwork report WRITTEN BY THE COMPUTER? How could that professor--how could, in fact, anyone who hadn't been immersed in this uncharted man-machine universe--understand how Wagner and his fellow hackers were routinely using the computer to simulate, according to Wagner, "strange situations which one could scarcely envision otherwise"? The professor would learn in time, as would everyone, that the world opened up by the computer was a limitless one. If anyone needed further proof, you could cite the project that Kotok was working on in the Computation Center, the chess program that bearded Al professor "Uncle" John McCarthy, as he was becoming known to his hacker students, had begun on the IBM 704. Even though Kotok and the several other hackers helping him on the program had only contempt for the IBM batch-processing mentality that pervaded the machine and the people around it, they had managed to scrounge some late-night time to use it interactively, and had been engaging in an informal battle with the systems programmers on the 704 to see which group would be known as the biggest consumer of computer time. The lead would bounce back and forth, and the white-shirt-and-black-tie 704 people were impressed enough to actually let Kotok and his group touch the buttons and switches on the 704: rare sensual contact with a vaunted IBM beast. Kotok's role in bringing the chess program to life was indicative of what was to become the hacker role in Artificial Intelligence: a Heavy Head like McCarthy or like his colleague Marvin Minsky would begin a project or wonder aloud whether something might be possible, and the hackers, if it interested them, would set about doing it. The chess program had been started using FORTRAN, one of the early computer languages. Computer languages look more like English than assembly language, are easier to write with, and do more things with fewer instructions; however, each time an instruction is given in a computer language like FORTRAN, the computer must first translate that command into its own binary language. A program called a compiler does this, and the compiler takes up time to do its job, as well as occupying valuable space within the computer. In effect, using a computer language puts you an extra step away from direct contact with the computer, and hackers generally preferred assembly or, as they called it, "machine" language to less elegant, "higher-level" languages like FORTRAN.