GREENBLATT was hacker of systems and visionary of application; Gosper was metaphysical explorer and handyman of the esoteric. Together they were two legs of a techno-cultural triangle which would serve as the Hacker Ethic's foundation in its rise to cultural supremacy at MIT in the coming years. The third leg of the triangle arrived in the fall of 1963, and his name was Stewart Nelson.
Not long after his arrival, Stew Nelson displayed his curiosity and ability to get into uncharted electronic realms, traits which indicated his potential to become a master magician in service to the Hacker Ethic. As was the custom, Nelson had come a week early for Freshman Rush. He was a short kid, generally taciturn, with curly hair, darting brown eyes, and a large overbite which gave him the restlessly curious look of a small rodent. Indeed, Stewart Nelson was sniffing out sophisticated electronics equipment that he could play on, and it did not take him long to find what he wanted at MIT.
It began at WTBS, the campus radio station. Bob Clements, a student worker at the station who would later do some PDP-6 hacking, was showing a group of freshmen the control rooms when he opened a door that opened to the complex machinery and found Stew Nelson, "a weaselly little kid," he later remembered, "who had his fingers on the guts of our phone lines and our East Campus radio transmitter."
Eventually, he found his way to the PDP-1 in the Kluge Room. The machine got Stewart Nelson very excited. He saw this friendly computer which you could put your hands on, and with a confidence that came from what Greenblatt might call born hackerism he got to work. He noticed immediately how the One's outside speaker was hooked to the computer, and how Peter Samson's music program could control that speaker. So one night, very late, when John McKenzie and the people tending the TX-0 next door were asleep in their homes, Stewart Nelson set about learning to program the PDP-1, and it did not take him long to teach the PDP-1 some new tricks. He had programmed some appropriate tones to come out of the speaker and into the open receiver of the campus phone that sat in the Kluge Room. These tones made the phone system come to attention, so to speak, and dance. Dance, phone lines, dance!
And the signals did dance. They danced from one place on the MIT tie-line system to the next and then to the Haystack Observatory (connected to MIT's system), where they danced to an open line and, thus liberated, danced out into the world. There was no stopping them, because the particular tones which Stew Nelson had generated on the PDP-1 were the exact tones which the phone company used to send its internal calls around the world, and Stew Nelson knew that they would enable him to go all around the marvelous system which was the phone company without paying a penny.
This analog alchemist, the new hacker king, was showing a deeply impressed group of PDP-1 programmers how a solitary college freshman could wrest control of the nearly hundred-year-old phone system, using it not for profit but for sheer joyriding exploration. Word spread of these exploits, and Nelson began to achieve heroic status around TMRC and the Kluge Room; soon some of the more squeamish PDP-1 people were doing some hand-wringing about whether he had gone too far. Greenblatt did not think so, nor did any true hacker: people had done that sort of thing around TMRC for years; and if Nelson took things a step beyond, that was a positive outgrowth of the Hacker Ethic. But when John McKenzie heard of it he ordered Nelson to stop, probably realizing that there was not much he could do to slow Stew Nelson's eternal quest for systems knowledge. "How can you stop talent like that?" he later reflected. As it turned out, things were going to go much further before Stewart Nelson was through. In some ways, they would never stop.
Nelson's freshman pyrotechnics were not so startling in light of his life before MIT. Born in the Bronx, Nelson was the son of a physicist-tumed-engineer who had done some pioneering work on color TV design. Stewart's own interest in electronics, though, needed no parental urging. It was as natural as walking, and by the time he was five he was building crystal radios. At eight, he was working on dual-relay burglar alarms. He had little interest, socially or educationally, in school, but gravitated to the electronics shop, where he'd engage in relentless experimentation. It wasn't long before the other kids' mothers would ban their children from playing with Stewart they were afraid that their progeny would be fried by a dose of electricity. These were inevitable dangers of fooling around with powerful vacuum tube circuits and state-of-the-art transistors powered by HO-volt electrical lines. Stew on occasion would get shocks so severe that he'd be painfully jolted. He would later tell stories of his equipment flying halfway across the room and exploding into smithereens. After one particularly searing shock, he swore off playing with electricity. But after about two days he was back at it, a young loner working on fantastic projects.
Stew loved the telephone. His family had moved to Haddonfield, New Jersey, and he soon found out that by clicking the switches on which the receiver rests, you could actually dial a number. Someone on the other end will be saying, "Hello ... yes? Hello?" and you realize that this is not just a random piece of equipment, but something hooked to a system that you can endlessly explore. Stewart Nelson was soon building things that few of his neighbors in the mid-1950s had seen, like automatic dialers and gadgets that could connect to several phone lines, receiving a call on one line and automatically calling out on the other. He learned to handle telephone equipment with the deftness with which an artist wields his tools; witnesses would later report how Nelson, when confronted with a phone, would immediately dismantle it, first removing the filter which prevents the caller from hearing the dialing signals, and then making a few adjustments so that the phone would dial significantly faster. Essentially, he was reprogramming the telephone, unilaterally debugging Western Electric equipment.
Stew's father died when he was fourteen, and his mother moved them up to Poughkeepsie, New York. He struck a deal with his high school teachers wherein he would fix their radios and televisions in exchange for not having to go to class. Instead, he spent time at a small radio station starting up nearby Nelson "pretty much put it together," he later explained, connecting the elements, tuning the transmitter, finding sources of noise and hums in the system. When the radio station was running, he was the main engineer, and sometimes he would even be the disc jockey. Every glitch in the system was a new adventure, a new invitation to explore, to try something new, to see what might happen. To Stew-art Nelson, wanting to find out what might happen was the ultimate justification, stronger than self-defense or temporary insanity.
With that attitude, he fit in comfortably at the Tech Model Railroad Club and the PDP-1. There had already been avid interest in "phone hacking" around the club; with Nelson around, that interest could really flower. Besides being a technical genius, Nelson would attack problems with bird-dog perseverance. "He approached problems by taking action," Donald Eastlake, a hacker in Nelson's class, later recalled. "He was very persistent. If you try a few times and give up, you'll never get there. But if you keep at it ... There's a lot of problems in the world which can really be solved by applying two or three times the persistence that other people will."
Nelson was displaying an extension of the Hacker Ethic if we all acted on our drive to discover, we'd discover more, produce more, be in control of more. Naturally, the phone system was his initial object of exploration at MIT. First the PDP-1 and later the PDP-6 were ideal tools to use in these excursions. But even as Nelson set off on these electronic journeys, he adhered to the unofficial hacker morality. You could call anywhere, try anything, experiment endlessly, but you should not do it for financial gain. Nelson disapproved of those MIT students who built "blue boxes" hardware devices to make illegal calls for the purpose of ripping off the phone company. Nelson and the hackers believed that they were helping the phone company. They would get hold of priority phone company lines to various locations around the country and test them. If they didn't work, they would report it to the appropriate repair service.
To do this, of course, you had to successfully impersonate technical employees of the Bell Telephone System, but the hackers became quite accomplished at that, especially after reading such contraband books as the classic Principles of Electricity and Electronics Applied to Telephone and Telegraph Work, or Notes on Distant Dialing, or recent issues of the Bell System Technical Journal.
Armed with this information, you could travel around the world, saying to an operator, "I'm calling from the test board in Hacken-sack and I'd like you to switch me through to Rome. We're trying to test the circuit." She would "write up the number," which would lead you to another number, and soon you would be asking a phone operator in Italy what the weather was like there. Or you'd use the PDP-1 in Blue Box Mode, letting it route and reroute your calls until you were connected to a certain phone number in England where callers would hear a children's bedtime story, a number inaccessible from this country except by blue box.
In the mid-sixties, the phone company was establishing its system of toll-free area-code-800 numbers. Naturally, the hackers knew about this. With scientific precision, they would attempt to chart these undocumented realms: excursions to 800-land could send you to bizarre places, from the Virgin Islands to New York. Eventually someone from the phone company gave a call to the line near the computer, asking what were these four hundred or so calls to places that, as far as the phone company was concerned, did not exist. The unlucky Cambridge branch of the phone company had coped with MIT before, and would again at one point, they burst into the ninth floor at Tech Square, and demanded that the hackers show them the blue box. When the hackers pointed to the PDP-6, the frustrated officials threatened to take the whole machine, until the hackers unhooked the phone interface and handed it over.
Though Nelson's initial interest in the PDP-1 was its phone hacking potential, he became more versatile with it, and was eventually programming all sorts of things. The more he programmed, the better he got, and the better he got, the more he wanted to program. He would sit by the console of the machine while some graduate student would fumble with a program, and he'd sort of peck around the grad student's back, which would only make the graduate student fumble more, and finally he would burst out, "If I solve that problem for you, will you let me have the computer?" The grad student, who probably had been trying to crack the problem for weeks, would agree, not really believing this quirky fellow could solve it, but Nelson would already be pushing him away, sitting down at the console, bringing up the "TECO" editing program, and pounding in code at a blinding rate. In five minutes, he'd be done, leaping up to print it on the Model 33 teletype near the machine, and in a rush of motion he'd rip the paper off the line printer, run back to the machine, pull off the tape with the grad student's program, and send him off. Then he'd do his own hacking.
He knew no bounds. He used both the PDP-1 in the Kluge Room and the newer machine at Project MAC. When others used the PDP-1 and its limited instruction set, they might have grumbled at having to use several instructions for a simple operation, and then figured out the subroutines to do the programs. Nelson could bum code with the best of them, but he wanted more instructions actually on the machine. Putting an instruction on the computer itself in hardware is a rather tricky operation. When the TX-0 was given its new instructions, it had to be shut down for a while until official priests, trained to the level of Pope, almost, performed the necessary brain surgery. This seemed only logical who would expect a university to allow underclassmen to tamper with the delicate parts of a fantastically expensive computer?
No one. In fact, Dan Edwards, one of Minsky's graduate students who had done some hacking on Spacewar, had set himself up as protector of the hardware. According to Gosper, Edwards had declared that "Anyone who does as much as change a ribbon in the typewriter is going to get permanently barred from this place!" But hackers did not care what the university allowed or didn't allow. What Dan Edwards thought was of even less concern: his position of authority, like that of most bureaucrats, was deemed an accident.
Nelson thought that adding an "add to memory" instruction would improve the machine. It would take months, perhaps, to go through channels to do it, and if he did it himself he would learn something about the way the world worked. So one night Stewart Nelson spontaneously convened the Midnight Computer Wiring Society. This was an entirely ad hoc organization which would, when the flow of history required it, circumvent the regulations of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology against unauthorized tampering with expensive computers. The MCWS, which that night consisted of Nelson, a student worker, and several interested bystanders, opened up the cabinet and proceeded to rewire the PDP-1. Nelson fused a couple of diodes between the "add" line and the "store" line outputs of the instruction decoder, and had himself a new op-code, which presumably supported all the previous instructions. He then proceeded to reassemble the machine to an apparent pristine state.
The machine was taken through its paces by the hackers that night, and worked fine. But the next day an Officially Sanctioned User named Margaret Hamilton showed up on the ninth floor to work on something called a Vortex Model for a weather-simulation project she was working on. Margaret Hamilton was just beginning a programming career which would see her eventually in charge of on-board computers on the Apollo moon shot, and the Vortex program at that time was a very big program for her. She was well aware of the hackers' playfulness around the ninth floor, and she was moderately friendly with some of them, even though they would eventually blend into one collective personality in her memory: one unkempt, though polite, young male whose love for the computer had made him lose all reason.
The assembler that Margaret Hamilton used with her Vortex program was not the hacker-written MIDAS assembler, but the DEC-supplied DECAL system that the hackers considered absolutely horrid. So of course Nelson and the MCWS, when testing the machine the previous night, had not used the DECAL assembler. They had never even considered the possibility that the DECAL assembler accessed the instruction code in a different manner than MIDAS, a manner that was affected to a greater degree by the slight forward voltage drop created by the addition of two diodes between the add line and the store line. Margaret Hamilton, of course, was unaware that the PDP-1 had undergone surgery the previous night. So she did not immediately know the reason why her Vortex program, after she fed it in with the DECAL assembler ... broke. Stopped working. Died. Mysteriously, a perfectly good program had bombed. Though programs often did that for various reasons, this time Margaret Hamilton complained about it, and someone looked into why, and someone else fingered the Midnight Computer Wiring Society. So there were repercussions. Reprimands.
That was not the end of the Midnight Computer Wiring Society. Edwards and his ilk could not stay up all night to watch the machines. Besides, Minsky and the others in charge of Project MAC knew that the hackers' nocturnal activities were turning into a hands-on postgraduate course on logic design and hardware skills. Partially because Nelson and the others got good enough so disasters like the Great Margaret Hamilton Program Clobber were less likely to occur, the official AI lab ban against hardware tampering gradually faded away to the status of one of those antiquated laws that nobody bothers to take off the books, like a statute forbidding you from publicly beating a horse on Sunday. Eventually the Midnight Computer Wiring Society felt free enough to change instructions, make new hardware connections, and even rig the computer to the room lights on the ninth floor, so that when you fired up the TECO text-editing program, the lights automatically dimmed so that you could read the CRT display more easily.
This last hack had an unexpected consequence. The TECO editor rang a bell on the teletype to signal when the user made an error. This normally was no problem, but on certain days the machine got flaky, and was extremely sensitive to power line variations like those generated by the bell on the teletype. Those times, when someone made a mistake with TECO, the bell would ring, and the machine would be thrown into randomness. The computer would be out of control; it would type spastically, ringing the bell, and most unsettling, turning the room lights on and off. The computer had run amok! Science-fiction Armageddon! The hackers considered this extremely humorous. The people in charge of the lab, particularly Marvin Minsky, were very understanding about these things. Marvin, as the hackers called him (they invariably called each other by last name), knew that the Hacker Ethic was what kept the lab productive, and he was not going to tamper with one of the crucial components of hackerism. On the other hand, there was Stew Nelson, constantly at odds with the rules, a hot potato who got hotter when he was eventually caught red-handed at phone hacking. Something had to be done. So Minsky called up his good friend Ed Fredkin, and told him he had this problem with an incredibly brilliant nineteen-year old who had a penchant for getting into sophisticated mischief. Could Fredkin hire him?
Besides being a close friend of Marvin Minsky and the founder of Information International Incorporated (Triple-I), Ed Fredkin considered himself the greatest programmer in the world.
A dark-haired man with warm brown eyes behind glasses that rested on a nose with a slight intellectual hook, Fredkin had never finished college. He'd learned computers in the Air Force in 1956, as one of the first men working on the SAGE computer air defense system, then reputed to be the most complicated system known to man. Fredkin and nineteen others began an intensive course in the budding field of computation memory drums, logic, communications, and programming. Fredkin later recalled, in his soothing, story-teller voice, "After a week, everyone dropped out but me."
Ed Fredkin did not fall into computers head-over-heels as had Kotok, Samson, Greenblatt, or Gosper in some ways he was a very measured man, too much an intellectual polyglot to fixate solely on computers. But he was intensely curious about them, so after leaving the service he took a job at MIT-affiliated Lincoln Lab, where he soon earned the reputation of top program bummer around. He could consistently come up with original algorithms, some of which became well known as standard programming protocols. He also was one of the first to see the significance of the PDP-1 he knew about it before the prototype was built, and ordered the very first one. He was talked out of the purchase by Bolt Beranek and Newman, who instead hired him to program the machine and write an assembler. Fredkin did so and modestly considered it a masterpiece of programming. Besides systems work, Fredkin engaged in the kind of math hacking that would later be Bill Gosper's forte, and he did some early theorizing on automatons. But not being a pure hacker he had business instincts and a family to support he left BBN to start his own company, Information International, which would perform all sorts of digital troubleshooting and special computer consultations. The company was eventually based in Los Angeles, but for a long time it had facilities in Tech Square, two floors below the PDP-6.
Fredkin was delighted with the hacker community at Tech Square; they had taken hackerism beyond its previous state, found only part-time in the few places in the world (such as MIT, DEC, the Army, BBN) where computers were accessible to people for whom computing was an end in itself. Around MIT, hackerism was full-time. Fredkin came to love the hackers he could speak their language and admire their work. Sometimes he would accompany them on their Chinatown excursions, and on those occasions the discussions could get quite freewheeling. Many of the hackers were avid science-fiction fans (note the origins of Spacewar), but Fredkin was able to link the wonders of Heinlein and Asimov to the work that the hackers were doing making computers into powerful systems and building a software groundwork for artificial intelligence. Fredkin had a talent for sparking their imaginations, as he did when he mused that one day people would have tiny robots on their heads which would snip off hair when it reached the precise length for the desired coiffure. (Fredkin would cause a national ruckus when he repeated this prediction on a television talk show.)
As much as Fredkin admired the hackers, though, he still thought he was the best programmer. While the Hacker Ethic encouraged group effort for general improvement, every hacker wanted to be recognized as a wizard, and fast programs and blazing code-crafting efforts would be eagerly displayed and discussed. It was a heady ego boost to be at the top of the hacking hill, where Fredkin considered himself. Hacking, to Fredkin, was above all a pride in craftsmanship.
"I had never run into anyone who could outcode me, in any sense," Fredkin later recalled. "But it was really clear that Nelson could." Nelson was genius-level in his computer knowledge, innovative in approach, fantastically intense in attacking problems, and capable of superhuman concentration. Fredkin did hire the young hacker on Minsky's recommendation, and it did not take Fredkin long to realize that even in a place where exceptional programming was commonplace. Nelson was something special, a one-man human wave of programmers. Of course, since Triple-I was in Tech Square, Nelson was also able to hang out around the AI lab on the ninth floor and do the work of several programmers up there as well. But that was no cause for complaint; when Fredkin needed him, Nelson could almost always come up with magic.
There was a programming project in particular, a task on the DEC PDP-7, that Fredkin wanted Nelson to work on, but for some reason Nelson couldn't get motivated. Fredkin's company also needed at the same time a design for an interface between a certain computer and a disk drive for data storage. Fredkin considered the latter a six man-month project, and wanted the other task done first. Nelson promised him that he'd get some results during the weekend. That next Monday, Nelson came in with a giant piece of paper almost completely covered with tiny scrawlings, long lines connecting one block of scribblings to another, and evidence of frantic erasing and write-overs. It was not the PDP-7 program Fredkin had asked for, but the entire disk-drive interface. Nelson had tried it as a constructive escape from the assigned task. Fredkin's company built the piece of equipment straight from that piece of paper, and it worked.
Fredkin was delighted, but he still wanted the PDP-7 problem done, too. So he said, "Nelson, you and I are going to sit down and program this together. You write this routine, and I'll write that." Since they did not have a PDP-7 around, they sat down at tables to write their pre-debugged assembly code. They began hacking away. Maybe it was about then that Ed Fredkin realized, once and for all, that he was not the best programmer in the world. Nelson was racing along as if it were just a matter of how fast he could get his scribbles on paper. Fredkin was finally overcome with curiosity and looked at Nelson's program. He couldn't believe it. It was bizarre. Totally non-obvious, a crazy quilt of interlacing subroutines. And it was clear that it would work. "Stew," Fredkin burst out, "why on earth are you writing it this way?" Nelson explained that he had once written something similar on the PDP-6, and instead of thinking about it he was merely transliterating the previous routines, from memory, into PDP-7 code. A perfect example of the way Nelson's mind worked. He had his own behavior down to the point where he could bum mental instructions, and minimize the work he did.
It was clearly an approach that was better suited to working with machines than it was to human interaction. Nelson was extremely shy, and Fredkin probably acted like a father figure to the young hacker. He would later recall being startled one day when Nelson marched into his office and said, "Guess what? I'm getting married!"
Fredkin would have judged that Nelson did not know how to go about asking a female for a date, let alone tender a proposal of marriage. "Fantastic!" he said. "Who's the lucky girl?"
"Oh, I don't know," said Nelson. "I just decided it would be a good thing to do."
Fifteen years later, Nelson was still in Bachelor Mode.
While women might not have been much of a presence in his life, Nelson did have the companionship of fellow hackers. He moved into a house with Gosper and two others. Although this "Hacker House" was in nearby Belmont, then shifted to Brighton, Nelson resisted buying a car. He couldn't stand driving. "It takes too much processing to deal with the road," he would later explain. He would take public transportation, or get a ride from another hacker, or even take a cab. Once he got to Tech Square, he was good for hours: Nelson was among those hackers who had settled on the twenty-eight-hour-day, six-day-week routine. He didn't worry about classes he figured that he could get whatever job he wanted whether he had a degree or not, so he never did rematriculate.
Nelson was completely a creature of the Hacker Ethic, and the influence of his behavior was a contributing factor to the cultural and scientific growth of the AI lab. If Minsky needed someone to point out why a certain subroutine was not working, he would go to Nelson. Meanwhile, Nelson would be all over the place. Working for Fredkin, doing systems work with Greenblatt, display hacking with Gosper, and creating all sorts of strange things. He hacked a weird connection between the Triple-I computer on the seventh floor and the PDP-6 on the ninth which sent signals between an oscilloscope on one line and a TV camera on another. He pulled off all sorts of new phone hacks. And, again more by example than by organizing, he was a leader in the hallowed black art of lock hacking.
"Lock hacking" was the skillful solution of physical locks, whether on doors, file cabinets, or safes. To some extent, the practice was an MIT tradition, especially around TMRC. But once it was combined with the Hacker Ethic, lock hacking became more of a crusade than an idle game, though the playful challenge of overcoming artificial obstacles contributed to lock backing's popularity.
To a hacker, a closed door is an insult, and a locked door is an outrage. Just as information should be clearly and elegantly transported within a computer, and just as software should be freely disseminated, hackers believed people should be allowed access to files or tools which might promote the hacker quest to find out and improve the way the world works. When a hacker needed something to help him create, explore, or fix, he did not bother with such ridiculous concepts as property rights.
Say you are working on the PDP-6 one night, and it goes down. You check its innards and discover that it needs a part. Or you may need a tool to install a part. Then you discover that what you need a disk, a tape, a screwdriver, a soldering iron, a spare IC (integrated circuit) is locked up somewhere. A million dollars' worth of hardware wasted and idle, because the hardware wizard who knows how to fix it can't get at the seventy-five-cent IC, or the oscilloscope kept in a safe. So the hackers would manage to get the keys to these lockers and these safes. So they could get hold of the parts, keep the computers working, carefully replace what they'd taken, and go back to work.
As a hacker named David Silver later put it, it was "ultra-highly-clever warfare ... there were administrators who would have high-security locks and have vaults where they would store the keys, and have sign-out cards to issue keys. And they felt secure, like they were locking everything up and controlling things and preventing information from flowing the wrong way and things from being stolen. Then there was another side of the world where people felt everything should be available to everybody, and these hackers had pounds and pounds and pounds of keys that would get them into every conceivable place. The people who did this were very ethical and honest and they weren't using this power to steal or injure. It was kind of a game, partly out of necessity, and partly out of ego and fun ... At the absolute height of it, if you were in the right inside circle, you could get the combination to any safe and you'd get access to anything."
The basic acquisition of every lock hacker was a master key. The proper master key would unlock the doors of a building, or a floor of a building. Even better than a master key was a grand-master key, sort of a master master-key; one of those babies could open perhaps two thirds of the doors on campus. Just like phone hacking, lock hacking required persistence and patience. So the hackers would go on late-night excursions, unscrewing and removing locks on doors. Then they would carefully dismantle the locks. Most locks could be opened by several different key combinations; so the hackers would take apart several locks in the same hallway to ascertain which combination they accepted in common. Then they would go about trying to make a key shaped in that particular combination.
It might be that the master key had to be made from special "blanks" unavailable to the general public. (This is often the case with high-security master keys, such as those used in defense work). This did not stop the hackers, because several of them had taken correspondence courses to qualify for locksmith certification; they were officially allowed to buy those restricted blank keys. Some keys were so high-security that even licensed locksmiths could not buy blanks for them; to duplicate those, the hackers would make midnight calls to the machine shop a corner work space on the ninth floor where a skilled metal craftsman named Bill Bennett worked by day on such material as robot arms. Working from scratch, several hackers made their own blanks in the machine shop.
The master key was more than a means to an end; it was a symbol of the hacker love of free access. At one point, the TMRC hackers even considered sending an MIT master key to every incoming freshman as a recruitment enticement. The master key was a magic sword to wave away evil. Evil, of course, was a locked door. Even if no tools were behind locked doors, the locks symbolized the power of bureaucracy, a power that would eventually be used to prevent full implementation of the Hacker Ethic. Bureaucracies were always threatened by people who wanted to know how things worked. Bureaucrats knew their survival depended on keeping people in ignorance, by using artificial means like locks to keep people under control. So when an administrator upped the ante in this war by installing a new lock, or purchasing a Class Two safe (government-certified for classified material), the hackers would immediately work to crack the lock, open the safe. In the latter case, they went to a super-ultra-techno surplus yard in Taunt-on, found a similar Class Two safe, took it back to the ninth floor, and opened it up with acetylene torches to find out how the locks and tumblers worked.
With all this lock hacking, the AI lab was an administrator's nightmare. Russ Noftsker knew; he was the administrator. He had arrived at Tech Square in 1965 with an engineering degree from the University of Mexico, an interest in artificial intelligence, and a friend who worked at Project MAC. He met Minsky, whose prime grad student-administrator, Dan Edwards, had just left the lab. Minsky, notoriously uninterested in administration, needed someone to handle the paperwork of the AI lab, which was eventually to split from Project MAC into a separate entity with its own government funding. So Marvin hired Noftsker, who in turn officially hired Greenblatt, Nelson, and Gosper as full-time hackers. Somehow, Noftsker had to keep this electronic circus in line with the values and policy of the Institute.
Noftsker, a compactly built blond with pursed features and blue eyes which could alternatively look dreamy or troubled, was no stranger to weird technological exploits: when he was in school, he had hacked explosives with a friend. They worked for a high-tech company and took their salaries in primacord (a highly combustible material) or dynamite, and set off explosions in caves to see how many spiders they could blow out, or see how much primacord it took to split a sixty-five-gallon drum in half. Noftsker's friend once was melting thirty pounds of TNT late one night in his mother's oven when it caught fire the oven and refrigerator actually melted, and the boy was in the awkward position of having to go to the next-door neighbors' and say, "Excuse me, uh, I think it would be a good idea if you kind of, uh, moved down the street a little ways..." Noftsker knew he'd been lucky to survive those days; yet, according to Gosper, Noftsker later would cook up a plan for clearing snow from his sidewalk with primacord, until his wife put a stop to the idea. Noftsker also shared the hacker aversion to cigarette smoke, and would sometimes express his displeasure by shooting a jet of pure oxygen from a canister he kept for that purpose; the astonished smoker would find his or her cigarette bursting into a fierce orange blur. Obviously, Noftsker understood the concept of technological extremism to maintain a convivial environment.
On the other hand, Noftsker was in charge, dammit, and part of his job was keeping people out of locked areas and keeping confidential information private. He would bluster, he would threaten, he would upgrade locks and order safes, but he knew that ultimately he could not prevail by force. Naive as the thought was in the Real World, hackers believed that property rights were nonexistent. As far as the ninth floor was concerned, that was indeed the case. The hackers could get into anything, as Noftsker graphically saw one day when a new safe with a twenty-four-hour pick-proof lock arrived and someone inadvertently closed the safe and spun the dial before Noftsker got the combination from the manufacturer. One of the hackers who was a registered locksmith volunteered to help out, and had the safe open in twenty minutes.
So what was Noftsker to do?
"Erecting barriers [would raise] the level of the challenge," Noftsker would later explain. "So the trick was to sort of have an unspoken agreement that. This line, imaginary as it may be, is off limits' to give the people who felt they had to have some privacy and security the sense that they really had some privacy and security. And if someone violated those limits, the violation would be tolerated as long as no one knew about it. Therefore if you gained something by crawling over the wall to get into my office, you had to never say anything about it."
Unilateral disarmament. Give the hackers free rein to go where they wanted in their explorations, take what they wanted to aid them in their electronic meanderings and computer-science jam sessions ... as long as they didn't go around boasting how the bureaucratic emperor had no clothes. That way, Noftsker and the administration he represented could maintain some dignity while the hackers could pretend the administration did not exist. They went wherever they wanted, entering offices by traveling in the crawl space created by the low-hanging artificial ceiling, removing a ceiling tile, and dropping into their destinations commandos with pencil-pals in their shirt pockets. One hacker hurt his back one night when the ceiling collapsed and he fell into Minsky's office. But more often, the only evidence Noftsker would find was the occasional footprint on his wall. And, of course, sometimes he would enter his locked office and discover a hacker dozing on the sofa.
Some people, though, never could tolerate the Hacker Ethic. Apparently, one of these was the machine shop craftsman Bill Bennett. Though he was a TMRC member, he was by no means a hacker: his allegiance was not to the Signals & Power faction, but to what Gosper called the "Let's-Build-Precise-Little-Miniature-Physical-Devices Subculture." He was a good old boy from Marietta, Georgia, and had a near-religious respect for his tools. His homeland tradition thought of tools as sanctified objects, things you nurture and preserve and ultimately hand over to your grandchildren. "I'm a fanatic," he would later explain. "A tool should be in its right place, cleaned and ready to use." So he not only locked up all his tools but would forbid the hackers to even enter his work space, which he cordoned off by setting up a rope fence and painting stripes on the floor.
Bennett could not prevent the inevitable result of drawing a line and telling hackers they could not cross. He would come in and see his tools had been used, and would complain to Minsky. He would threaten to quit; Noftsker recalls him threatening to booby-trap his area. He would especially demand that Minsky take vengeance on Nelson, whom he apparently saw as the worst offender. Minsky or Noftsker might go through the motions of reprimanding Nelson, but privately they considered the drama rather amusing. Eventually Noftsker would come up with the idea of giving each hacker his own toolbox, with responsibility for his own tools, but that didn't work out particularly well. When a hacker wants something on a machine adjusted, or wants to create a quick hardware hack, he'll use anything available, whether it belongs to a friend or whether it is one of Bill Bennett's pampered possessions. One time Nelson used the latter, a screwdriver, and in the course of his work marked it up somewhat. When Bennett came in the next day and found a damaged screwdriver, he went straight for Nelson.
Nelson was normally very quiet, but at times he would explode. Gosper later described it: "Nelson was an incredible arguer. If you cornered Nelson, he would turn from this mousy little guy to a complete savage." So, Gosper later recalled, Nelson and Bennett got into a shouting match, and during the course of it Nelson said that the screwdriver was just about "used up," anyway.
Used up? It was an incredibly offensive philosophy to Bennett. "This caused smoke to come out of Bennett's ears," Gosper later recounted. "He just blew up." To people like Bennett, things are not passed along from person to person until they are no longer useful. They are not like a computer program which you write and polish, then leave around so others without asking your permission can work on it, add new features, recast it in their own image, and then leave it for the next person to improve, the cycle repeating itself all over when someone builds from scratch a gorgeous new program to do the same thing. That might be what hackers believed, but Bill Bennett thought that tools were something you owned, something private. These hackers actually thought that a person was entitled to use a tool just because he thought he could do something useful with it. And when they were finished, they would just toss it away, saying it was ... used up!
Considering these diametrically opposed philosophies, it was no surprise that Bennett blew up at Nelson. Bennett would later say that his outbursts were always quick, and followed by the usual good will that existed between himself and the hackers. But Nelson would later say that at the time he had been afraid the machinist might do him physical harm.
A few nights later Nelson wanted to perform some completely unauthorized adjustments to the power supply on a computer on the seventh floor of Tech Square, and needed a large screwdriver to do it. Naturally, he went into Bennett's locked cabinet for the tool. Somehow the breakers on the power supply were in a precarious state, and Nelson got a huge electrical jolt. Nelson survived nicely, but the shock melted the end off the screwdriver.
The next day Bill Bennett came back to his office and found his mangled screwdriver with a sign on it. The sign read "USED UP".