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.
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."
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.
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."
