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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Steven Levy
Read between
October 17 - November 19, 2020
things had meaning only if you found out how they worked.
Logic elements:
program, a program being a series of instructions which yielded some expected result, just as the instructions in a recipe, when precisely followed, lead to a cake.
the IBM 704
knife-and-paintbrush contingent,
Signals and Power
The System,
Head of S&P was an upperclassman named Bob Saunders,
a product built not solely to fulfill some constructive goal, but with some wild pleasure taken in mere involvement, was called a “hack.”
John McCarthy.
The super professor
“program bumming,”
Jack Dennis.
This machine did not use cards.
John McKenzie.
a freshman named Bob Wagner
Peter Deutsch.
Something about the orderliness of the computer instructions appealed to him: he would later describe the feeling as the same kind of eerily transcendent recognition that an artist experiences when he discovers the medium that is absolutely right for him.
Deutsch would also brazenly announce that he was going to write better programs than the ones currently available, and he would go and do it.
software. So Jack Dennis, even before he introduced the TMRC people to the TX-0, had been writing “systems programs”—the software to help users utilize the machine.
The value of this was incalculable: it enabled programmers to write in something that looked like code, rather than an endless, dizzying series of 1s and 0s.
Arabic—ours—which is base 10),
sounds would be emitted depending on the state of the 14th bit in the 18-bit words
“WALRUS.”
state of pure concentration.
logical mind-frame required for programming spilled over into more commonplace activities.
The Hacker Ethic:
Access to computers—and anything that might teach you something about the way the world works—should be unlimited and total. Always yield to the Hands-On Imperative!
