Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution

by Steven Levy

A certain esthetic of programming style had emerged. Because of the limited memory space of the TX-0 (a handicap that extended to all computers of that era), hackers came to deeply appreciate innovative techniques that allowed programs to do complicated tasks with very few instructions. The shorter a program was, the more space you had left for other programs, and the faster a program ran. Sometimes when you didn’t need much speed or space, and you weren’t thinking about art and beauty, you’d hack together an ugly program, attacking the problem with “brute force” methods. “Well, we can do this by adding twenty numbers,” Samson might say to himself, “and it’s quicker to write instructions to do that than to think out a loop in the beginning and the end to do the same job in seven or eight instructions.” But the latter program might be admired by fellow hackers, and some programs were bummed to the fewest lines so artfully that the author’s peers would look at it and almost melt with awe.