<nettime> you can create art and beaty on a computer - steven levy (1984)

[Pit Schultz <pit@klubradio.de>]

YOU CAN CREATE ART AND BEAUTY ON A COMPUTER.

Samson's music program was an example.  But to hackers, the art
of the program did not reside in the pleasing sounds emanating
from the on-line speaker.  The code of the program held a beauty
of its own.  (Samson, though, was particularly obscure in
refusing to add comments to his source code explaining what he
was doing at a given time.  One well-distributed program Samson
wrote went on for hundreds of assembly language instructions,
with only one comment beside an instruction which contained the
number 1750.  The comment was RIPJSB, and people racked their
brains about its meaning until someone figured out that 1750 was
the year Bach died, and that Samson had written an abbreviation
for Rest In Peace Johann Sebastian Bach.) 

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 which 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 speed or space much,
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. 

Sometimes program bumming became competitive, a macho contest to
prove oneself so much in command of the system that one could
recognize elegant shortcuts to shave off an instruction or two,
or, better yet, rethink the whole problem and devise a new
algorithm which would save a whole block of instructions.  (An
algorithm is a specific procedure which one can apply to solve a
complex computer problem; it is sort of a mathematical skeleton
key.) This could most emphatically be done by approaching the
problem from an offbeat angle that no one had ever thought of
before but that in retrospect made total sense.  There was
definitely an artistic impulse residing in those who could
utilize this genius-from-Mars techniques black-magic, visionary
quality which enabled them to discard the stale outlook of the
best minds on earth and come up with a totally unexpected new
algorithm.  

This happened with the decimal print routine program.  This was a
subroutines program within a program that you could sometimes
integrate into many different programs--to translate binary
numbers that the computer gave you into regular decimal numbers. 
In Saunders' words, this problem became the "pawn's ass of
programming--if you could write a decimal print routine which
worked you knew enough about the computer to call yourself a
programmer of sorts."  And if you wrote a GREAT decimal print
routine, you might be able to call yourself a hacker.  More than
a competition, the ultimate bumming of the decimal print routine
became a sort of hacker Holy Grail.

Various versions of decimal print routines had been around for
some months.  If you were being deliberately stupid about it, or
if you were a genuine moron--an out-and-out "loser"--it might
take you a hundred instructions to get the computer to convert
machine language to decimal.  But any hacker worth his salt could
do it in less, and finally, by taking the best of the programs,
bumming an instruction here and there, the routine was diminished
to about fifty instructions.  

After that, things got serious.  People would work for hours,
seeking a way to do the same thing in fewer lines of code.  It
became more than a competition; it was a quest.  For all the
effort expended, no one seemed to be able to crack the fifty-line
barrier.  The question arose whether it was even possible to do
it in less.  Was there a point beyond which a program could not
be bummed?  

Among the people puzzling with this dilemma was a fellow named
Jenson, a tall, silent hacker from Maine who would sit quietly in
the Kluge Room and scribble on printouts with the calm demeanor
of a backwoodsman whittling.  Jenson was always looking for ways
to compress his programs in time and space--his code was a
completely bizarre sequence of intermingled Boolean and
arithmetic functions, often causing several different
computations to occur in different sections of the same
eighteen-bit "word."  Amazing things, magical stunts.  

Before Jenson, there had been general agreement that the only
logical algorithm for a decimal print routine would have the
machine repeatedly subtracting, using a table of the powers of
ten to keep the numbers in proper digital columns.  Jenson
somehow figured that a powers-of-ten table wasn't necessary; he
came up with an algorithm that was able to convert the digits in
a reverse order but, by some digital sleight of hand, print them
out in the proper order.  There was a complex mathematical
justification to it that was clear to the other hackers only when
they saw Jenson's program posted on a bulletin board, his way of
telling them that he had taken the decimal print routine to its
limit.  FORTY-SIX INSTRUCTIONS.  People would stare at the code
and their jaws would drop.  Marge Saunders remembers the hackers
being unusually quiet for days afterward.  

"We knew that was the end of it," Bob Saunders later said.  "That
was Nirvana."


ftp://metalab.unc.edu/pub/docs/books/gutenberg/etext96/hckrs10.txt

Hackers, Heroes of the Computer Revolution, by Steven Levy

(C)1984 by Steven Levy


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