All fascinating stuff, but not the vision that was driving Kotok and Samson and the others. They wanted to learn how to WORK the damn machines, and while this new programming language called LISP that McCarthy was talking about in 641 was interesting, it was not nearly as interesting as the act of programming, or that fantastic moment when you got your printout back from the Priesthood—word from the source itself!—and could then spend hours poring over the results of the program, what had gone wrong with it, how it could be improved.
This is so exact!
Taken from: http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/729/pg729.html
Hackers, Heroes of the Computer Revolution, by Steven Levy
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