But crucially, nobody was telling them what to program or what not to program. They were the first group of coders who used the machines to do things that were simply whimsical or creative. They’d get the machines to play music by writing code that turned the vibrating speaker on and off at different frequencies. They’d write programs to calculate chess moves, one of which eventually beat an actual human. Russell wrote Spacewar!, one of the world’s first graphical computer games, in which two players each piloted a ship around a black hole, trying to shoot the other. Using a $120,000 machine to play a video game would likely have seemed, to computer-makers at the time, a madly frivolous thing to do. But the MIT hackers regarded themselves as liberating programming from its mundane history of mere bean counting and scientific problem-solving. Coding itself, they felt, was a playful, artistic act.