Some people, though, never could tolerate the Hacker Ethic. Apparently, one of these was the machine shop craftsman Bill Bennett. Though he was a TMRC member, he was by no means a hacker: his allegiance was not to the Signals & Power faction, but to what Gosper called the "Let's-Build-Precise-Little-Miniature-Physical-Devices Subculture." He was a good old boy from Marietta, Georgia, and had a near-religious respect for his tools. His homeland tradition thought of tools as sanctified objects, things you nurture and preserve and ultimately hand over to your grandchildren. "I'm a fanatic," he would later explain. "A tool should be in its right place, cleaned and ready to use." So he not only locked up all his tools but would forbid the hackers to even enter his work space, which he cordoned off by setting up a rope fence and painting stripes on the floor.

Bennett could not prevent the inevitable result of drawing a line and telling hackers they could not cross. He would come in and see his tools had been used, and would complain to Minsky. He would threaten to quit; Noftsker recalls him threatening to booby-trap his area. He would especially demand that Minsky take vengeance on Nelson, whom he apparently saw as the worst offender. Minsky or Noftsker might go through the motions of reprimanding Nelson, but privately they considered the drama rather amusing. Eventually Noftsker would come up with the idea of giving each hacker his own toolbox, with responsibility for his own tools, but that didn't work out particularly well. When a hacker wants something on a machine adjusted, or wants to create a quick hardware hack, he'll use anything available, whether it belongs to a friend or whether it is one of Bill Bennett's pampered possessions. One time Nelson used the latter, a screwdriver, and in the course of his work marked it up somewhat. When Bennett came in the next day and found a damaged screwdriver, he went straight for Nelson.

Nelson was normally very quiet, but at times he would explode. Gosper later described it: "Nelson was an incredible arguer. If you cornered Nelson, he would turn from this mousy little guy to a complete savage." So, Gosper later recalled, Nelson and Bennett got into a shouting match, and during the course of it Nelson said that the screwdriver was just about "used up," anyway.

Used up? It was an incredibly offensive philosophy to Bennett. "This caused smoke to come out of Bennett's ears," Gosper later recounted. "He just blew up." To people like Bennett, things are not passed along from person to person until they are no longer useful. They are not like a computer program which you write and polish, then leave around so others without asking your permission can work on it, add new features, recast it in their own image, and then leave it for the next person to improve, the cycle repeating itself all over when someone builds from scratch a gorgeous new program to do the same thing. That might be what hackers believed, but Bill Bennett thought that tools were something you owned, something private. These hackers actually thought that a person was entitled to use a tool just because he thought he could do something useful with it. And when they were finished, they would just toss it away, saying it was ... used up!

Considering these diametrically opposed philosophies, it was no surprise that Bennett blew up at Nelson. Bennett would later say that his outbursts were always quick, and followed by the usual good will that existed between himself and the hackers. But Nelson would later say that at the time he had been afraid the machinist might do him physical harm.

A few nights later Nelson wanted to perform some completely unauthorized adjustments to the power supply on a computer on the seventh floor of Tech Square, and needed a large screwdriver to do it. Naturally, he went into Bennett's locked cabinet for the tool. Somehow the breakers on the power supply were in a precarious state, and Nelson got a huge electrical jolt. Nelson survived nicely, but the shock melted the end off the screwdriver.

The next day Bill Bennett came back to his office and found his mangled screwdriver with a sign on it. The sign read "USED UP".