Tech Model Railroad Club
The Tech Model Railroad Club ( TMRC ) is a student organization at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and one of the most famous model railroad clubs in the world. The system, built in nominal size H0 , is designed for automated operation. The association, founded in 1946, is one of the birthplaces of the hacker culture.
investment
The layout recreates a fictional east-west route in America in the 1950s, shortly after the end of the steam locomotive era. Right from the start, the members, who had a very technical background through their work or training at MIT, concentrated less on model-making design and more on the desire for automation.
As early as 1962, the system control, consisting of around 1200 relays , was known for its complexity. RESA switches were installed all over the room , with which the trains can be stopped in an emergency - such as when a collision is imminent. Another feature of the system was a clock with a seven-segment display on the control panel, the implementation of which in relay logic can itself be considered a marvel for the time. When one of the RESA switches was pressed, the display of the clock jumped to the word FOO , which is why the RESA switches were also called "foo switches" in TMRC circles.
Around 1964, the control system was replaced by a switching center computer of the type 5XB switch . As early as 1970 it was supplemented by two donated PDP-1 computers which, among other things, took over the control of the freight yard. For many students this was the first practical application of computers.
In 1997 the association moved from building 20, a "makeshift" accommodation from the pre-war period, to building N52, which is home to the MIT University Museum. As a result of this move, most of the facility was destroyed, and a new one has been under construction since then. This system is controlled by a network called System 3 and consisting of around 40 PIC16F877 microcontrollers , which is controlled by a Linux PC. Another "hack" is an 18-story replica of a building on the MIT campus, which, equipped with lamps in the windows, can be used to play Tetris . It's a tribute to a legendary (albeit fictional) hack by MIT students.
Influence on the hacker culture
A stimulating description of those years can be found in the book Hackers by Steven Levy . Among other things, the TMRC had a Signals and Power Subcommittee , which was dedicated to the work between relays, switches and cables, and a Midnight Requisitioning Committee , which organized components by bypassing the procurement guidelines of the campus. The Signals and Power Subcommittees were largely recruited from the ranks of the IBM-704 and TX-0 hackers and from people who would later form the core of the workforce at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory . These connections still exist after almost 40 years, as the inclusion of a large number of terms from the TMRC in the hacker dictionary Jargon File shows.
Many of the terms in the TMRC language dictionary , which was compiled by Peter Samson in 1959 , and of which some say he coined the expression " Information wants to be free ", have become the basic vocabulary of the hacker vocabulary (especially " foo " , "Mung", and "frob").
Also was Spacewar! one of the first interactive computer games developed by Steve Russell at TMRC .
literature
- Steven Levy: Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution , 1984, Project Gutenberg ( ISBN 0-385-19195-2 )
Web links
- Homepage
- The Dot Eaters entry ( Memento from May 3, 2006 in the Internet Archive )