28 lines
1.7 KiB
Plaintext
28 lines
1.7 KiB
Plaintext
TMRC
|
|
|
|
/tmerk/ , n. The Tech Model Railroad Club at MIT, one of the wellsprings of
|
|
hacker culture. The 1959 Dictionary of the TMRC Language compiled by Peter
|
|
Samson included several terms that became basics of the hackish vocabulary
|
|
(see esp. foo , mung , and frob ). By 1962, TMRC's legendary layout was
|
|
already a marvel of complexity and has grown in the years since. All the
|
|
features described here were still present when the old layout was
|
|
decommissioned in 1998 just before the demolition of MIT Building 20, and
|
|
will almost certainly be retained when the old layout is rebuilt (expected
|
|
in 2003). The control system alone featured about 1200 relays. There were
|
|
scram switch es located at numerous places around the room that could be
|
|
thwacked if something undesirable was about to occur, such as a train going
|
|
full-bore at an obstruction. Another feature of the system was a digital
|
|
clock on the dispatch board, which was itself something of a wonder in those
|
|
bygone days before cheap LEDs and seven-segment displays. When someone hit a
|
|
scram switch the clock stopped and the display was replaced with the word
|
|
FOO ; at TMRC the scram switches are therefore called foo switches. Steven
|
|
Levy, in his book Hackers (see the Bibliography in Appendix C), gives a
|
|
stimulating account of those early years. TMRC's Signals and Power Committee
|
|
included many of the early PDP-1 hackers and the people who later became the
|
|
core of the MIT AI Lab staff. Thirty years later that connection is still
|
|
very much alive, and this lexicon accordingly includes a number of entries
|
|
from a recent revision of the TMRC dictionary. TMRC has a web page at
|
|
http://tmrc-www.mit.edu/. The TMRC Dictionary is available there, at
|
|
http://tmrc-www.mit.edu/dictionary.html.
|
|
|