Hackers, Heroes of the Computer Revolution | Page 7

value, or
creating realistic scenery for the layout. This was the knife-and-paintbrush contingent,
and it subscribed to railroad magazines and booked the club for trips on aging train lines.
The other faction centered on the Signals and Power Subcommittee of the club, and it
cared far more about what went on under the layout. This was The System, which worked
something like a collaboration between Rube Goldberg and Wernher von Braun, and it
was constantly being improved, revamped, perfected, and sometimes "gronked"--in club
jargon, screwed up. S&P people were obsessed with the way The System worked, its
increasing complexities, how any change you made would affect other parts, and how
you could put those relationships between the parts to optimal use.
Many of the parts for The System had been donated by the Western Electric College Gift
Plan, directly from the phone company. The club's faculty advisor was also in charge of
the campus phone system, and had seen to it that sophisticated phone equipment was
available for the model railroaders. Using that equipment as a starting point, the
Railroaders had devised a scheme which enabled several people to control trains at once,
even if the trains were at different parts of the same track. Using dials appropriated from
telephones, the TMRC "engineers" could specify which block of track they wanted
control of, and run a train from there. This was done by using several types of phone
company relays, including crossbar executors and step switches which let you actually
hear the power being transferred from one block to another by an other-worldly
chunka-chunka-chunka sound.
It was the S&P group who devised this fiendishly ingenious scheme, and it was the S&P
group who harbored the kind of restless curiosity which led them to root around campus
buildings in search of ways to get their hands on computers. They were lifelong disciples
of a Hands-On Imperative. Head of S&P was an upperclassman named Bob Saunders,
with ruddy, bulbous features, an infectious laugh, and a talent for switch gear. As a child
in Chicago, he had built a high-frequency transformer for a high school project; it was his
six-foot-high version of a Tesla coil, something devised by an engineer in the 1800s
which was supposed to send out furious waves of electrical power. Saunders said his coil
project managed to blow out television reception for blocks around. Another person who
gravitated to S&P was Alan Kotok, a plump, chinless, thick-spectacled New Jerseyite in
Samson's class. Kotok's family could recall him, at age three, prying a plug out of a wall
with a screwdriver and causing a hissing shower of sparks to erupt. When he was six, he
was building and wiring lamps. In high school he had once gone on a tour of the Mobil
Research Lab in nearby Haddonfield, and saw his first computer--the exhilaration of that
experience helped him decide to enter MIT. In his freshman year, he earned a reputation
as one of TMRC's most capable S&P people.
The S&P people were the ones who spent Saturdays going to Eli Heffron's junkyard in
Somerville scrounging for parts, who would spend hours on their backs resting on little
rolling chairs they called "bunkies" to get underneath tight spots in the switching system,
who would work through the night making the wholly unauthorized connection between
the TMRC phone and the East Campus. Technology was their playground.
The core members hung out at the club for hours; constantly improving The System,
arguing about what could be done next, developing a jargon of their own that seemed
incomprehensible to outsiders who might chance on these teen-aged fanatics, with their

checked short-sleeve shirts, pencils in their pockets, chino pants, and, always, a bottle of
Coca-Cola by their side. (TMRC purchased its own Coke machine for the then forbidding
sum of $165; at a tariff of five cents a bottle, the outlay was replaced in three months; to
facilitate sales, Saunders built a change machine for Coke buyers that was still in use a
decade later.) When a piece of equipment wasn't working, it was "losing"; when a piece
of equipment was ruined, it was "munged" (Mash Until No Good); the two desks in the
corner of the room were not called the office, but the "orifice"; one who insisted on
studying for courses was a "tool"; garbage was called "cruft"; and a project undertaken or
a product built not solely to fulfill some constructive goal, but with some wild pleasure
taken in mere involvement, was called a "hack."
This latter term may have been suggested by ancient MIT lingo-- the word "hack" had
long been used to describe the elaborate college pranks that MIT students would
regularly devise, such as covering the dome that overlooked the campus with reflecting
foil. But as the TMRC people