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.
[glossary]
[Reference(s) to this entry by made by: {baz}{DDT}{DEC}{foo}{frob}{frobnitz}{J. Random Hacker}{kluge}{mung}{scram switch}{TMRCie}]