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Additionally, the TMRC is 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 especially " foo", "mung", and "frob").
It was at the TMRC that the word "hacking" was coined (followed later by "hack" and "hacker"). It was also at the TMRC that Steve Russel invented the first computer game, Spacewar.
By 1962, TMRC's legendary layout was already a marvel of complexity (and was to grow further over the next thirty years). The control system alone featured about 1200 relays. There were scram switches 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".
Design-wise, the layout is set in the 1950s, a transition period when railroads operated steam, diesel, and electric engines side by side. This allows visitors to run any engine they want without anything looking out of place.
Steven LevySteven Levy is an American journalist who has written several books on computers, technology, cryptography, the Internet, cyber security and privacy. Levy is a senior editor and chief technology writer for Newsweek writing mainly on the "Science & Technol, in his book HackersHackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution (BooksEnthsiast.com) is a book by Steven Levy about the hacker culture. It was published in 1984 in Garden City, New York by Anchor Press/ Doubleday. Levy describes the people, the machines, and the events that defi (BooksEnthsiast.com), gives a stimulating account of those early years. TMRC's Power and Signals group included most of the early PDP-1The PDP-1 P rogrammed D ata P rocessor 1 was the first computer in Digital Equipment's PDP series and was first produced in 1960. It is famous for being the computer most important in the creation of hacker culture, at MIT, BBN and elsewhere. The PDP-1 wa hackers and the people who later became the core of the MIT AI LabThe MIT Artificial intelligence Laboratory was an interdisciplinary research entity at MIT founded in 1959, and one of the most influential and accomplished in the field. The AI Lab (as it is commonly abbreviated) was originally a subdivision of Project M staff. Thirty years later that connection is still very much alive, and a recent dictionary of hacker slang accordingly includes a number of entries from a recent revision of the TMRC dictionary (via the Hacker Jargon File).In 1997 TMRC moved from building 20, a "temporary" World War IIWorld War II was the most extensive and costly armed conflict in the history of the world, involving the great majority of the world's nations, being fought simultaneously in several major theatres, and costing tens of millions of lives. The war was fough-era structure, to building N52, the MIT Museum building. As a result, the majority of the layout was destroyed. A new layout, under construction, is controlled by System 3, comprising around 40 PIC16F877 microcontrollersPIC is a family of RISC microcontrollers made by Microchip Technology, derived from the PIC1650 originally developed by General Instrument's Microelectronics Division. Microchip Technology does not use PIC as an acronym (in fact they call their chips PICm under the command of a Linux PC. An unusual feature of the layout is a 20-story building from the MIT campus, replicated in HO scale and wired with an array of window lights which can be used as a display for playing Tetris, in reference to a legendary (but apocryphal) MIT hack.