The Tech Model Railroad club (MIT, 1946 onwards, Hacker culture)

Histories
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TMRC was featured as the first chapter of the book Hackers, by Steven Levy (New York: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1984). The club is credited as one (possibly the primary) source of the Hacker Culture, as described in the book.

Several entries of the book The New Hacker’s Dictionary, are derived from TMRC’s own dictionary:

The Tech Model Railroad club is an MIT student activity founded during the 1946-1947 school year

The Tech Model Railroad Club (TMRC) caters to model railroaders, railfans, and hackers alike. Our activities involve all aspects of model railroading, including the application of computer technology and timetable passenger and card-order freight operation.

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Experiments with MIT’s DEC and Lincoln machines, and employment at DEC and at the AI Lab were not, of course, the limit of TMRC’s involvement with computers. Early DEC computers soon found their way into TMRC. They were used to control routes in the freight yard and to throw switches on the main layout. TMRC was probably one of the first student activities to make use of computers. However, in each application, cost and electrical component limits dictated that elaborate relay interfaces connect each computer to the layout.

This photo shows TMRC’s “program development PDP-11.” Somewhat smaller machines were used under the layout to control the freight yard and assist in throwing switches.

For more on the intersection of model railways and computing, see

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(BYTE issue via @oldben )

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Notably, the MIT wasn’t the only university which featured a model railroad, which also leads to a few confusions. E.g, in this context, we have to point out a couple of photos that are frequently distributed with the tag line “The PDP-1 at the Tech Model Railroad Club.”

Here’s one of them and even the CHM has it under the title “History - PDP-1 at the Tech Model Railroad Club” in its catalog:

dec.pdp-1.train_set.102631219.lg

There are some details that don’t add up. Notably, the PDP-1 was never at the TMRC and there wasn’t even a possible time window for this to happen.
As it turns out, this is at the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 1968, and the person seen operating the PDP-1, which was indeed used to control the layout seen in the foreground, was J.A.N. Lee, Head of the then new CS program. The machine seen in the picture, is the PDP-1B production prototype that was originally installed at BBN in 1960 and was once used for Ed Fredkin’s pioneering timesharing system.

(Marginally interesting is that, while the machine had originally a detached operator’s console, this was now mounted to what looks like the integrated paper tape reader found on the production models, which it seems to have acquired over the years and which promotes a somewhat deplorable impression regarding the state of the computer, as if dismantled half-ways. BTW, the PDP-1 is the white (or rather cream colored) cabinets seen in the background of the photo. What’s balancing on the combined paper tape reader and console assembly may be a paper tape punch, as indicated by the rails around what looks like a slot seen at its top. The tape punch is the vertical slot seen at the right of the top front panel of the production models. — And, yes, as the machine retired to UMas, it was found to still have a copy of Space War in its non-volatile core memory.)

And, to close the circle, the image first publicly appeared (with a correct tag line) in a review of Steven Levy’s “Hackers”, the very book that popolarized the notion of the TMRC. This review was written by the same J.A.N. Lee, we see in the photo, and is found on page 271 of the Annals of the History of Computing, vol. 7, no. 3, July, 1985 (J.A.N. Lee, “Reviews: Levy, Steven. Hackers”, pp. 270-272).

For more on this, see

and

The only thing I’m still somewhat unsure about that photo is the scale/gauge of the model railway, which looks a bit too big for me to be HO and too small to be O gauge – but this could be also a matter of perspective. (I think, this was indeed a HO layout.)

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