The Tech Model Railroad Club (TMRC), also known as "The Midnight Requisitioning Committee" a student organization at MIT, is one of the most famous model railroad clubs in the world. Formed in 1946, its HO scale layout specializes in automated operation of model trains. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology, or MIT, is a research institution and university located in the city of Cambridge, Massachusetts along the Charles River and across from Bostons Back Bay district. ... This article needs cleanup. ... 1946 was a common year starting on Tuesday. ... HO scale (H0 scale in continental Europe) is the most popular scale of model railway in most of the world outside the United Kingdom, where the slightly larger in scale OO gauge is most common. ...

Additionally, the TMRC is one of the wellsprings of hacker culture. The 1959 "Dictionary of the TMRC Language" compiled by Peter Samson, who some say coined "Information wants to be free", included several terms that became basics of the hackish vocabulary (see especially "foo", "mung", and "frob"). // Definition Common Contemporary Meanings Hacker is a term used to describe different types of computer experts, who employ a tactical, rather than strategic, approach to computer programming, administration, or security. ... 1959 was a common year starting on Thursday of the Gregorian calendar. ... The introduction of this article does not provide enough context for readers unfamiliar with the subject. ... The Jargon File is a glossary of hacker slang. ... A metasyntactic variable is a placeholder name, or a kind of alias term, commonly used to denote the subject matter under discussion, or a random member of a class of things under discussion. ...

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. Steve Sloth Russel created the first videogame, Spacewar at the Tech Model Railroad Club at the MIT. Categories: People stubs ... A computer game is a game composed of a computer-controlled virtual universe that players interact with in order to achieve a defined goal or set of goals. ... Spacewar was an early video game, a multiplayer space-combat simulation inspired by Doc Smiths Lensman series of science fiction novels. ...

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". 1962 was a common year starting on Monday (link will take you to calendar). ... Automotive style miniature relay A relay is an electrical switch that opens and closes automatically under control of another electrical circuit. ... A scram is an emergency shutdown of a nuclear reactor, though the term has been extended to cover shutdowns of other complex operations, such as server farms and even large model railroads (see Tech Model Railroad Club). ... Various light-emitting diodes (5 mm reds, 3 mm greens and yellows) A light-emitting diode (LED) is a semiconductor device that emits incoherent monochromatic light when electrically biased in the forward direction. ... A seven segment display (sometimes written as 7-segment display) is a form of display that predates the now ubiquitous dot-matrix displays. ...

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 Levy, in his book Hackers (ISBN 0385191952), gives a stimulating account of those early years. TMRC's Power and Signals group included most 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 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). Steven Levy is an American journalist who has written several books on computers, technology, cryptography, the Internet, cyber security and privacy. ... Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution (ISBN 0385191952) is a book by Steven Levy about the hacker culture. ... The PDP-1 (Programmed Data Processor-1) was the first computer in Digital Equipments PDP series and was first produced in 1960. ... ... // Definition Common Contemporary Meanings Hacker is a term used to describe different types of computer experts, who employ a tactical, rather than strategic, approach to computer programming, administration, or security. ... The Jargon File is a glossary of hacker slang. ...

In 1997 TMRC moved from building 20, a "temporary" World War II-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 microcontrollers under the command of a Linux PC. An unusual feature of the layout is an 18-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. World War II was a truly global conflict with many facets: immense human suffering, fierce indoctrinations, and the use of new, extremely devastating weapons like the atom bomb. ... PIC, is a family of RISC microcontrollers made by Microchip Technology, derived from the PIC1650 originally developed by General Instruments Microelectronics Division. ... Tux, a cartoon penguin frequently featured sitting, is the official Linux mascot. ... Tetris on the Nintendo Game Boy Tetris is a computer game invented by Alexey Pajitnov in 1985, while he was working for the Academy of Sciences in Moscow, Russia. ... A hack in progress in Lobby 7 at MIT. Hack is a term in the slang of the technology culture which has come into existence over the past few decades. ...

References

The Free On-line Dictionary of Computing (FOLDOC) is an on-line, searchable encyclopedic dictionary of computing subjects. ... GNU logo The GNU Free Documentation License (GNU FDL or simply GFDL) is a copyleft license for free content, designed by the Free Software Foundation (FSF) for the GNU project. ...

External links

• TMRC from MIT
• TMRC Dictionary