Between 1946 and 1947, two MIT students named John Fitzallen Moore and Walter Marvin founded the Tech Model Railroad Club, and as its name suggests, it is focused on the particular world of scale model trains. However, its reach is not limited to them.
The way its members work, their ability to improvise, their adaptation to new technologies, and the constant desire to share their achievements with the public have made the TMRC the primordial source of hacker culture.
The Hacker Spirit
One of the most interesting aspects of the Tech Model Railroad Club is its interpretation of the word hacker: someone who channels their ingenuity and creativity into developing a solution that is fast, effective, and not necessarily elegant. No matter how crude they may be, hacks accomplish their goal without modifying the general structure of the system, and when working on automating scale model trains, its members never hesitated to apply them.
The popularization of the term hacker was led by the "Energy and Signaling Subcommittee", which designed the circuits for the trains. Other groups within the club devoted their enthusiasm to building the units, to buildings and landscapes, or to preparing schedules.
The desire to automate train operation (instead of placing manual switches everywhere) made the control system widely based on telephone technology, made possible thanks to the efforts of Professor Carlton E. Tucker, with several contacts in the industry that provided a lot of equipment for the club.
A good portion of the TMRC members were electrical engineers, and given the challenges in logical design and circuit theory, interest in computers was inevitable. The close relationship between the club, the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, the Lincoln Laboratory, and Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) allowed the use of systems like the TX-0, the 'father' of the historic PDP-1, original hardware on which nothing less than Spacewar! was executed.
Alan Kotok, who participated in the development of Spacewar!, was a member of the Tech Model Railroad Club and was responsible for designing the second control system for the trains.
By 1962, the TMRC system used more than 1,200 relays. The environment was inspired by the 1950s, a time when steam and diesel-electric trains still ran together, so members could use almost any train without falling into deep anachronism.
By 1965, the club almost managed to obtain its own PDP-1, but due to space problems it was impossible to receive it. The idea of a forced and spontaneous move never disappeared (the MIT authorities indicated on several occasions their intention to demolish Building 20), however, the TMRC remained there until 1997, when it moved to Building N52.
The relay system was moved successfully, but the original layout did not have the same luck, and it ended up being demolished with Building 20. When starting to build a new one and analyzing the impact of its rapid growth, the members concluded it was a good time to replace and miniaturize the control system, combining a series of PIC microcontrollers, under the command of a Linux computer.
More than 70 years have passed since its creation, but the spirit of the Tech Model Railroad Club remains intact. Each member has their own little project, work sessions are organized, and everyone maintains this collaborative miniature world of scale model trains with kilometers of track, sensors, lights, and a lot of enthusiasm for hacking.
