Tech Model Railroad Club

The Tech Model Railroad Club (TMRC) is a student organization at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Historically it has been a wellspring of hacker culture. Formed in 1946, its HO scale layout specializes in automated operation of model trains.

The first meeting was organized by John Fitzallen Moore and Walter Marvin in November 1946. Moore and Marvin had membership cards #0 and #1. They served as the first president and vice-president respectively, and switched these roles the following year.

Circa 1948, the club obtained space in Room 20E-214, on the third floor of Building 20, a "temporary" World War II-era structure, sometimes called "the Plywood Palace," which had been home to the MIT Radiation Lab during World War II.

The club's members, who shared a passion to find out how things worked and then to master them, were among the first hackers. Some of the key early members of the club were Jack Dennis and Peter Samson, who compiled the 1959 Dictionary of the TMRC Language and who are credited with originating the concept "Information wants to be free". The atmosphere was casual; members disliked authority. Members received a key to the room after logging 40 hours of work on the layout.

The club was composed of several groups, including those who were interested in building and painting replicas of certain trains with historical and emotional values, those that wanted to do scenery and buildings, those that wanted to run trains on schedules, and those comprising the "Signals and Power Subcommittee" who created the circuits that made the trains run. This last group would be among the ones who popularized the term "hacker" among many other slang terms, and who eventually moved on to computers and programming. They were initially drawn to the IBM 704, the multimillion-dollar mainframe that was operated in Building 26, but access to and time on the mainframe was restricted to more important people. The group really became intensively involved with computers when Jack Dennis, a former member who had by then joined the MIT Electrical Engineering faculty, introduced them to the TX-0, a $3,000,000 computer on long-term loan from Lincoln Laboratory.

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