Tech Model Railroad Club
The Tech Model Railroad Club (TMRC) 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.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 (and later hack & hacker) was coined. 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 has grown in the thirty years since; all the features described here are still present). 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 Levy, in his book (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).
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 IBM compatible PCs using standard connectors and protocols. An unusual feature of the layout is a 20-story building whose lighted window array can act as a display for playing Tetris.
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Based on material from FOLDOC, used with permission.