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35-604: Around 1958, the term was used in the sense of "garbage" by students frequenting the Tech Model Railroad Club (TMRC) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). In the 1959 edition of the club's dictionary, it was defined as "that which magically amounds in the Clubroom just before you walk in to clean up. In other words, rubbage". Its author Peter Samson later explained that this

70-538: A Linux computer. An unusual feature of the new layout is an HO scale model of the Green Building , an 18-story building which is the tallest structure in the academic core of the MIT campus . The model is wired with an array of incandescent window lights, which can be used as a display for playing Tetris , and was a precursor to the project to do this with the actual building. Passersby inside Building N52 can view

105-474: A branch of the cypherpunk movement, whose members espouse a particular political viewpoint ( anarchism ). The construction of the statement takes its meaning beyond the simple judgmental observation, "Information should be free", by acknowledging that the internal force or entelechy of information and knowledge makes it essentially incompatible with notions of proprietary software , copyrights, patents, subscription services , etc. They believe that information

140-477: A detailed account of those early years. TMRC's "Signals and Power Subcommittee" liked to work on the layout's relays, switches, and wires, while the "Midnight Requisitioning Committee" obtained parts independently of campus procurement rules. The Signals and Power Subcommittee included most of the early TX-0 and PDP-1 computer hackers, and several people would later join the core of the MIT AI Lab staff. TMRC

175-513: A scram switch, the clock stops and the time display is replaced with the word "FOO". At TMRC, the scram switches are therefore called "foo switches". The layout is set in the 1950s, when railroads operated steam and diesel-electric engines side by side. This allows visitors to run a wide variety of model rolling stock without looking too anachronistic. In his book Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution , Steven Levy gives

210-505: A semi-annual Open House , inviting the MIT community and the general public to visit. At other times, visitors are generally welcome when members are present. Information wants to be free " Information wants to be free " is an expression that means either that all people should be able to access information freely, or that information (formulated as an actor) naturally strives to become as freely available among people as possible. It

245-647: A wellspring of hacker culture and the oldest such hacking group in North America. Formed in 1946, its HO scale layout specializes in the automated operation of model trains. The first meeting of the Tech Model Railroad Club was organized by John Fitzallen Moore and Walter Marvin in November of 1946. Moore and Marvin had membership cards #0 and #1 and served as the first president and vice-president respectively. They then switched roles

280-490: Is also used to describe instances of unnecessary, leftover or just poorly written source code in a computer program that is then uselessly, or even harmfully, compiled into object code. Cruft accumulation may result in technical debt , which can subsequently make adding new features or modifying existing features—even to improve performance—more difficult and time-consuming. In the context of Internet or Web addresses ( Uniform Resource Locators or "URLs"), cruft refers to

315-494: Is attributed to Stewart Brand , who, in the late 1960s, founded the Whole Earth Catalog and argued that technology could be liberating rather than oppressing. What is considered the earliest recorded occurrence of the expression was at the first Hackers Conference in 1984, although the video recording of the conversation shows that what Brand actually said is slightly different. Brand told Steve Wozniak : On

350-761: Is dynamic, ever-growing and evolving and cannot be contained within (any) ideological structure. According to this philosophy, hackers , crackers , and phreakers are liberators of information which is being held hostage by agents demanding money for its release. Other participants in this network include cypherpunks who educate people to use public-key cryptography to protect the privacy of their messages from corporate or governmental snooping and programmers who write free software and open source code . Still others create Free-Nets allowing users to gain access to computer resources for which they would otherwise need an account. They might also break copyright law by swapping music, movies, or other copyrighted materials over

385-409: Is often used by technology activists to criticize laws that limit transparency and general access to information. People who criticize intellectual property law say the system of such government-granted monopolies conflicts with the development of a public domain of information. The expression is often credited to Stewart Brand , who was recorded saying it at a Hackers Conference in 1984. The phrase

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420-620: The characters that are relevant or meaningful only to the people who created the site, such as implementation details of the computer system which serves the page. Examples of URL cruft could include filename extensions such as .php or .html , and internal organizational details such as /public/ or /Users/john/work/drafts/ . Cruft may also refer to unused and out-of-date computer paraphernalia, collected through upgrading, inheritance, or simple acquisition, both deliberate and through circumstance. This accumulated hardware, however, often has benefit when IT systems administrators, technicians, and

455-504: 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

490-532: The Harvard Physics Department's radar lab during World War II . The FreeBSD handbook uses the term to refer to leftover or superseded object code that accumulates in a folder or directory when software is recompiled and new executables and data files are produced. Such cruft, if required for the new executables to work properly, can cause the BSD equivalent of dependency hell . The word

525-466: The Internet. Chelsea Manning is alleged to have said "Information should be free" to Adrian Lamo when explaining a rationale for US government documents to be released to WikiLeaks . The narrative goes on with Manning wondering if she is a " 'hacker', 'cracker', 'hacktivist', 'leaker' or what". In the " Fall Revolution " series of science-fiction books, author Ken Macleod riffs and puns on

560-574: The expression by writing about entities composed of information actually "wanting", as in desiring, freedom and the machinations of several human characters with differing political and ideological agendas, to facilitate or disrupt these entities' quest for freedom. In the Warcross duology by Marie Lu, the virtual space "The Pirate's Den" sports the slogan. In the cyberpunk world of post-singularity transhuman culture described by Charles Stross in his books like Accelerando and Singularity Sky ,

595-605: The following year. Circa 1948, the club obtained official MIT campus 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

630-417: The free communication of scientific knowledge, and specifically criticized the patent system. The various forms of the original statement are ambiguous: the slogan can be used to argue the benefits of propertied information, of liberated, free, and open information, or of both. It can be taken amorally as an expression of a fact of information-science: once information has passed to a new location outside of

665-440: The freedom to copy the information and to adapt it to one's own uses   ... When information is generally useful, redistributing it makes humanity wealthier no matter who is distributing and no matter who is receiving. Stallman's reformulation incorporates a political stance into Brand's value-neutral observation of social trends. Brand's attribution of will to an abstract human construct (information) has been adopted within

700-527: The hacker's Jargon File , such as " foo ", " mung ", and " frob ". Other substitutions include "orifice" for office (as in later Back Orifice ), "cruft" for garbage, and "hack", meaning an elaborate college prank carried out by MIT students. This last definition is the basis for the term " hacker ". By 1962, the TMRC layout was already a complex electromechanical system, controlled by about 1200 relays . There were scram switches located at numerous places around

735-695: 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 composing

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770-521: The layout. There was also a digital clock display with relay switching, and an internal telephone system with external tie-lines, all built from telephone stepping switches and relays. The system of telephones was used for voice communication, for control of the clock, as well as for control of switches and blocks. Additionally, " j trains" (imaginary trains) could be run by plugs in the control system. Around 1970, Digital Equipment Corporation donated two small rackmount PDP-11 minicomputers . One

805-402: The like have need for critical replacement parts. An unused machine or component similar to a production unit could allow near-immediate restoration of the failed unit, as opposed to waiting for a shipped replacement. 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

840-405: The model through a window and play a monochromatic version of Tetris via remote control, accompanied by authentic-sounding music, even when the facility is closed. In 2011, an independent group of hackers reified this " holy grail " of hacking by installing and operating a full-sized color version of Tetris on the 295-foot (90 m) tall Green Building tower. As of April 2015 , TMRC holds

875-474: The one hand you have—the point you’re making Woz—is that information sort of wants to be expensive because it is so valuable—the right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information almost wants to be free because the costs of getting it out is getting lower and lower all of the time. So you have these two things fighting against each other. Brand's conference remarks are transcribed accurately by Joshua Gans in his research on

910-508: The quote as used by Steve Levy in his own history of the phrase. A later form appears in his The Media Lab: Inventing the Future at MIT : Information Wants To Be Free. Information also wants to be expensive. ...That tension will not go away. According to historian Adrian Johns, the slogan expresses a view that had already been articulated in the mid-20th century by Norbert Wiener , Michael Polanyi and Arnold Plant , who advocated for

945-404: The room that could be pressed to shut down all movement on the tracks if something undesirable was about to occur, such as a train going full speed toward an obstruction. Another feature of the system was a relay-logic digital clock (dubbed the "digital crock") on the dispatch board, which was itself something of a wonder in the days before cheap LEDs and seven-segment displays . When someone hits

980-487: The source's control there is no way of ensuring it is not propagated further, and therefore will naturally tend towards a state where that information is widely distributed. Much of its force is due to the anthropomorphic metaphor that imputes desire to information. In 1990 Richard Stallman restated the concept normatively, without the anthropomorphization : I believe that all generally useful information should be free. By "free" I am not referring to price, but rather to

1015-487: Was called the ARRC (Automatic Railroad Running Computer). It could run a train over the entire set of track, in both directions without manual intervention, throwing switches and powering tracks ahead of the train. A mainframe program was used to compute the path, and all modifications to the layout had to be compatible with this ability. It was sometimes used to clean the tracks with a track scraper car. Sometime around 1964, this

1050-400: Was demolished. Construction of a new layout began immediately and still continues. The vintage telephone crossbar relay-based control system was moved into the new space and operated for two years but, as the new layout grew, the decision was made to replace it with an electronic equivalent. Known as "System 3", this new system comprises around 40 PIC16F877 microcontrollers under the command of

1085-598: Was even offered its own multi-rack-cabinet PDP-1 by 1965, although it had no space in which to install it and thus was forced to decline the gift. MIT's Building 20 , TMRC's home for 50 years, was slowly evacuated in 1996–98 and demolished in 1999 to make room for the Ray and Maria Stata Center . The club was offered a new space in Building N52, the MIT Museum building. Most of the original layout could not be moved and

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1120-511: Was eventually used to operate the club's major freight yard, and the other was set up to perform user interface tasks, such as the initial assignment of trains to throttles,and to throw turnouts. The computer replaced the keypad unit from an old keypunch machine, which had been originally installed by Richard Greenblatt . The TMRC spawned a unique vocabulary. Compiled in the TMRC Dictionary, it included terms that later became part of

1155-436: Was meant in the sense of "detritus, that which needs to be swept up and thrown out. The dictionary has no definition for 'crufty,' a word I didn't hear until some years later". In 2008 it was also used to refer to alumni who remain socially active at MIT. The origin of the term is uncertain, but it may be derived from Harvard University 's Cruft Laboratory. Built in 1915 as a gift from a donor named Harriet Otis Cruft, it housed

1190-557: Was replaced by a second system built around the Number 5 Crossbar telephone switch ; the lead designer for this project was Alan Kotok , a prominent member of the design staff at Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC). Equipment for this effort was donated by the telephone company via the Western Electric College Gift Plan. An extension to the basic control system allowed TMRC engineers to control switches on

1225-541: 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 . At the club itself, a semi-automatic control system based on telephone relays was installed by the mid-1950s. It

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