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75-532: The concept of the file began with the Tech Model Railroad Club (TMRC) that came out of early TX-0 and PDP-1 hackers in the 1950s, where the term hacker emerged and the ethic, philosophies and some of the nomenclature emerged. The Jargon File (referred to here as "Jargon-1" or "the File") was made by Raphael Finkel at Stanford in 1975. From that time until the plug was finally pulled on

150-538: 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

225-479: A hacker named Charles Spurgeon got a large chunk of the File published in Stewart Brand 's CoEvolution Quarterly (issue 29, pages 26–35) with illustrations by Phil Wadler and Guy Steele (including a couple of Steele's Crunchly cartoons). This appears to have been the File's first paper publication. A late version of Jargon-1, expanded with commentary for the mass market, was edited by Guy Steele into

300-399: A sabbatical from Bell Labs and came to Berkeley as a visiting professor. He helped to install Version 6 Unix and started working on a Pascal implementation for the system. Graduate students Chuck Haley and Bill Joy improved Thompson's Pascal and implemented an improved text editor, ex . Other universities became interested in the software at Berkeley, and so in 1977 Joy started compiling

375-489: A binary compatibility layer . This is much simpler and faster than emulation ; for example, it allows applications intended for Linux to be run at effectively full speed. This makes BSDs not only suitable for server environments, but also for workstation ones, given the increasing availability of commercial or closed-source software for Linux only. This also allows administrators to migrate legacy commercial applications, which may have only supported commercial Unix variants, to

450-488: A bit more BSD-flavored than SysVish, but it was pretty eclectic. Eric S. Raymond summarizes the longstanding relationship between System V and BSD, stating, "The divide was roughly between longhairs and shorthairs; programmers and technical people tended to line up with Berkeley and BSD, more business-oriented types with AT&T and System V." In 1989, David A. Curry wrote about the differences between BSD and System V. He characterized System V as being often regarded as

525-496: A book published in 1983 as The Hacker's Dictionary (Harper & Row CN 1082, ISBN   0-06-091082-8 ). It included all of Steele's Crunchly cartoons. The other Jargon-1 editors (Raphael Finkel, Don Woods, and Mark Crispin ) contributed to this revision, as did Stallman and Geoff Goodfellow . This book (now out of print) is hereafter referred to as "Steele-1983" and those six as the Steele-1983 coauthors. Shortly after

600-509: A complete operating system including the new kernel, ports of the 2BSD utilities to the VAX, and the utilities from 32V was released as 3BSD at the end of 1979. 3BSD was also alternatively called Virtual VAX/UNIX or VMUNIX (for Virtual Memory Unix), and BSD kernel images were normally called /vmunix until 4.4BSD. After 4.3BSD was released in June 1986, it was determined that BSD would move away from

675-477: 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

750-481: A more modern operating system, retaining the functionality of such applications until they can be replaced by a better alternative. Current BSD operating system variants support many of the common IEEE , ANSI , ISO , and POSIX standards, while retaining most of the traditional BSD behavior. Like AT&T Unix , the BSD kernel is monolithic , meaning that device drivers in the kernel run in privileged mode , as part of

825-648: A nearly complete operating system that was freely distributable. Net/2 was the basis for two separate ports of BSD to the Intel 80386 architecture: the free 386BSD by William and Lynne Jolitz , and the proprietary BSD/386 (later renamed BSD/OS) by Berkeley Software Design (BSDi). 386BSD itself was short-lived, but became the initial code base of the NetBSD and FreeBSD projects that were started shortly thereafter. BSDi soon found itself in legal trouble with AT&T's Unix System Laboratories (USL) subsidiary, then

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900-499: A positive light to the general public. In the early 1990s in particular, many news stories emerged portraying hackers as law-breakers with no respect for the personal privacy or property of others. Raymond wanted to show some of the positive values of hacker culture, particularly the hacker sense of humor. Because love of humorous wordplay is a strong element of hacker culture, a slang dictionary works quite well for such purposes. PC Magazine in 1984, stated that The Hacker's Dictionary

975-513: 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

1050-564: 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. Berkeley Software Distribution The Berkeley Software Distribution or Berkeley Standard Distribution ( BSD ) is a discontinued operating system based on Research Unix , developed and distributed by the Computer Systems Research Group (CSRG) at

1125-490: A separate release of the networking code, which had been developed entirely outside AT&T and would not be subject to the licensing requirement. This led to Networking Release 1 ( Net/1 ), which was made available to non-licensees of AT&T code and was freely redistributable under the terms of the BSD license . It was released in June 1989. After Net/1, BSD developer Keith Bostic proposed that more non-AT&T sections of

1200-497: A substantial entry on the work, the Encyclopedia of New Media by Steve Jones (2002) observed that this defense of the term hacker was a motivating factor for both Steele's and Raymond's print editions: The Hacker's Dictionary and The New Hacker's Dictionary sought to celebrate hacker culture, provide a repository of hacking history for younger and future hackers, and perhaps most importantly, to represent hacker culture in

1275-751: Is a student organization at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Historically, it has been 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

1350-446: Is approximately equal to one inch per second? Or an example of the canonical use of canonical ? Or a definition like "A cuspy but bogus raving story about N random broken people"? The third print edition garnered additional coverage, in the usual places like Wired (August 1996), and even in mainstream venues, including People magazine (October 21, 1996). Tech Model Railroad Club The Tech Model Railroad Club ( TMRC )

1425-526: Is much more suited to a research environment, which requires a faster file system, better virtual memory handling, and a larger variety of programming languages . Berkeley's Unix was the first Unix to include libraries supporting the Internet Protocol stacks: Berkeley sockets . A Unix implementation of IP's predecessor, the ARPAnet's NCP , with FTP and Telnet clients, had been produced at

1500-575: The ARPANET , circulated even in cultures far removed from MIT's; the content exerted a strong and continuing influence on hackish slang and humor. Even as the advent of the microcomputer and other trends fueled a tremendous expansion of hackerdom, the File (and related materials like the AI Koans in Appendix A) came to be seen as a sort of sacred epic, a hacker-culture Matter of Britain chronicling

1575-587: The Encyclopedia of New Media , the Jargon file, especially in print form, is frequently cited for both its definitions and its essays, by books and other works on hacker history, cyberpunk subculture, computer jargon and online style, and the rise of the Internet as a public medium, in works as diverse as the 20th edition of A Bibliography of Literary Theory, Criticism and Philology edited by José Ángel García Landa (2015); Wired Style: Principles of English Usage in

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1650-500: The Jupiter project at DEC . The File's compilers, already dispersed, moved on to other things. Steele-1983 was partly a monument to what its authors thought was a dying tradition; no one involved realized at the time just how wide its influence was to be. As mentioned in some editions: By the mid-1980s, the File's content was dated, but the legend that had grown up around it never quite died out. The book, and softcopies obtained off

1725-650: The Linux kernel , which did not have such legal ambiguity, gained greater support. The lawsuit was settled in January 1994, largely in Berkeley's favor. Of the 18,000 files in the Berkeley distribution, only three had to be removed and 70 modified to show USL copyright notices. A further condition of the settlement was that USL would not file further lawsuits against users and distributors of the Berkeley-owned code in

1800-585: The NHD as a source for computer-related neologisms . The Chicago Manual of Style , the leading American academic and book-publishing style guide, beginning with its 15th edition (2003) explicitly defers, for "computer writing", to the quotation punctuation style – logical quotation  – recommended by the essay "Hacker Writing Style" in The New Hacker's Dictionary (and cites NHD for nothing else). The 16th edition (2010, and

1875-669: The SAIL computer in 1991, the File was named "AIWORD.RF[UP,DOC]" ("[UP,DOC]" was a system directory for "User Program DOCumentation" on the WAITS operating system). Some terms, such as frob , foo and mung are believed to date back to the early 1950s from the Tech Model Railroad Club at MIT and documented in the 1959 Dictionary of the TMRC Language compiled by Peter Samson. The revisions of Jargon-1 were all unnumbered and may be collectively considered "version 1". Note that it

1950-466: The University of California, Berkeley . Since the original has become obsolete, the term "BSD" is commonly used for its open-source descendants, including FreeBSD , OpenBSD , NetBSD , and DragonFly BSD . BSD was initially called Berkeley Unix because it was based on the source code of the original Unix developed at Bell Labs . In the 1980s, BSD was widely adopted by workstation vendors in

2025-545: The University of Illinois in 1975, and was available at Berkeley. However, the memory scarcity on the PDP-11 forced a complicated design and performance problems. By integrating sockets with the Unix operating system's file descriptors , it became almost as easy to read and write data across a network as it was to access a disk. The AT&T laboratory eventually released their own STREAMS library, which incorporated much of

2100-433: The vi text editor (a visual version of ex ) and the C shell . Some 75 copies of 2BSD were sent out by Bill Joy. A VAX computer was installed at Berkeley in 1978, but the port of Unix to the VAX architecture, UNIX/32V , did not take advantage of the VAX's virtual memory capabilities. The kernel of 32V was largely rewritten to include Berkeley graduate student Özalp Babaoğlu 's virtual memory implementation, and

2175-504: 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

2250-544: The "standard Unix." However, he described BSD as more popular among university and government computer centers, due to its advanced features and performance: Most university and government computer centers that use UNIX use Berkeley UNIX, rather than System V. There are several reasons for this, but perhaps the two most significant are that Berkeley UNIX provides networking capabilities that until recently (Release 3.0) were completely unavailable in System V, and that Berkeley UNIX

2325-499: The 9th Edition, which incorporated source code and improvements from 4.3BSD. The result was that these later versions of Research Unix were closer to BSD than they were to System V. In a Usenet posting from 2000, Dennis Ritchie described this relationship between BSD and Research Unix: Research Unix 8th Edition started from (I think) BSD 4.1c, but with enormous amounts scooped out and replaced by our own stuff. This continued with 9th and 10th. The ordinary user command-set was, I guess,

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2400-480: The BSD system be released under the same license as Net/1. To this end, he started a project to reimplement most of the standard Unix utilities without using the AT&;T code. Within eighteen months, all of the AT&T utilities had been replaced, and it was determined that only a few AT&T files remained in the kernel. These files were removed, and the result was the June 1991 release of Networking Release 2 (Net/2),

2475-554: The CSRG worked on an implementation of the OSI network protocol stack, improvements to the kernel virtual memory system and (with Van Jacobson of LBL ) new TCP/IP algorithms to accommodate the growth of the Internet. Until then, all versions of BSD used proprietary AT&T Unix code, and were therefore subject to an AT&T software license. Source code licenses had become very expensive and several outside parties had expressed interest in

2550-709: The Digital Age by Constance Hale and Jessie Scanlon of Wired magazine (1999); Transhumanism: The History of a Dangerous Idea by David Livingstone (2015); Mark Dery's Flame Wars: The Discourse of Cyberculture (1994) and Escape Velocity: Cyberculture at the End of the Century (2007); Beyond Cyberpunk! A Do-it-yourself Guide to the Future by Gareth Branwyn and Peter Sugarman (1991); and numerous others. Time magazine used The New Hacker's Dictionary (Raymond-1993) as

2625-554: The Jargon File in its "CyberStuff" segments. Computing Reviews used one of the Jargon File's definitions on its December 1991 cover. On October 23, 2003, The New Hacker's Dictionary was used in a legal case. SCO Group cited the 1996 edition definition of "FUD" ( fear, uncertainty and doubt ), which dwelt on questionable IBM business practices, in a legal filing in the civil lawsuit SCO Group, Inc. v. International Business Machines Corp. (In response, Raymond added SCO to

2700-514: The SAIL computer continued as a computer science department resource until 1991. Stanford became a major TWENEX site, at one point operating more than a dozen TOPS-20 systems, but by the mid-1980s, most of the interesting software work was being done on the emerging BSD Unix standard. In April 1983, the PDP-10 -centered cultures that had nourished the File were dealt a death-blow by the cancellation of

2775-447: The SAIL contact for the File (which was subsequently kept in duplicate at SAIL and MIT, with periodic resynchronizations). The File expanded by fits and starts until 1983. Richard Stallman was prominent among the contributors, adding many MIT and ITS -related coinages. The Incompatible Timesharing System (ITS) was named to distinguish it from another early MIT computer operating system, Compatible Time-Sharing System (CTSS). In 1981,

2850-425: The aging VAX platform. The Power 6/32 platform (codenamed "Tahoe") developed by Computer Consoles Inc. seemed promising at the time, but was abandoned by its developers shortly thereafter. Nonetheless, the 4.3BSD-Tahoe port (June 1988) proved valuable, as it led to a separation of machine-dependent and machine-independent code in BSD which would improve the system's future portability. In addition to portability,

2925-410: The basis for Apple's macOS and iOS , is based on 4.4BSD-Lite2 and FreeBSD. Various commercial Unix operating systems, such as Solaris , also incorporate BSD code. Starting with the 8th Edition, versions of Research Unix at Bell Labs had a close relationship to BSD. This began when 4.1cBSD for the VAX was used as the basis for Research Unix 8th Edition. This continued in subsequent versions, such as

3000-467: The basis for an article about online culture in the November 1995 inaugural edition of the "Time Digital" department. NHD was cited by name on the front page of The Wall Street Journal . Upon the release of the second edition, Newsweek used it as a primary source, and quoted entries in a sidebar, for a major article on the Internet and its history. The MTV show This Week in Rock used excerpts from

3075-459: The changes made under his watch were controversial; early critics accused Raymond of unfairly changing the file's focus to the Unix hacker culture instead of the older hacker cultures where the Jargon File originated. Raymond has responded by saying that the nature of hacking had changed and the Jargon File should report on hacker culture, and not attempt to enshrine it. After the second edition of NHD (MIT Press, 1993; hereafter Raymond-1993), Raymond

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3150-412: The core of the operating system. Several operating systems are based on BSD, including FreeBSD , OpenBSD , NetBSD , MidnightBSD , MirOS BSD , GhostBSD , Darwin and DragonFly BSD . Both NetBSD and FreeBSD were created in 1993. They were initially derived from 386BSD (also known as "Jolix"), and merged the 4.4BSD-Lite source code in 1994. OpenBSD was forked from NetBSD in 1995, and DragonFly BSD

3225-422: The current issue as of 2016) does likewise. The National Geographic Style Manual lists NHD among only 8 specialized dictionaries, out of 22 total sources, on which it is based. That manual is the house style of NGS publications, and has been available online for public browsing since 1995. The NGSM does not specify what, in particular, it drew from the NHD or any other source. Aside from these guides and

3300-540: The day, sometimes during the night). A larger PDP-11/70 was installed at Berkeley the following year, using money from the Ingres database project. BSD began life as a variant of Unix that programmers at the University of California at Berkeley, initially led by Bill Joy , began developing in the late 1970s. It included extra features, which were intertwined with code owned by AT&T. In 1975, Ken Thompson took

3375-426: The editors of Steele-1983). It merged in about 80% of the Steele-1983 text, omitting some framing material and a very few entries introduced in Steele-1983 that are now only of historical interest. The new version cast a wider net than the old Jargon File; its aim was to cover not just AI or PDP-10 hacker culture but all of the technical computing cultures in which the true hacker-nature is manifested. More than half of

3450-547: The entries derived from Usenet and represented jargon then current in the C and Unix communities, but special efforts were made to collect jargon from other cultures including IBM PC programmers, Amiga fans, Mac enthusiasts, and even the IBM mainframe world. Eric Raymond maintained the new File with assistance from Guy Steele, and is the credited editor of the print version of it, The New Hacker's Dictionary (published by MIT Press in 1991); hereafter Raymond-1991. Some of

3525-558: The entry in a revised copy of the Jargon File , feeling that SCO's own practices deserved similar criticism.) The book is particularly noted for helping (or at least trying) to preserve the distinction between a hacker (a consummate programmer) and a cracker (a computer criminal ); even though not reviewing the book in detail, both the London Review of Books and MIT Technology Review remarked on it in this regard. In

3600-662: 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 composing

3675-464: The first Berkeley Software Distribution (1BSD), which was released on March 9, 1978. 1BSD was an add-on to Version 6 Unix rather than a complete operating system in its own right. Some thirty copies were sent out. The second Berkeley Software Distribution (2BSD), released in May 1979, included updated versions of the 1BSD software as well as two new programs by Joy that persist on Unix systems to this day:

3750-653: The first president and vice-president respectively. They then switched roles 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

3825-692: The form of proprietary Unix variants such as DEC Ultrix and Sun Microsystems SunOS due to its permissive licensing and familiarity to many technology company founders and engineers. These proprietary BSD derivatives were largely superseded in the 1990s by UNIX SVR4 and OSF/1 . Later releases of BSD provided the basis for several open-source operating systems including FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, DragonFly BSD, Darwin and TrueOS . These, in turn, have been used by proprietary operating systems, including Apple 's macOS and iOS , which derived from them and Microsoft Windows (since at least 2000 and XP ), which used (at least) part of its TCP/IP code, which

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3900-527: 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

3975-506: The heroic exploits of the Knights of the Lab. The pace of change in hackerdom at large accelerated tremendously, but the Jargon File passed from living document to icon and remained essentially untouched for seven years. A new revision was begun in 1990, which contained nearly the entire text of a late version of Jargon-1 (a few obsolete PDP-10-related entries were dropped after consultation with

4050-521: 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

4125-405: 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

4200-500: The official Jargon File since 2003. A volunteer editor produced two updates, reflecting later influences (mostly excoriated) from text messaging language , LOLspeak , and Internet slang in general; the last was produced in January 2012. Despite its tongue-in-cheek approach, multiple other style guides and similar works have cited The New Hacker's Dictionary as a reference, and even recommended following some of its "hackish" best practices. The Oxford English Dictionary has used

4275-411: The owners of the System V copyright and the Unix trademark. The USL v. BSDi lawsuit was filed in 1992 and led to an injunction on the distribution of Net/2 until the validity of USL's copyright claims on the source could be determined. The lawsuit slowed development of the free-software descendants of BSD for nearly two years while their legal status was in question, and as a result systems based on

4350-473: The people who make up the hacker culture". He was nevertheless critical of Raymond's tendency to editorialize, even " flame ", and of the Steele cartoons, which Jackson described as "sophomoric, and embarrassingly out of place beside the dry and sophisticated humor of the text". He wound down his review with some rhetorical questions: [W]here else will you find, for instance, that one attoparsec per microfortnight

4425-555: The publication of Steele-1983, the File effectively stopped growing and changing. Originally, this was due to a desire to freeze the file temporarily to ease the production of Steele-1983, but external conditions caused the "temporary" freeze to become permanent. The AI Lab culture had been hit hard in the late 1970s, by funding cuts and the resulting administrative decision to use vendor-supported hardware and associated proprietary software instead of homebrew whenever possible. At MIT, most AI work had turned to dedicated Lisp machines . At

4500-474: The request of computer science professor Bob Fabry who had been on the program committee for the Symposium on Operating Systems Principles where Unix was first presented. A PDP-11/45 was bought to run the system, but for budgetary reasons, this machine was shared with the mathematics and statistics groups at Berkeley, who used RSTS , so that Unix only ran on the machine eight hours per day (sometimes during

4575-404: 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

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4650-413: The same functionality in a software stack with a different architecture, but the wide distribution of the existing sockets library reduced the impact of the new API . Early versions of BSD were used to form Sun Microsystems ' SunOS , founding the first wave of popular Unix workstations. Some BSD operating systems can run native software of several other operating systems on the same architecture , using

4725-684: The same time, the commercialization of AI technology lured some of the AI Lab's best and brightest away to startups along the Route 128 strip in Massachusetts and out west in Silicon Valley . The startups built Lisp machines for MIT; the central MIT-AI computer became a TWENEX system rather than a host for the AI hackers' ITS. The Stanford AI Lab had effectively ceased to exist by 1980, although

4800-674: The upcoming 4.4BSD release. The final release from Berkeley was 1995's 4.4BSD-Lite Release 2 , after which the CSRG was dissolved and development of BSD at Berkeley ceased. Since then, several variants based directly or indirectly on 4.4BSD-Lite (such as FreeBSD , NetBSD , OpenBSD and DragonFly BSD ) have been maintained. The permissive nature of the BSD license has allowed many other operating systems, both open-source and proprietary, to incorporate BSD source code. For example, Microsoft Windows used BSD code in its implementation of TCP/IP and bundles recompiled versions of BSD's command-line networking tools since Windows 2000 . Darwin ,

4875-565: Was accused of adding terms reflecting his own politics and vocabulary, even though he says that entries to be added are checked to make sure that they are in live use, not "just the private coinage of one or two people". The Raymond version was revised again, to include terminology from the nascent subculture of the public Internet and the World Wide Web, and published by MIT Press as The New Hacker's Dictionary , Third Edition, in 1996. As of January 2016, no updates have been made to

4950-585: Was always called "AIWORD" or "the Jargon file", never "the File"; the last term was coined by Eric Raymond. In 1976, Mark Crispin , having seen an announcement about the File on the SAIL computer, FTPed a copy of the File to the MIT AI Lab. He noticed that it was hardly restricted to "AI words", and so stored the file on his directory, named as "AI:MRC;SAIL JARGON" ("AI" lab computer, directory "MRC", file "SAIL JARGON"). Raphael Finkel dropped out of active participation shortly thereafter and Don Woods became

5025-487: 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

5100-400: 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

5175-598: 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

5250-511: 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

5325-481: Was legal. Code from FreeBSD was also used to create the operating systems for the PlayStation 5 , PlayStation 4 , PlayStation 3 , PlayStation Vita , and Nintendo Switch . The earliest distributions of Unix from Bell Labs in the 1970s included the source code to the operating system, allowing researchers at universities to modify and extend Unix. The operating system arrived at Berkeley in 1974, at

5400-557: 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

5475-541: 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

5550-792: Was so engaging that one's reading of it should be "severely timed if you hope to get any work done"; and Mondo 2000 describing it as "slippery, elastic fun with language", as well as "not only a useful guidebook to very much un-official technical terms and street tech slang, but also a de facto ethnography of the early years of the hacker culture". Positive reviews were also published in academic as well as computer-industry publications, including IEEE Spectrum , New Scientist , PC Magazine , PC World , Science , and (repeatedly) Wired . US game designer Steve Jackson , writing for Boing Boing magazine in its pre-blog, print days, described NHD 's essay "A Portrait of J. Random Hacker" as "a wonderfully accurate pseudo-demographic description of

5625-594: Was superior to most other computer-humor books, and noted its authenticity to "hard-core programmers' conversations", especially slang from MIT and Stanford. Reviews quoted by the publisher include: William Safire of The New York Times referring to the Raymond-1991 NHD as a "sprightly lexicon" and recommending it as a nerdy gift that holiday season (this reappeared in his "On Language" column again in mid-October 1992); Hugh Kenner in Byte suggesting that it

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