Computing Dictionary
TMRC definition
/tmerk'/ The Tech Model Railroad Club at
MIT, 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).
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".
Steven Levy, in his book "Hackers", 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 bacame the core of the
MIT AI Lab staff. This dictionary accordingly includes a number of entries from the TMRC dictionary (via the Hacker Jargon File).
[
Jargon File]
(2008-06-30)
