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TMRC /tmerk'/ n.
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 esp. 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" (see the
Bibliography in Appendix C), gives a stimulating account of
those early years. TMRC's Signals and Power Committee included
many 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 this lexicon accordingly includes a
number of entries from a recent revision of the TMRC dictionary.
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