Steven Levy discovered the peculiar charms of the hacker subculture on an assignment for Rolling Stone magazine in the early 80s. As a journalist, his mission was to chase the stereotype and uncover what he believed to be the "overweight, unfriendly and antisocial" world of computer hackers.

What he found was something else. "These people", he later remarked, "weren't antisocial weirdos, but rather fascinating people who were onto something big. They were artists, explorers, adventurers. They were doing things that couldn't be done on a computer, and that's what excited me."

Levy had stumbled on the roots of the computer revolution as it had evolved in the unlikely environment of the Tech Model Railroad Club, TMRC, (also known to the cognoscenti as The Midnight Requisitioning Committee), at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the late 50s - and his experience with those he met resulted in the book, Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution, which became the classic of its genre.

"It was there that I stumbled across the source of all computer controversy," Levy later recounted. "Underneath their (model railroad) layout was a labyrinth of connectors and cables that allowed them to control their trains. These people were the first to call themselves 'hackers' in the technological sense."

Model railways have been with us since the the earliest trains trundled down the tracks. We might dismiss them as toys, but to the hackers and students of the TMRC they were an open door to new realms of possibility. Model railways, at their best, are a medium for creativity. The painter has a paintbox, palette knife and canvas. The model railway engineer has papier mache, brass, electricity and wire. And, as every small boy knows, with the tools at his or her disposal the creative modeler can produce facsimiles of other worlds that can be just as magical as a landscape or a poem. It all depends on your perspective.

More importantly, a model railway has moving parts. Railway modelers discover that, just as in the real world, trains move down the lines between points and signals, and checks and balances have to be applied. To allow multiple trains to run along the same section of track requires complex electronics, which control the points and crossovers, the signals and individual locomotives, which allow them to cross from one line to another, or run along the same line in an organized sequence. So beneath the layout of the Tech Model Railroad Club there were "neat regimental lines of switches, and achingly regular rows of dull bronze relays, and a long, rambling tangle of red, blue, and yellow wires - twisting and twirling like a rainbow-colored explosion of Einstein's hair."

According to Levy: "Some members loved the idea of spending their time building and painting replicas of certain trains with historical and emotional value, or creating realistic scenery for the layout. This was the knife-and-paintbrush contingent, and it subscribed to railroad magazines and booked the club for trips on aging train lines. The other faction centered on the Signals and Power Subcommittee of the club, and it cared far more about what went on under the layout. This was The System, which worked something like a collaboration between Rube Goldberg and Werner von Braun, and it was constantly being improved, revamped, perfected, and sometimes 'gronked' - in club jargon, screwed up. S&P people were obsessed with the way The System worked, its increasing complexities, how any change you made would affect other parts, and how you could put those relationships between the parts to optimal use."

The romantic place to be was underneath the table with The Midnight Requisition Committee, who were so called because "when TMRC needed a set of diodes, or some extra relays, to build some new feature into The System, a few S&P people would wait until dark and find their way into the places where those things were kept. None of the hackers, who were as a rule scrupulously honest in other matters, seemed to equate this with stealing."

But the computer hacking traditions of MIT really took off when the TMRC discovered a TX-0 computer in Building 26, and worked out that the best time to gain access was at night, "when no person in his right mind would have signed up for an hour-long session on the piece of paper posted every Friday beside the air conditioner in the RLE lab ... the TMRC hackers, who soon were referring to themselves as TX-0 hackers, changed their life-style to accommodate the computer", and this is where the real fun began.

It was the members of The Tech Model Railroad Club who defined a hack as "a project undertaken or a product built not solely to fulfill some constructive goal, but with some wild pleasure taken in mere involvement." They saw themselves as spiritual outlaws on a voyage of discovery. Their midnight forays onto the TX-0 led them into a new world of weird and wonderful hacks, which took them far off the beaten track of the model railroad and far away from the engaging tangle of wires beneath the layout tables.

Programming may never again be as interesting and adventurous as it was in those days when the young prototypical hackers of the TMRC broke through the access barrier to the TX-0, when their mentor John McCarthy was developing the first Lisp machine, and they were developing the first computer games, the first music software, the first display hacks, and new and more inventive ways of stealing time on the machine in the hours after dark

There was a code of honor among the hackers of the TMRC from which Levy derived his interpretation of what was to become known as The Hacker Ethic:

Access to computers - and anything which might teach you something about the way the world works - should be unlimited and total. Always yield to the Hands-on Imperative!

Computers can change your life for the better

Model railways may not be the apotheosis of cool, but some may disagree. Alan Cox, Linux kernel hacker, likes to use his hacking skills to repair N scale locomotives just for fun. Bruce Springsteen and Donald Sutherland are fans of miniature trains, and more surprisingly, the erstwhile Godfather of Grunge, Neil Young, holds US Patent 20050110653 in a digital command and control system for model railroads.

"It's meditation for me", he has said. "It's such a relief to escape music making and the pressure of music, to release it all in algorithms and theory of operations."

Richard Hillesley

See:
Be Realistic, Demand the Impossible
Hacking after Midnight
Roads to the GPL