The RESISTORS Were Teenage Hackers and Computer Pioneers

This text is an tailored excerpt from W. Patrick McCray’s README: A Bookish History of Computing From Electronic Brains to Everything Machines (The MIT Press, 2025).MIT Press

However a small cohort of teenage pc fans from the Princeton, N.J., space flaunted a intelligent work-around: They borrowed an acoustic coupler—a forerunner of the pc modem—and linked it to a close-by pay cellphone. With this {hardware} in place, the kids dialed in to an off-site minicomputer.

The youngsters known as themselves the RESISTORS, a retronym (they picked the moniker first after which matched phrases to the letters) for “Radically Emphatic College students Concerned about Science, Expertise, Or Analysis Research.” The commerce publication Computerworld gave the RESISTORS front-page billing—“College students Steal Present as Convention Opens”—and famous how the group drew a “fascinated crowd” of pc professionals. A reporter even steered that the RESISTORS represented the vanguard of a small-scale social motion as the teenagers sought to have interaction with their counterparts from “underprivileged areas of Trenton” and introduce them to non-public computing.

RESISTOR Peter Eichenberger works on a DEC PDP-8 pc, which Claude Kagan satisfied the corporate to donate to the group.Chuck Ehrlich

Within the fashionable historical past of computing, a narrative a few small cohort of teenagers “enjoying” with computer systems might sound tangential. However the beforehand untold historical past of the RESISTORS highlights the truth that, years earlier than there have been machines known as private computer systems, some individuals frequently accessed computer systems for actions unrelated to their skilled lives. Motives different, however leisure in addition to the show of technical prowess mattered. Simply as vital, the story of the RESISTORS expands our sense of the hobbyist neighborhood past later and better-known teams just like the Bay Space’s Homebrew Computer Club.

An early pc membership for teenagers

Fewer than 70 youngsters claimed membership within the RESISTORS over the group’s roughly decade-long existence. Nonetheless, a surprisingly massive variety of them went on to have careers in know-how and science. Two members wrote books about computing that will promote hundreds of thousands of copies. One other member cofounded Cisco Systems, which bought its begin manufacturing Web routers and different networking {hardware} and is now a multibillion-dollar enterprise. Others grew to become faculty professors or skilled programmers. And beginning round 1969, the RESISTORS grew to become linked to pc pioneer Ted Nelson (extra on that later).

An engineer named Claude Kagan was the nucleus round which the RESISTORS first organized. Born in 1924 in Orval, France, Kagan moved to the US as a teen, served within the military, and earned an M.S. from Cornell University in 1950. He took a place with Western Electric, the manufacturing arm of AT&T, and in 1958, he moved to Hopewell Township, N.J., a brief drive from Princeton.

Electrical engineer Claude Kagan [second from left] inspired the RESISTORS to be taught computing, utilizing the big assortment of used gear saved in his barn. Chuck Ehrlich

Kagan’s specialty was high-level pc languages, akin to Fortran and BASIC, wherein programmers write code that’s largely unbiased of the actual kind of pc. He was additionally an inveterate collector of outdated computer systems and different electronics, which he saved in a big crimson barn on his property that was additionally dwelling to some donkeys and malamutes.

Chuck Ehrlich, one of many unique RESISTORS and later an entrepreneur and enterprise capitalist, recollects that in late 1966, he and a small group of “brainy social outcasts” have been searching for some kind of clubhouse. The youngsters weren’t eager about smoking pot or social protests, and so they have been disenchanted with the science courses supplied at their native faculties. However they have been into electronics.

Kagan knew one of many teenagers’ fathers and supplied to let the group use his barn. They quickly found Kagan’s assortment of artifacts, together with a surplus IBM paper tape punch, some analog phone gear, and a Friden Flexowriter (a form of heavy-duty typewriter that may very well be linked to a pc).

The primary pc the RESISTORS used was a Burroughs Datatron 205 mainframe, which occupied most of two partitions in Kagan’s barn.David Gesswein

However the primary attraction for the teenagers have been Kagan’s computer systems. Essentially the most imposing of those was a Burroughs Datatron 205, a pc first manufactured within the mid-Fifties and based mostly on vacuum tubes. The large machine weighed a number of tons, and tales circulated about how Kagan had borrowed a tractor trailer to heroically transport the behemoth from Michigan to New Jersey.

Solely barely much less imposing was an inoperable Packard Bell PB250, a refrigerator-size pc of newer classic that the teenagers managed to get working. Kagan additionally allowed the teenagers to connect with his employer’s DEC PDP-8 machine through teletype over cellphone traces so they may run applications written in TRAC (Textual content Reckoning And Compiling). Developed beginning in 1959 by pc scientist Calvin Mooers, TRAC was an environment friendly language amenable to being run on machines that had comparatively little reminiscence. The kids have been keen on connecting to the off-site pc and accessing a model of Joseph Weizenbaum’s ELIZA chatbot program.

With the ability to work with computer systems interactively and in actual time was typically unavailable to nonprofessional pc customers on the time. Kagan finally persuaded the Digital Gear Corp. to donate a PDP-8—no trivial present, as new fashions bought for US $15,000 or extra—which the RESISTORS labored with within the barn.

One of many donkeys in Claude Kagan’s barn appears to be like on as RESISTOR Doug Timbie works on some gear.John A. Pietras/The Night Instances; Trenton Free Public Library

The cut price Kagan struck with the RESISTORS was uncommon for a number of causes. First, Kagan was homosexual, a indisputable fact that the teenagers (and their mother and father) have been conscious of however which, by all accounts, bothered nobody. When the Hopewell Valley Jaycee-ettes held a home tour in April 1966, the brochure inspired individuals to go to Kagan’s “distinctive bachelor setting” that he shared with artist George Furnish. Furnish handed away across the time the RESISTORS have been forming, and the grieving Kagan assumed a number of roles for the group: guru, mentor, publicity agent, and landlord. Kagan supplied the house, whereas the teenagers have been answerable for sustaining each it and the gear in addition to masking the price of electrical energy.

Most newbie pc golf equipment of the period have been masculine areas, however images of the RESISTORS nearly all the time present a number of younger girls working at a terminal or fixing a programming drawback. When it got here to deciding whose flip it was to make use of a machine, Jean Hunter—later a professor of organic and environmental engineering at Cornell—likened it to social time-sharing that required “beating individuals over the pinnacle to make them provide you with a flip.” John R. Levine, who was a RESISTOR earlier than learning pc science at Yale and later coauthoring the bestseller The Internet for Dummies, recalled, “We have been so nerdy that it didn’t happen to us that ladies [would] be any completely different by way of what they may do.”

There have been additionally efforts to recruit African American teenagers from faculties in Trenton. One among these youngsters, Joseph Tulloch, supplied quirky, Dr. Seuss-like illustrations for a programming guide that Kagan and the teenagers assembled and revealed. Tulloch later grew to become a programmer for the state of New Jersey.

New members have been initiated into the group by having an omega signal, the engineer’s image for electrical resistance, drawn on their face with a Magic Marker (these have been youngsters in spite of everything). One of many first issues a brand new member would be taught was the way to use TRAC to put in writing applications. For his half, Kagan held a dim view of conventional studying as practiced in native lecture rooms. He as an alternative insisted that the RESISTORS be taught by doing. The group’s pedagogical strategy got here from the African American motto “Every one, educate one.” As one member recalled, “If you wish to educate somebody the way to do one thing, you needed to allow them to sit on the keyboard.”

The RESISTORS’ location within the Princeton space contributed to their success. A number of members had mother and father employed at close by know-how corporations, akin to AT&T and RCA. Others, akin to Nat Kuhn, had mother and father who labored at Princeton University. Kuhn’s father was Thomas Kuhn, a historian and creator of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), the landmark e book that launched “paradigm shift” into the vernacular.

Twelve-year-old Nat Kuhn was simply 10 when he joined the RESISTORS. “I used to be tremendous geeky,” he later recalled. David Fox

As a child, Nat constructed units from hobbyist electronics kits together with his father, a former physicist. Nat joined the RESISTORS after attending an open home the group sponsored in February 1968 on the Princeton Junior Museum. He was simply 10 years outdated on the time. “I used to be tremendous geeky,” he recalled, “and the pc grew to become my interest and obsession. You might perceive issues by means of it and make issues occur.”

Quickly after Nat had his face inked with an omega signal, one other particular person, a lot older however simply as obsessed with private computing, began displaying up at Claude Kagan’s barn.

Ted Nelson had majored in philosophy at Swarthmore School, graduating in 1959, after which studied sociology on the College of Chicago and later Harvard, the place he took his first pc course. Nelson’s 2010 autobiography features a complete chapter, titled “The Epiphany of Ted Nelson,” about this revelatory expertise. When he realized that the pc, as an alternative of a dreary number-crunching machine, “may very well be no matter it was programmed to be,” his “world exploded.”

Ted Nelson met the RESISTORS within the late Nineteen Sixties, when he was creating his concepts round hypertext and globally interconnected networks for publishing.Ted Nelson

Nelson had a penchant for writing, and so a fair greater revelation was that computer systems may deal with textual content by manipulating, storing, printing, and, above all, displaying it on screens. And, if this may very well be completed with textual content, it may in all probability even be completed with photographs and sound. “The way forward for mankind was on the pc display screen,” he determined, because the “interactive pc would develop into the office of the longer term.”

Equally profound for Nelson was recognizing that when an individual had textual content on a pc display screen, they may use it to assemble parallel, nonsequential textual passages. These phrase assemblages may then be linked to at least one one other or department off in fully new instructions—a farsighted concept for the time.

In 1964, Nelson accepted a educating place at Vassar School, the place his new colleagues invited him to explain how the future of work and creative creativity would occur on pc screens. Within the promotional flyer for the discuss, he launched a brand new phrase: hypertext.

A number of the concepts that Ted Nelson mentioned with the RESISTORS later turned up in Nelson’s opus Laptop Lib/Dream Machines.Microsoft Press

As Nelson outlined it in a 1965 paper, hypertext meant “a physique of written or pictorial materials interconnected in such a fancy manner that it couldn’t conveniently be introduced or represented on paper.” Nearly any matter may, in precept, be represented on a pc display screen with “hyperlinks” connecting one entry to a different, together with annotation, footnotes, and summaries, whereas additionally together with “each characteristic a novelist or absent-minded professor may need.”

RELATED VIDEO: Ted Nelson on What Modern Programmers Can Learn From the Past

Nelson imagined that his system of knowledge storage, retrieval, and documentation may “develop indefinitely,” containing increasingly more of the world’s information whereas revealing vital connections between all the entries.

Nelson quickly stop Vassar and began elevating cash and his skilled profile. His aim was to design and implement a common textual content dealing with, publishing, and globally linked digital library system, which he named Project Xanadu, from Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan.” (It’s additionally the title of Charles Foster Kane’s mansion in Orson Welles’s 1941 traditional, Citizen Kane.) Xanadu would flip into Nelson’s lifelong obsession.

A convergence of artwork and computer systems

The catalyst that introduced Nelson along with Claude Kagan and the RESISTORS wasn’t some new pc however an avant-garde artwork present. Within the fall of 1970, a lavish new exhibition titled Software opened on the Jewish Museum in New York Metropolis. Museum director Karl Katz handpicked the influential artwork theorist Jack Burnham to curate the present. Burnham, in flip, was impressed by Norbert Wiener’s cybernetic ideas and needed to discover how conceptual artists would possibly experiment with new computing applied sciences, akin to “real-time computing” and “interactivity,” in a gallery setting. The exhibition gave hundreds of tourists a chance to see, and in some instances use, minicomputers, teletype gear, high-speed copy machines, and closed-circuit tv.

When the Jewish Museum launched an formidable artwork and tech exhibition in 1970, members of the RESISTORS collaborated with artists and supplied tech help. The Jewish Museum

A contributor to the present and its technical adviser, Ted Nelson recruited the RESISTORS to assist him and a few of the artists. As he later wrote in his influential 1974 e book Computer Lib/Dream Machines, “Some persons are too proud to ask kids for info. That is dumb. Info is the place you discover it.” For Agnes Denes, a Hungarian-born conceptual artist, the teenagers coded a minicomputer to animate triangles on a display screen for a chunk known as Trigonal Ballet. For conceptual artist Carl Fernbach-Flarsheim, the teenagers used the I Ching to program a chunk known as Conceptual Typewriter. A customer may choose considered one of a number of buttons, akin to “the silent” (represented by a circle) or “the offering” (illustrated by sheaves of wheat), after which use a light-weight pen to change the picture. Each artists supplied the preliminary concepts, however the RESISTORS executed them.

Nelson, working with programmer Ned Woodman, contributed a chunk titled Labyrinth. Operating on a PDP-8 that DEC supplied, Labyrinth was defined as “the primary public demonstration of a hypertext system.” To make use of it, a customer would sit at a terminal and start studying the displayed textual content. For the passage “The exhibition you might be attending is named Software program. It was organized by Jack Burnham,” you may use keystrokes (akin to F for ahead) to navigate the textual content and retrieve a definition of “software program” or biographical particulars about Burnham.

Conceptual artist Agnes Denes [right] programmed her piece Trigonal Ballet on the Jewish Museum with assist from RESISTORS [from left] Peter Eichenberger, J Laurence Sarno, and John Levine.The Jewish Museum

For a lot of museumgoers, the whole exhibition steered a technological future the place individuals simply navigated the information-rich realm of what would develop into generally known as our on-line world.

The RESISTORS, in the meantime, steadily pale all through the Seventies as its members went off to varsity and the provision of latest recruits dwindled. Nonetheless, members like Nat Kuhn and John Levine recall that concepts they bantered about in bull classes with Nelson in Kagan’s barn materialized later within the pages of Laptop Lib/Dream Machines. “There was definitely little or no in that e book that we hadn’t already heard about earlier than it appeared,” Levine mentioned.

Once I talked with former RESISTORS, it was stunning to listen to what number of members remained in contact with each other greater than a half-century later. A lot of them nonetheless included their participation on résumés. Courtships shaped, and no less than two members married one another. Their actions left a long-lasting echo on this planet of computing as nicely. Len Bosack cofounded Cisco Programs. Cynthia Dwork, a professor of pc science at Harvard, made pioneering contributions to cryptography. Steve Kirsch was considered one of two individuals to invent the optical mouse and went on to develop into a profitable tech entrepreneur.

Even because the RESISTORS have been fading as a gaggle, huge technological modifications have been simply over the horizon. Private computer systems, launched within the early Seventies, quickly grew to become shopper items present in a whole lot of hundreds of properties. That technological revolution can be solidified when Time named the PC “Machine of the Year” in 1982. New computing worlds beckoned to specialists and neophytes alike, nevertheless it was a future {that a} group of teenagers in a New Jersey barn had already seen and lived.

This text is customized from the creator’s new e book, README: A Bookish History of Computing from Electronic Brains to Everything Machines (The MIT Press, 2025).