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 laptop fans from the Princeton, N.J., space flaunted a intelligent work-around: They borrowed an acoustic coupler—a forerunner of the pc modem—and related it to a close-by pay cellphone. With this {hardware} in place, the children 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 Considering 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 laptop professionals. A reporter even urged that the RESISTORS represented the vanguard of a small-scale social motion as the kids sought to interact with their counterparts from “underprivileged areas of Trenton” and introduce them to private computing.

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

Within the fashionable historical past of computing, a narrative a couple of 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 folks frequently accessed computer systems for actions unrelated to their skilled lives. Motives diverse, however leisure in addition to the show of technical prowess mattered. Simply as essential, 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 laptop membership for teenagers

Fewer than 70 children 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 expertise 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 laptop 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 massive assortment of used gear saved in his barn. Chuck Ehrlich

Kagan’s specialty was high-level laptop languages, equivalent to Fortran and BASIC, by which programmers write code that’s largely impartial of the actual kind of laptop. He was additionally an inveterate collector of outdated computer systems and different electronics, which he saved in a big purple 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 on the lookout for some kind of clubhouse. The children weren’t excited about smoking pot or social protests, they usually have been disenchanted with the science courses provided at their native faculties. However they have been into electronics.

Kagan knew one of many teenagers’ fathers and provided 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 type of heavy-duty typewriter that might be linked to a pc).

The primary laptop 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 kids have been Kagan’s computer systems. Probably 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 laptop of newer classic that the kids managed to get working. Kagan additionally allowed the kids to connect with his employer’s DEC PDP-8 machine through teletype over cellphone strains so they might run applications written in TRAC (Textual content Reckoning And Compiling). Developed beginning in 1959 by laptop 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 laptop 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 laptop customers on the time. Kagan ultimately persuaded the Digital Tools Corp. to donate a PDP-8—no trivial reward, 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 seems on as RESISTOR Doug Timbie works on some gear.John A. Pietras/The Night Instances; Trenton Free Public Library

The discount Kagan struck with the RESISTORS was uncommon for a number of causes. First, Kagan was homosexual, a proven fact that the kids (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 folks 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 offered the house, whereas the kids have been answerable for sustaining each it and the gear in addition to protecting the price of electrical energy.

Most newbie laptop golf equipment of the period have been masculine areas, however pictures of the RESISTORS virtually at all times present a number of younger girls working at a terminal or fixing a programming downside. 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 folks over the pinnacle to make them provide you with a flip.” John R. Levine, who was a RESISTOR earlier than learning laptop 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 women [would] be any completely different when it comes to what they might do.”

There have been additionally efforts to recruit African American teenagers from faculties in Trenton. Considered one of these children, Joseph Tulloch, offered quirky, Dr. Seuss-like illustrations for a programming handbook that Kagan and the kids assembled and printed. 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 write down applications. For his half, Kagan held a dim view of conventional studying as practiced in native school 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 expertise firms, equivalent to AT&T and RCA. Others, equivalent to Nat Kuhn, had mother and father who labored at Princeton University. Kuhn’s father was Thomas Kuhn, a historian and writer 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 gadgets from hobbyist electronics kits along 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 could possibly perceive issues by it and make issues occur.”

Quickly after Nat had his face inked with an omega signal, one other individual, a lot older however simply as captivated with private computing, began exhibiting 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 laptop course. Nelson’s 2010 autobiography features a entire 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, “might be no matter it was programmed to be,” his “world exploded.”

Ted Nelson met the RESISTORS within the late 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 an excellent larger revelation was that computer systems might deal with textual content by manipulating, storing, printing, and, above all, displaying it on screens. And, if this might be completed with textual content, it might in all probability even be completed with pictures and sound. “The way forward for mankind was on the laptop display screen,” he determined, because the “interactive laptop would change into the office of the long run.”

Equally profound for Nelson was recognizing that after an individual had textual content on a pc display screen, they might use it to assemble parallel, nonsequential textual passages. These phrase assemblages might then be linked to 1 one other or department off in fully new instructions—a farsighted concept for the time.

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

A few of the concepts that Ted Nelson mentioned with the RESISTORS later turned up in Nelson’s opus Pc 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 subject might, 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 might 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 might “develop indefinitely,” containing an increasing number of of the world’s information whereas revealing essential connections between the entire entries.

Nelson quickly stop Vassar and began elevating cash and his skilled profile. His objective was to design and implement a common textual content dealing with, publishing, and globally related digital library system, which he named Project Xanadu, from Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan.” (It’s additionally the identify 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 laptop 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 wished to discover how conceptual artists would possibly experiment with new computing applied sciences, equivalent to “real-time computing” and “interactivity,” in a gallery setting. The exhibition gave 1000’s of holiday makers 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 bold artwork and tech exhibition in 1970, members of the RESISTORS collaborated with artists and offered tech assist. The Jewish Museum

A contributor to the present and its technical adviser, Ted Nelson recruited the RESISTORS to assist him and a number of the artists. As he later wrote in his influential 1974 e-book Computer Lib/Dream Machines, “Some persons are too proud to ask youngsters for info. That is dumb. Info is the place you discover it.” For Agnes Denes, a Hungarian-born conceptual artist, the kids coded a minicomputer to animate triangles on a display screen for a chunk known as Trigonal Ballet. For conceptual artist Carl Fernbach-Flarsheim, the kids used the I Ching to program a chunk known as Conceptual Typewriter. A customer might choose one in all a number of buttons, equivalent 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 offered 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 offered, 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 might use keystrokes (equivalent 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 complete exhibition urged a technological future the place folks simply navigated the information-rich realm of what would change into referred to as our on-line world.

The RESISTORS, in the meantime, step by step light all through the Seventies as its members went off to school and the availability of latest recruits dwindled. Nonetheless, members like Nat Kuhn and John Levine recall that concepts they bantered about in bull periods with Nelson in Kagan’s barn materialized later within the pages of Pc 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 shocking to listen to what number of members remained in contact with each other greater than a half-century later. Lots of them nonetheless included their participation on résumés. Courtships fashioned, and at the very least two members married one another. Their actions left a long-lasting echo on this planet of computing as properly. Len Bosack cofounded Cisco Programs. Cynthia Dwork, a professor of laptop science at Harvard, made pioneering contributions to cryptography. Steve Kirsch was one in all two folks to invent the optical mouse and went on to change into a profitable tech entrepreneur.

Claude Kagan’s computer-filled barn in Hopewell Township, N.J., proven right here in 2008, was the headquarters for the RESISTORS. David Gesswein

Even because the RESISTORS have been fading as a bunch, large technological adjustments have been simply over the horizon. Private computer systems, launched within the early Seventies, quickly grew to become client items present in lots of of 1000’s of houses. 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, but it surely was a future {that a} group of teenagers in a New Jersey barn had already seen and lived.

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