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 lovers 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 kids dialed in to an off-site minicomputer.

The youngsters referred to as themselves the RESISTORS, a retronym (they picked the moniker first after which matched phrases to the letters) for “Radically Emphatic College students Focused on Science, Know-how, 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 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 laptop, which Claude Kagan satisfied the corporate to donate to the group.Chuck Ehrlich

Within the trendy historical past of computing, a narrative a few small cohort of teenagers “taking part in” 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 referred to as private computer systems, some individuals often 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 necessary, 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 youngsters claimed membership within the RESISTORS over the group’s roughly decade-long existence. Nonetheless, a surprisingly giant 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 turned faculty professors or skilled programmers. And beginning round 1969, the RESISTORS turned 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 USA 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 study computing, utilizing the big assortment of used gear saved in his barn. Chuck Ehrlich

Kagan’s specialty was high-level laptop languages, resembling Fortran and BASIC, wherein programmers write code that’s largely impartial of the actual sort of laptop. 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 house 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” had been on the lookout for some form of clubhouse. The youngsters weren’t excited by smoking pot or social protests, and so they had been disenchanted with the science lessons provided at their native colleges. However they had 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 form of heavy-duty typewriter that may very well 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 had 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 primarily based on vacuum tubes. The big 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 more moderen classic that the kids managed to get working. Kagan additionally allowed the kids to connect with his employer’s DEC PDP-8 machine by way of teletype over cellphone strains so they may 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 teenagers had been keen on connecting to the off-site laptop and accessing a model of Joseph Weizenbaum’s ELIZA chatbot program.

Having the ability to work with computer systems interactively and in actual time was usually unavailable to nonprofessional laptop customers on the time. Kagan finally 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 appears on as RESISTOR Doug Timbie works on some gear.John A. Pietras/The Night Occasions; Trenton Free Public Library

The cut price Kagan struck with the RESISTORS was uncommon for a number of causes. First, Kagan was homosexual, a incontrovertible fact that the kids (and their mother and father) had 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 had 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 kids had been accountable for sustaining each it and the gear in addition to overlaying the price of electrical energy.

Most beginner laptop golf equipment of the period had 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 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 offer you 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 had been so nerdy that it didn’t happen to us that women [would] be any completely different by way of what they may do.”

There have been additionally efforts to recruit African American teenagers from colleges in Trenton. Considered one of these youngsters, Joseph Tulloch, supplied quirky, Dr. Seuss-like illustrations for a programming guide that Kagan and the kids assembled and printed. Tulloch later turned a programmer for the state of New Jersey.

New members had 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 had been youngsters in spite of everything). One of many first issues a brand new member would study was learn how to use TRAC to put in writing applications. For his half, Kagan held a dim view of conventional studying as practiced in native school rooms. He as a substitute insisted that the RESISTORS study by doing. The group’s pedagogical method got here from the African American motto “Every one, train one.” As one member recalled, “If you wish to train somebody learn how 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 firms, resembling AT&T and RCA. Others, resembling 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 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 turned my pastime and obsession. You could possibly perceive issues by means of 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 obsessed with private computing, began exhibiting up at Claude Kagan’s barn.

Ted Nelson had majored in philosophy at Swarthmore Faculty, 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 a substitute of a dreary number-crunching gadget, “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 growing his concepts round hypertext and globally interconnected networks for publishing.Ted Nelson

Nelson had a penchant for writing, and so a good 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 laptop display screen,” he determined, because the “interactive laptop would change 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 thought for the time.

In 1964, Nelson accepted a instructing place at Vassar Faculty, 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.

Among 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 posh method that it couldn’t conveniently be offered or represented on paper.” Nearly any subject 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 function 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 data storage, retrieval, and documentation may “develop indefinitely,” containing an increasing number of of the world’s information whereas revealing necessary connections between all the 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, resembling “real-time computing” and “interactivity,” in a gallery setting. The exhibition gave 1000’s of holiday makers a chance to see, and in some circumstances 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 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 number of the artists. As he later wrote in his influential 1974 e-book Computer Lib/Dream Machines, “Some individuals are too proud to ask youngsters for data. That is dumb. Data 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 bit referred to as Trigonal Ballet. For conceptual artist Carl Fernbach-Flarsheim, the kids used the I Ching to program a bit referred to as Conceptual Typewriter. A customer may choose one among a number of buttons, resembling “the silent” (represented by a circle) or “the offering” (illustrated by sheaves of wheat), after which use a lightweight pen to change the picture. Each artists supplied the preliminary concepts, however the RESISTORS executed them.

Nelson, working with programmer Ned Woodman, contributed a bit titled Labyrinth. Working 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’re attending known as Software program. It was organized by Jack Burnham,” you could possibly use keystrokes (resembling 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, all the exhibition urged a technological future the place individuals simply navigated the information-rich realm of what would change into often called our on-line world.

The RESISTORS, in the meantime, regularly pale all through the Seventies as its members went off to varsity and the availability 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 Pc Lib/Dream Machines. “There was actually 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 a minimum of two members married one another. Their actions left a long-lasting echo on the planet of computing as effectively. Len Bosack cofounded Cisco Methods. Cynthia Dwork, a professor of laptop science at Harvard, made pioneering contributions to cryptography. Steve Kirsch was one among two individuals 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 had been fading as a bunch, huge technological modifications had been simply over the horizon. Private computer systems, launched within the early Seventies, quickly turned client items present in lots of of 1000’s of properties. That technological revolution can be solidified when Time named the PC “Machine of the Year” in 1982. New computing worlds beckoned to consultants and neophytes alike, however it was a future {that a} group of teenagers in a New Jersey barn had already seen and lived.

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