How the RESISTORS Put Computing into 1960s Counter-culture

How the RESISTORS Put Computing into 1960s Counter-culture Teenage nerds in New Jersey were hacking before the PC and the Internet The RESISTORS bonded over their shared love of computers and often met at the home of their mentor, Claude Kagan. The group shown here includes Chuck Ehrlich, Gail Warner, Daryl Bailey (at keyboard), and Barry Klein (back to camera). In late April of 1968, a computer conference in Atlantic City, N.J., got off to a rocky start. A strike by telephone operators prevented exhibitors from linking their terminals to off-site computers, as union-sympathetic workers refused to wire up the necessary connections. Companies’ displays were effectively dead. This article is an adapted excerpt from W. Patrick McCray’s README: A Bookish History of Computing From Electronic Brains to Everything Machines (The MIT Press, 2025).MIT Press But a small cohort of teenage computer enthusiasts from the Princeton, N.J., area flaunted a clever work-around: They borrowed an acoustic coupler-a forerunner of the computer modem-and connected it to a nearby pay phone. With this hardware in place, the youngsters dialed in to an off-site minicomputer. The teenagers called themselves the RESISTORS, a retronym (they picked the moniker first and then matched words to the letters) for “Radically Emphatic Students Interested in Science, Technology, Or Research Studies.” The trade publication Computerworld gave the RESISTORS front-page billing-“Students Steal Show as Conference Opens”-and noted how the group drew a “fascinated crowd” of computer professionals. A reporter even suggested that the RESISTORS represented the vanguard of a small-scale social movement as the teens sought to engage with their counterparts from “underprivileged areas of Trenton” and introduce them to personal computing. RESISTOR Peter Eichenberger works on a DEC PDP-8 computer, which Claude Kagan convinced the company to donate to the group.Chuck Ehrlich In the modern history of computing, a story about a small cohort of teens “playing” with computers might seem tangential. But the previously untold history of the RESISTORS highlights the fact that, years before there were machines called personal computers, some people regularly accessed computers for activities unrelated to their professional lives. Motives varied, but entertainment as well as the display of technical prowess mattered. Just as important, the story of the RESISTORS expands our sense of the hobbyist community beyond later and better-known groups like the Bay Area’s Homebrew Computer Club . An early computer club for teens Fewer than 70 kids claimed membership in the RESISTORS over the group’s roughly decade-long existence. Nonetheless, a surprisingly large number of them went on to have careers in technology and science. Two members wrote books about computing that would sell millions of copies. Another member cofounded Cisco Systems , which got its start manufacturing Internet routers and other networking hardware and is now a multibillion-dollar business. Others became college professors or professional programmers. And starting around 1969, the RESISTORS became linked to computer pioneer Ted Nelson (more on that later). An engineer named Claude Kagan was the nucleus around which the RESISTORS first organized. Born in 1924 in...

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