History of the R.E.S.I.S.T.O.R.S.

Formation

The R.E.S.I.S.T.O.R.S. started in November 1966 when a group of students from the Hopewell Valley High School met in the Stone Cottage, then moved to meet in a barn owned by Claude Kagan, a research leader at nearby Western Electric Labs (now Lucent Technologies). The students were tired of the science courses in school and eager to learn real science on their own.

Chuck Ehrlich's recollections

We founded the RESISTORS as a scientific and social organization for the brainy social outcasts from high school. Protests and smoking pot were not on our original agenda.

One of the earliest group activities I recall was cleaning out an old building (smokehouse?) on the Grossman's property (Poor Farm Road) that we were going to fix up as our clubhouse. This would have been in early spring 67.

We connected with Claude a few weeks later (May 67?) when he met one of the fathers (Brigham?) and invited us to the barn. The decision to move to the barn was not popular with everyone and we lost a few members over the change.

The primary computer in the barn at that time was the Burroughs 205, a vacuum tube computer weighing about 9 tons. Power to run the computer cost about $1 an hour (a considerable sum for teenagers in those days). The computer used enough power to heat the barn during the winter and could not be used during warm weather.

Some of the other artifacts in the barn included an early typewriter with a piano keyboard, an early IBM paper tape punch that made square holes (not round), an official IBM song book, early prototypes of touch-tone phones, Teletypes, Flexowriters, an early IBM time clock, manual telephone switchboards, electro-mechanical telephone switches, and music boxes.

Upstairs in the Barn was the Anna Russell Memorial Theater.

At the time of the newspaper article below, Chris Brigham was president. My recollection is that I forced new elections later that summer and served as president until I left for college in August 68.

We staffed a museum exhibit in Princeton during the 67-68 school year with a Teletype (what else) dialing into the PDP-8 at the Western Electric Engineering Research Center (ERC). This exhibit was in a former grammar school on the east side of Nassau Street, just north of Washington Street [184 Nassau Street]. Several of us took evening programming classes at Princeton University (Engineering Quadrangle) in Fortran II and Algol 60. You could get a few seconds of free computer time on the 360/65 by submitting your cards at the window. PU was just starting to offer online access to TSS.

We had an exhibit at the Spring Joint Computer Conference (SJCC,a precursor to Comdex) in Atlantic City in April or May of 68 in an upstairs room away from the main exhibit floor. Our only online connection was through an acoustic coupler using a phone booth. AT&T managers came to visit our exhibit but we were warned not to put them at the keyboard because they couldn't type.

The RESISTORS were involved with 'Project Might' an outreach program to blacks in Trenton, and it was through this program that Joe Tulloch joined the group. The Theriault family was part of the group that organized this project, possibly through the Unitarian Church in Princeton.

The TRAC language was used for many programming projects and as the subject of a Primer. Calvin Moore, the inventor of the TRAC language, was (initially) supportive of the group and visited several times. Later Moore sued Western Electric, claiming copyright infringement.

TRAC was an interpreter language with a LISP-like syntax that embodied many features later made popular by such as FORTH and Smalltalk. L. Peter Deutsch worked on the development of TRAC with Moore and went on to work on Smalltalk as chief scientist for ParcPlace Systems.

DEC donated a PDP-8 (original series with 4,096 12-bit words of core memory), and a model 33 ASR Teletype to the group. We went to Maynard, Mass. and picked these up from 'the mill' (the original headquarters building) and brought it back to the barn in someone's VW bus. The computer was mounted on a pallet with 4 handles so it could be carried like a sedan chair making it one of the first portable computers.

We may have made two trips to Boston, one to pick up the PDP-8 and one for a computer conference related to the TRAC language. During on one of these trips several of us stayed at the home of Alan Taylor, who at that time was the publisher of ComputerWorld. Alan and his wife were gracious hosts and even made traditional English steak and kidney pie for us.

During the computer conference we used an acoustic coupler to connect to the PDP-8 at Western Electric in Princeton. This was so novel at the time that we had to instruct the hotel operator not to monitor or disconnect the line even though it sounded faulty.

In 1968 or 69 we made a group trip to Washington DC during the summer. I drove in a rented station wagon with Claude, Joe Tulloch, Gail Warner, and several others crammed in. We visited Jake Rabinow's lab at CDC, Margaret Fox and Joe Hilsenrath at NBS (now NIST) in Gaithersburg, the Smithsonian, and saw the movie "2001 A Space Odyssey."

One of the computers we saw at NBS was Mobidic (Mobile Digital Computer), an early transportable computer (truck mounted) built for the US Army by Sylvania* at Needham, Mass.

At the time of the moonwalk in 1969, several of us were at the barn working on projects and watching the lunar landing on TV.

In spring of 1970, the group exhibited at the SJCC in Atlantic City during the time of the shootings at Kent State University.

Several people from the RESISTORS went to Woodstock. Skip King didn't come back as expected so I drove up the following weekend looking for him. Everyone but the Hog Farm commune had left by that time. Skip had gotten a ride to New York City and returned to the barn a few days later.

I received the following email concerning the MOBIDIC:

The reference to the MOBIDIC (MOBIle DIgital Computer) built for the
Army was built be Sylvania Electric, not Raytheon.

I was in the Army Security Agency (1953-1960) and stationed at Fort
Devens Massachusetts 1957-58. Along with 11 others I was placed on TDY
to the Sylvania plant where we were given instruction on actual machine
language programming for the MOBIDIC. The MOBIDIC Team was then
transfered to Arlington Hall Station, VA and put on TDY to the National
Security Agency at Fort Meade Maryland.

Thanks for listening.

Gary Foote
bigfoot@kalama.com

The SAM76 Primer

Ask Joe Tulloch?

The Jewish Museum

Chuch Ehrlich recalls: In 1969?? the RESISTORS staffed an exhibit at the Jewish Museum in New York that featured a computer-controlled machine known as the 'gerbil smasher' developed by Nick Negroponte of the Architecture Machines Group at MIT. Ted Nelson may have been involved with this exhibit.

Skip King brought original copies of the book about the exhibit with him to the reunion, so we'll be scanning in some pages to add to this site.