7. ITS and hacker culture
The hacker culture started with the Tech Model Railroad Club at MIT. This club made moving model trains and studied how the trains would not collide with each other [1].
For reference, the video below shows why a computer is needed to control moving model trains.
The PDP models made by DEC contributed greatly to the hacker culture and the birth of free software. It was a kind of mini computer that was sold at a relatively low price and was particularly popular in universities. For reference, DEC donated a PDP-1 to MIT in 1961[2].
After that, students interested in train control in the Tech Model Railway Club spend more time with the PDP-1.
And, for fun, the students created the first ever video game called Spacewar!
At the time, the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab (AI Lab) was the birthplace of hacker culture, and it was developing an operating system called Multics with GE and Bell Labs. However, due to different opinions on operating system development, they began to develop their own operating system called ITS (Incompatible Time Sharing System) from the late 1960s.
MIT hacker Tom Knight(right) developed the first kernel for ITS.
Actual development started on the PDP-6 and it was all written in assembly
At the time, ITS operating system had a unique user environment that could not be found today. In the early days, anyone could log in to the system without a password. All files, including documentation and source code, could be edited by anyone.
In addition, it was possible to access ITS not only inside MIT, but also from other institutions or schools through ARPAnet. The wide-open ITS philosophy and collaborative online community had a great impact on hacker culture, and also on free/open source and wiki movements[3].
Richard Stallman, who later started the free software movement, also participated in the development of the ITS operating system as a member of the community while working at the MIT AI Lab from 1971, where he was influenced by the hacker culture.
Until then, software was recognized as a bundle of hardware and was copied and used without paying each other. Companies also distributed their software for free, allowing the users to modify and copy it.
References
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacker
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PDP-1
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incompatible_Timesharing_System