The term was coined in 1958 in the Tech Model Railroad Club at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Building 20 was the home of the Tech Model Railroad Club, where many aspects of what later became the hacker culture developed.
The "'Tech Model Railroad Club ( TMRC ) "'is a student organization at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology ( MIT ).
Ceruzzi credits the hacker culture at MIT and Stanford, particularly MIT's Tech Model Railroad Club, with the existence of democratising personal computer technology today.
The use of " foo " in a programming context is generally credited to the Tech Model Railroad Club ( TMRC ) of MIT from circa 1960.
Kotok was a member of the Signals and Power Subcommittee of the student-organized Tech Model Railroad Club ( TMRC ) which he joined soon after starting college in 1958.
Friends from the MIT Tech Model Railroad Club, Wagner and a group of fellow students had access to these room-sized machines outside classes, signing up for time during off hours.
As a prototype feasibility demonstration, the Tech Model Railroad Club ( located in Building N52 ) had years earlier added a scale model of the Green Building to its HO scale model railroad layout.
This resulted in a community of undergraduate students led by Bob Saunders, Peter Samson, and Alan Kotok, many of them affiliated with the Tech Model Railroad Club, conducting their own experiments on the computer.
In 1961, Russell created and designed " Spacewar ! ", with the fellow members of the Tech Model Railroad Club at MIT, working on a Digital Equipment Corporation PDP-1 minicomputer . " Spacewar ! " is widely considered to be the first digital video game and served as a foundation for the entire video game industry.