Historic RESISTORS radical hackerspace burns down

Cory Doctorow 7:31 am Fri Dec 4, 2009

Steve Silberman sez, "A barn in Hopewell Township, NJ that housed the RESISTORS — Radically Emphatic Students Interested in Science, Technology and Other Research Subjects — a group of computer geeks who got together in 1967 to smoke pot, write primitive code, talk about the future of computing, and protest bad science education — burned down yesterday."

In the salute to Kagan in 2007, it was noted there had been a 9-ton Burroughs 205 vacuum tube computer in the barn in the late '60s.

"Some of the other artifacts … 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."

There had been a computer room "that looked like the Bat Cave in the '70s before there were computers," one friend said, and also a museum in the barn. A room full of antique telephones. A set of walkie-talkies from the Bay of Pigs invasion.

Computer barn crashes as historic stage burns

(Thanks, Steve!)

(Image: Trenton Times)

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