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 Orval, France, Kagan moved to the United States as a teen, served in the army, and earned an M.S. from Cornell University in 1950. He took a position with Western Electric, the manufacturing arm of AT&T, and in 1958, he moved to Hopewell Township, N.J., a short drive from Princeton.
Electrical engineer Claude Kagan [second from left] encouraged the RESISTORS to learn computing, using the large collection of used equipment stored in his barn. Chuck Ehrlich
Kagan’s specialty was high-level computer languages, such as Fortran and BASIC, in which programmers write code that is largely independent of the particular type of computer. He was also an inveterate collector of old computers and other electronics, which he stored in a large red barn on his property that was also home to some donkeys and malamutes.
Chuck Ehrlich, one of the original RESISTORS and later an entrepreneur and venture capitalist, recalls that in late 1966, he and a small group of “brainy social outcasts” were looking for some sort of clubhouse. The kids weren’t interested in smoking pot or social protests, and they were disenchanted with the science classes offered at their local schools. But they were into electronics.
Kagan knew one of the teens’ fathers and offered to let the group use his barn. They soon discovered Kagan’s collection of artifacts, including a surplus IBM paper tape punch, some analog telephone equipment, and a Friden Flexowriter (a kind of heavy-duty typewriter that could be linked to a computer).
The first computer the RESISTORS used was a Burroughs Datatron 205 mainframe, which occupied most of two walls in Kagan’s barn.David Gesswein
But the main attraction for the teens were Kagan’s computers. The most imposing of these was a Burroughs Datatron 205, a computer first manufactured in the mid-1950s and based on vacuum tubes. The enormous machine weighed several tons, and stories circulated about how Kagan had borrowed a tractor trailer to heroically transport the behemoth from Michigan to New Jersey.
Only slightly less imposing was an inoperable Packard Bell PB250, a refrigerator-size computer of more recent vintage that the teens managed to get working. Kagan also allowed the teens to connect to his employer’s DEC PDP-8 machine via teletype over phone lines so they could run programs written in TRAC (Text Reckoning And Compiling). Developed starting in 1959 by computer scientist Calvin Mooers, TRAC was an efficient language amenable to being run on machines that had relatively little memory. The teens were fond of connecting to the off-site computer and accessing a version of Joseph Weizenbaum’s ELIZA chatbot program.
Being able to work with computers interactively and in real time was generally unavailable to nonprofessional computer users at the time. Kagan eventually persuaded the Digital Equipment Corp. to donate a PDP-8—no trivial gift, as new models sold for US $15,000 or more—which the RESISTORS worked with in the barn.
One of the donkeys in Claude Kagan’s barn looks on as RESISTOR Doug Timbie works on some equipment.John A. Pietras/The Evening Times; Trenton Free Public Library
The bargain Kagan struck with the RESISTORS was unusual for several reasons. First, Kagan was gay, a fact that the teens (and their parents) were aware of but which, by all accounts, bothered no one. When the Hopewell Valley Jaycee-ettes held a house tour in April 1966, the brochure encouraged people to visit Kagan’s “unique bachelor setting” that he shared with artist George Furnish. Furnish passed away around the time the RESISTORS were forming, and the grieving Kagan assumed multiple roles for the group: guru, mentor, publicity agent, and landlord. Kagan provided the space, while the teens were responsible for maintaining both it and the equipment as well as covering the cost of electricity.
Most amateur computer clubs of the era were masculine spaces, but photographs of the RESISTORS almost always show one or more young women working at a terminal or solving a programming problem. When it came to deciding whose turn it was to use a machine, Jean Hunter—later a professor of biological and environmental engineering at Cornell—likened it to social time-sharing that required “beating people over the head to make them give you a turn.” John R. Levine, who was a RESISTOR before studying computer science at Yale and later coauthoring the bestseller The Internet for Dummies, recalled, “We were so nerdy that it didn’t occur to us that girls [would] be any different in terms of what they could do.”
There were also efforts to recruit African American teens from schools in Trenton. One of these kids, Joseph Tulloch, provided quirky, Dr. Seuss-like illustrations for a programming manual that Kagan and the teens assembled and published. Tulloch later became a programmer for the state of New Jersey.
New members were initiated into the group by having an omega sign, the engineer’s symbol for electrical resistance, drawn on their face with a Magic Marker (these were teenagers after all). One of the first things a new member would learn was how to use TRAC to write programs. For his part, Kagan held a dim view of traditional learning as practiced in local classrooms. He instead insisted that the RESISTORS learn by doing. The group’s pedagogical approach came from the African American motto “Each one, teach one.” As one member recalled, “If you want to teach someone how to do something, you had to let them sit at the keyboard.”
The RESISTORS’ location in the Princeton area contributed to their success. Several members had parents employed at nearby technology companies, such as AT&T and RCA. Others, such as Nat Kuhn, had parents who worked at Princeton University. Kuhn’s father was Thomas Kuhn, a historian and author of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), the landmark book that introduced “paradigm shift” into the vernacular.
Twelve-year-old Nat Kuhn was just 10 when he joined the RESISTORS. “I was super geeky,” he later recalled. David Fox
As a kid, Nat built devices from hobbyist electronics kits with his father, a former physicist. Nat joined the RESISTORS after attending an open house the group sponsored in February 1968 at the Princeton Junior Museum. He was just 10 years old at the time. “I was super geeky,” he recalled, “and the computer became my hobby and obsession. You could understand things through it and make things happen.”
Soon after Nat had his face inked with an omega sign, another person, much older but just as passionate about personal computing, started showing up at Claude Kagan’s barn.
Ted Nelson had majored in philosophy at Swarthmore College, graduating in 1959, and then studied sociology at the University of Chicago and later Harvard, where he took his first computer course. Nelson’s 2010 autobiography includes a whole chapter, titled “The Epiphany of Ted Nelson,” about this revelatory experience. When he realized that the computer, instead of a dreary number-crunching device, “could be whatever it was programmed to be,” his “world exploded.”
Ted Nelson met the RESISTORS in the late 1960s, when he was developing his ideas around hypertext and globally interconnected networks for publishing.Ted Nelson
Nelson had a penchant for writing, and so an even bigger revelation was that computers could handle text by manipulating, storing, printing, and, above all, displaying it on screens. And, if this could be done with text, it could probably also be done with images and sound. “The future of mankind was at the computer screen,” he decided, as the “interactive computer would become the workplace of the future.”
Equally profound for Nelson was recognizing that once a person had text on a computer screen, they could use it to construct parallel, nonsequential textual passages. These word assemblages could then be linked to one another or branch off in entirely new directions—a farsighted idea for the time.
In 1964, Nelson accepted a teaching position at Vassar College, where his new colleagues invited him to describe how the future of work and artistic creativity would happen on computer screens. In the promotional flyer for the talk, he introduced a new word: hypertext.
Some of the ideas that Ted Nelson discussed with the RESISTORS later turned up in Nelson’s opus Computer Lib/Dream Machines.Microsoft Press
As Nelson defined it in a 1965 paper, hypertext meant “a body of written or pictorial material interconnected in such a complex way that it could not conveniently be presented or represented on paper.” Almost any topic could, in principle, be represented on a computer screen with “links” connecting one entry to another, along with annotation, footnotes, and summaries, while also including “every feature a novelist or absent-minded professor could want.”
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Nelson imagined that his system of information storage, retrieval, and documentation could “grow indefinitely,” containing more and more of the world’s knowledge while revealing important connections between all of the entries.
Nelson soon quit Vassar and started raising money and his professional profile. His goal was to design and implement a universal text handling, publishing, and globally connected electronic library system, which he named Project Xanadu, from Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan.” (It’s also the name of Charles Foster Kane’s mansion in Orson Welles’s 1941 classic, Citizen Kane.) Xanadu would turn into Nelson’s lifelong obsession.
A convergence of art and computers
The catalyst that brought Nelson together with Claude Kagan and the RESISTORS wasn’t some new computer but an avant-garde art show. In the fall of 1970, a lavish new exhibition titled Software opened at the Jewish Museum in New York City. Museum director Karl Katz handpicked the influential art theorist Jack Burnham to curate the show. Burnham, in turn, was inspired by Norbert Wiener’s cybernetic concepts and wanted to explore how conceptual artists might experiment with new computing technologies, such as “real-time computing” and “interactivity,” in a gallery setting. The exhibition gave thousands of visitors an opportunity to see, and in some cases use, minicomputers, teletype equipment, high-speed copy machines, and closed-circuit television.
When the Jewish Museum launched an ambitious art and tech exhibition in 1970, members of the RESISTORS collaborated with artists and provided tech support. The Jewish Museum
A contributor to the show and its technical adviser, Ted Nelson recruited the RESISTORS to help him and some of the artists. As he later wrote in his influential 1974 book Computer Lib/Dream Machines, “Some people are too proud to ask children for information. This is dumb. Information is where you find it.” For Agnes Denes, a Hungarian-born conceptual artist, the teens coded a minicomputer to animate triangles on a screen for a piece called Trigonal Ballet. For conceptual artist Carl Fernbach-Flarsheim, the teens used the I Ching to program a piece called Conceptual Typewriter. A visitor could select one of several buttons, such as “the silent” (represented by a circle) or “the providing” (illustrated by sheaves of wheat), and then use a light pen to alter the image. Both artists provided the initial ideas, but the RESISTORS executed them.
Nelson, working with programmer Ned Woodman, contributed a piece titled Labyrinth. Running on a PDP-8 that DEC provided, Labyrinth was explained as “the first public demonstration of a hypertext system.” To use it, a visitor would sit at a terminal and begin reading the displayed text. For the passage “The exhibition you are attending is called Software. It was organized by Jack Burnham,” you could use keystrokes (such as F for forward) to navigate the text and retrieve a definition of “software” or biographical details about Burnham.
Conceptual artist Agnes Denes [right] programmed her piece Trigonal Ballet at the Jewish Museum with help from RESISTORS [from left] Peter Eichenberger, J Laurence Sarno, and John Levine.The Jewish Museum
For many museumgoers, the entire exhibition suggested a technological future where people easily navigated the information-rich realm of what would become known as cyberspace.
The RESISTORS, meanwhile, gradually faded throughout the 1970s as its members went off to college and the supply of new recruits dwindled. Nonetheless, members like Nat Kuhn and John Levine recall that ideas they bantered about in bull sessions with Nelson in Kagan’s barn materialized later in the pages of Computer Lib/Dream Machines. “There was certainly very little in that book that we hadn’t already heard about before it appeared,” Levine said.
When I talked with former RESISTORS, it was surprising to hear how many members remained in touch with one another more than a half-century later. Many of them still included their participation on résumés. Courtships formed, and at least two members married each other. Their activities left a long-lasting echo in the world of computing as well. Len Bosack cofounded Cisco Systems. Cynthia Dwork, a professor of computer science at Harvard, made pioneering contributions to cryptography. Steve Kirsch was one of two people to invent the optical mouse and went on to become a successful tech entrepreneur.
Even as the RESISTORS were fading as a group, massive technological changes were just over the horizon. Personal computers, introduced in the early 1970s, soon became consumer goods found in hundreds of thousands of homes. That technological revolution would be solidified when Time named the PC “Machine of the Year” in 1982. New computing worlds beckoned to experts and neophytes alike, but it was a future that a group of teens in a New Jersey barn had already seen and lived.
This article is adapted from the author’s new book, README: A Bookish History of Computing from Electronic Brains to Everything Machines (The MIT Press, 2025).
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