How MIT students helped shape modern hacker culture in the 1950s

The roots of modern hacking and open-source culture can be traced to MIT’s Tech Model Railroad Club and its students’ experiments with the TX-0 computer in the late 1950s. Steven Levy’s Hackers documented the community’s emphasis on access, experimentation, merit and sharing. From Spacewar! and Silicon Valley hobbyists to Richard Stallman’s GNU Project, these ideas helped shape collaborative software development and the free software movement that underpin much of today’s technology industry.