Historic RESISTORS radical hackerspace burns down

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)

• [Pantograph]

  Now I’m of the firm conviction that letting out the magic smoke is somewhat of a rite of passage and that you can’t do any serious hardware hacking without starting at least a couple of small fires, but this is overdoing it a bit.

• [Pantograph]

  Now I’m of the firm conviction that letting out the magic smoke is somewhat of a rite of passage and that you can’t do any serious hardware hacking without starting at least a couple of small fires, but this is overdoing it a bit.

• [lamedust]

  History burns, why aren’t more things made like the pyramids. There’s no going back. Onward.