In the 1960s, long before personal computers or the internet existed, a band of teenage tech enthusiasts in New Jersey was quietly pushing the boundaries of computer access and community. Calling themselves the RESISTORS, short for “Radically Emphatic Students Interested in Science, Technology, Or Research Studies,” these teens met around a mentor’s collection of surplus computers stored in a barn near Princeton. With an acoustic coupler connected to a pay phone, they found creative ways to dial into a remote minicomputer, gaining hands-on experience that was rare outside professional labs at the time, tells IEEE Spectrum.
The RESISTORS didn’t just tinker; they built a vibrant peer community of fewer than 70 members over roughly a decade. They bonded over programming, hardware, and mutual curiosity, learning by doing rather than through formal classes. Many members went on to prominent careers in technology and science. One co-founder later helped build Cisco Systems, another wrote widely read books about computing, and several became educators and programmers.
Their mentor, engineer Claude Kagan, provided access to equipment like a Burroughs mainframe and a DEC PDP-8, allowing the group to experience real computing at a time when interactive access was rare and often limited to institutions. The RESISTORS’ barn-based lab was part club, part workshop, and part incubator for a new kind of technical exploration that prefigured later hacker culture.
The group’s work also intersected with figures such as Ted Nelson, an early computer visionary who helped broaden their understanding of computing and information structures, including concepts that would eventually resonate with the development of hypertext.
Though the RESISTORS eventually dissolved as members went off to college, their story enriches the history of computing by showing that enthusiastic teenagers shaped the early culture of personal computing long before Silicon Valley emerged and that grassroots curiosity and collaboration can precede and influence major technological shifts.