The RESISTORS Were Teenage Hackers and Computer Pioneers

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…