Talk:Hacks at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology

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Deletion[edit]

I almost feel like this page shouldn't exist because http://hacks.mit.edu/ does such a good job. There's no point in slowly replicating what an external source can and has done comprehensively. On the other hand, encyclopedias that are relatively free-standing are nice. Thoughts? Janet13 04:03, 24 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Nah - technically everything on wikipedia has been done before... and MIT hacks are very well known, and a pretty notable facet of MIT culture, so I vote it is deserving of existence. Although if someone wanted to merge it into the MIT article, that would be ok with me. --Bmk 03:23, 13 July 2006 (UTC)[reply]
I've always wanted to make a MIT hack site that's entirely a wiki so that it stays updated quickly. http://hacks.mit.edu/ is notoriously bad around MIT for not staying updated, they lack pictures and info about many hacks which people have repeatedly submitted to them, and you'll notice that their indexes are incomplete (Hacks by Location doesn't list, by location, every hack that's in the Hacks by Year section, etc.). I wonder if Wikipedia should be the place to establish a full-blown MIT hacks site, but I feel like not. --dheera
Well, considering the hacks.mit.edu page doesn't seem to be updating frequently, responding to people, or adding a wealth of hacks that don't even appear on their page, any objections if I merge the most major/best-appreciated ones from various years onto this page? If not I'll proceed. --dheera
Suggestions:
  • you might get someone at MIT to establish a local MediaWiki for hacks via the scripts.mit.edu web sight/portal
  • perhaps list the hacks on a separate "List of MIT Hacks" WP article. This is what is usually done for long lists. And just have a "Best of" short list in this article. If you do this, develope the entire article in your sandbox, then create it - short stub articles of this type, can get a lot of flak and are often AfD'ed and Speedy Deleted
  • either way, list the hacks in reverse chronological (time) order
  • either way, have a sub-section for each year in reverse chronological (time) order - Lentower 15:06, 29 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • use and cite more sources then both hacks.mit.edu and MIT hack#Further reading - Lentower 15:41, 29 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks for the suggestions. I am from MIT and willing to set up a local MediaWiki when I get time. I don't want to, however, "invade" hacks.mit.edu's purpose (I have already tried asking them about this specific suggestion with willingness to initiate it though; because if I started a local wiki, my first step I'd want to do is migrate the majority of hacks.mit.edu content as-is and build from there, if I can get permission to do so). I'd really like to see a wikified hack site though, because the quality of hacks.mit.edu is just terrible at the moment with detailed information about recent hacks. I worry though about people actually willing to update it though, as of course hackers themselves don't generally want to claim involvement in anything. But it's worth a try. I also have to think of a good namespace, because hacks.mit.edu is really a nice name. For wikipedia, I'm inclined to just do a subjective "best of" (i.e. things that the world would find cool, funny, or anything that is just plain large-scale) because a lot of inside-joke and small-scale hacks happen all the time at MIT, many of which are not meaningful for an audience like Wikipedia's, but can go on a separate wiki site. I wouldn't people to keep posting their small hacks to keep infiltrating a wikipedia listing, for example. Though I guess, there is always a discussion page, so well, it's worth a try. --dheera
dheera: email me from my user page User:Lentower. Include your MIT email address. Use the link "E-mail this user" in the left hand column. This seems to be no longer a WP issue. - Lentower 23:47, 29 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Referee Hack[edit]

While I can't confirm the Referee Hack rumor discussed in the article, I can add that I can confirm a similar prank performed in the US Marines. A company dog was trained in similar fashion to howl whenever a Colonel or higher ranking officer in dress-uniform spoke. The prank was pulled at the commissioning of a new class of graduates from a Marine academy. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 129.89.50.82 (talk) 06:19, 23 February 2007 (UTC).[reply]

Items dropped from Hack (technology) that could belong in the scope of this article[edit]

The following were items on the Hack (technology) as part of history of the term but are being removed to clean up the history. items already on MIT hack were omitted

  • Covering the university's signature "Great Dome" (which seems to be something of a magnet for hacks) with tin foil
  • Hiding the university president's office by covering its entrance with a fake bulletin board
  • Inflating a huge balloon on the playing field during a Harvard-Yale football game
  • Turning the MIT Dome into a giant baseball with a Red-Sox logo after the Red-Sox won the World Series
  • Making an image of Trogdor[1] out of post-it notes
  • Turning the Great Dome (again) into a beanie, complete with forty-foot spinning propeller on top and a detailed removal manual left at the base of the propeller.

Strikeouts in above list have already been incorporated into the "MIT Hacks" article. Reify-tech (talk) 14:13, 31 July 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Tetris?[edit]

Maybe this is just an urban legend I heard but didn't some MIT students wire the lighting of a building on campus to play a giant game of Tetris from a hill outdoors? Valley2city 22:15, 20 August 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Disappointingly, not quite true. For details, see the article on the Green Building (MIT), which points to known documentation on the subject. Summary: A technical challenge yet to be fully addressed by MIT hackers. Reify-tech (talk) 18:49, 12 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Update! This is true now! see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IAIPUGO1iko for example. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 128.119.15.139 (talk) 01:02, 4 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Welding the Trolley Car to the tracks at 77 Mass. Avenue[edit]

Does anyone think that writing up the following hacks would be worthwhile? If so, please contact me at kashi@alaska.net Regards Joe Kashi, BS '72, MS '73, Attorney at Law, Soldotna, AK The following is based solely upon my own personal observation and experience as News Editor of The Tech in the early 1970s.

A genealogybank.com search of newspapers in the relevant period (1936-1943) does not turn up any indication of this story. Further evidence needed that this ever happened. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2601:197:900:1AE0:400D:6B99:6EB:9A (talk) 19:20, 11 October 2021 (UTC)[reply]


I was the news editor of The Tech in the early 1970s and Ken Wadleigh, then Dean for Student Affairs, personally confirmed to me the truthfulness of the rumored legendary hack that he had welded a trolley car to the tracks outside of 77 Mass. Avenue with some Thermite bombs in the 1930s. He then told me exactly how he did the hack. Dean Wadleigh first asked me to admit a hack that made the national news and seriously embarrassed the administration, asking me how we pulled it off, and then laughed so hard that he and his wheeled chair fell over. Dean Wadleigh made me promise that I would not tell anyone that he found the incident so funny and then, as a quid pro quo, told me about his own famous undergraduate hack. When Wadleigh was an undergraduate, trolleys ran down the Mass Avenue tracks, stopping at 77 Mass Avenue. In those days, the fare was a nickel. Wadleigh had a confederate get on the trolley and hand the conductor a $10 bill. While the conductor was counting out 199 nickels as change, Wadleigh set off Thermite bombs between several of the wheels and the tracks, which was then a standard procedure for repairing cracked railroad rails. The net result was that the trolley was firmly welded to the tracks, requiring that a large crane be brought in to pick of the trolley car while worked removed and replaced the welded wheel-track assemblages.

FWIW, I had been called on the carpet to account for a (1971?)hack that Pete Peckarsky, later of the Jack Anderson column, and I pulled off that resulted in the Trustees being handed copies of The Tech whose headlines informed the Trustees (CEO of Boeing, Mobil Oil, Dupont, etc.) whom they were ostensibly about to elect as the new President of MIT ( Jerry Wiesner) and the changes in the academic structure (creation of a new post of Provost, appointing Paul Gray).

We thoughtfully informed the Boston TV stations of the news ahead of the scheduled event. In fact, because I was then the stringer for The New York Times, we also got it on the lower left corner of front page of the Times that morning, making sure that the Trustees were doubly informed as to what they were about to do. As their visuals for their store about the MIT election that evening, the local TV stations used the visual of us passing out copies of The Tech to the Trustees as they got out of their limos to enter the supposed deliberations while the President's Assistant and the campus police glared at us from inside the entry to the President's Mansion.

The entire event was "wired" of course. When we saw the MIT PR officer pacing in his office late the evening before, head in hand, we intuitively knew that he was writing the press release and that the next day's event was already wired. Besides, Wiesner was the obvious and appropriate choice anyway, but forms must be preserved, I suppose. (We waited until late at night and hijacked all of the uncollected trash bags in front of the PR office and the President's Office, going through them until we found a carbon paper sheet that someone failed to rip up - held to the light, it was sufficiently readable that we could get all of the main facts and fill in the details about likely changes in academic direction from The Tech's archives, that had past statements by Wiesner and Gray on various academic policies. Overall, we were pretty accurate and even printed the schedules telling the faculty when they were going to be informed about the results of the supposed election, which really rankled the administration.

In 1993 while visiting MIT, I stopped by the office of Captin Oliveri, by thenthe head of the MIT Police. In 1971, He had been the officer glaring at us, but eleven years late, we had a laugh over the prank and he then showed me his "musueum" of hacks that the police had "confiscated" but in fact had preserved. These included the device that inflated the famous MIT weather balloon. It was a beautiful piece of engineering. It seems that Harvard was infuriated and wanted to destroy it but the MIT police obtained and preserved it, ostensibly as evidence to prosecute the culprits, who were lionized at MIT rather than prosecuted. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 66.230.113.14 (talk) 18:59, 3 September 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for your first-person contribution. While it can't go onto the main article without additional documentation, your narrative was enjoyable to read here. Reify-tech (talk) 19:22, 9 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]

When I visited Boston in March of 1975 (from England), there was a green line car welded to the tracks on Commonwealth Ave close to B.U. Apparently it was too expensive to remove it, so some track had been laid in a kind of chicane to go round it. My friend, who was attending B.U., said that the guys from MIT over the river had done it. JimInRoses (talk) 20:18, 18 March 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Improper Grammar Usage[edit]

I would just like to point out that "snuck" is not the correct past tense of sneak. It is sneaked.71.195.66.228 (talk) 02:09, 10 February 2009 (UTC)[reply]

I would just like to point out that is incorrect. It is a documented past tense of sneak.
Sorry to sound rude, but I couldn't resist following your form. Seriously, it really is in dictionaries, and has been in wide use for a long time. We could go into a long discussion about the correct meaning of "correct", but I don't care what's "correct", I just wanted to point out there's another view. Maybe "preferred" would be the preferred description rather than "correct"? Bob Kerns (talk) 20:24, 20 April 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Never Gonna Give You Up[edit]

Shouldn't the event where notes from this song put on the dome? 72.220.153.202 (talk) 22:41, 16 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Caltech Fleming Cannon Picture Missing?[edit]

The picture now appears to be missing from the article, and appears as a "red link", which means that the file cannot be found. Some petty but unimaginative cracker may have deleted, renamed, or moved the file so that it is inacessible. I have to get some sleep, so I leave it to other Defenders of the Truth to restore this documentary evidence. Reify-tech (talk) 06:06, 18 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Upon investigation, it appears that the image was deleted because of a copyright issue. Does anybody have a suitable replacement photo showing the Caltech cannon fitted with the giant Brass Rat? This is truly an iconic image for a classic MIT hack, and ought to be part of the article. Reify-tech (talk) 14:35, 2 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]
You could do the Google Image search and chase down the rights. Lentower (talk) 15:19, 2 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Need More Pictures[edit]

Currently, the article points to many photos on other websites, but has relatively few itself. The issue is image rights clearance. Does anybody have good, rights-cleared photos they can personally contribute, or is anybody up to chasing down rights clearances from the owners of classic photos? Here's a brief "wanted list" of classic images that would really enhance the article:

  • "Borrowed" Caltech Cannon, fitted with its oversized MIT Brass Rat
  • Statue of John Harvard in Harvard Yard, wearing full "Halo 3" battle gear
  • Campus Patrol car on top of the Great Dome, from a nearby vantage point, including the spectacular panoramic view visible from that location
  • Flawlessly hacked inscription in Lobby 7 ("Established for advancement and development of [...] arts entertainment and hacking")
  • The Cathedral of Our Lady of the All-Night Tool
  • Expanding weather ballon hack at the Harvard-Yale football game

Further suggestions (and usable photos) are welcome! Reify-tech (talk) 18:49, 12 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]

IHTFP merger proposal[edit]

It's been proposed that IHTFP be merged into this article Hacks at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. User 71.184.245.22 added the merge templates with these edit summaries: Add merge suggestion and Link to IHTFP article, suggest merge. Lentower (talk) 13:18, 23 April 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Support The Merge From candidate is a very small stub, and the Merge To article has more to say on this topic. Making this small orphan a redirect like Ihtfp and IHTFP (disambiguation) is the encylopeidic thing to do. Note this was done in the past Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/IHTFP. Lentower (talk) 13:18, 23 April 2012 (UTC)[reply]
Support, for the reasons given. The merge target article has strong coverage and ties in well, and the merger source is a stub which appears unlikely to grow naturally into a stand-alone article. --Reify-tech (talk) 14:35, 23 April 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Congratulations!!![edit]

You can erase this guys, but I felt clap clap clap were due here. The quality of the text, the richness of research and resources is astounding. I would like to express all contributors, particularly Lentower, the most active editor here, my deepest gratitude for this entry. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Hcintra (talk • contribs)

I'd like to belatedly point out that I have probably added the most quantity of material (by byte count), including numerous reference footnotes. Reify-tech (talk) 00:21, 14 February 2017 (UTC)[reply]

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