Courtesy some fantastic alums. Most of the stories and more are retold here: http://everything2.net/index.pl?node=hacking+stories&lastnode_id=124&searchy=search
Compiled by an old Senior House type person.
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List of MIT Folklore/Hacks
I’ve included some interesting hacks because they seem to be at least in the peripheral memory of a lot of people.
If you rub the nose of the George Eastman plaque in Lobby 6 on your way to an exam, you’ll have good luck.
The reason the skylight over Lobby 7 was covered for decades was because it was covered during WWII to prevent the Nazis from using it as a target in case they ever bombed the US. The cover was removed ~2001. (This is true)
The Green Building was originally designed to sit at right angles to its current orientation, with the windows looking out over Cambridge. The plans were changed at the last minute when someone (variously cited as an administrator in Course 12, the architect, or the real estate office) determined that river view windows would be worth way more. Unfortunately, this was after the wind tunnel testing for the building, and the winds off of the Charles sweeping under the building caused the first floor entry doors to be unusable. (Reasons included in story variations include pressure differentials causing the doors to be unopenable or high winds causing the rotating doors to spin dangerously fast. The first is more likely.) The Great Sail was designed by Calder as a windbreak. This is why there is not only the Great Sail next to the Dot, but also the Little Sail in the Media Lab (formerly in front of Building 9, and its plaque was still there last time I looked) and the ItsyBitsy Sail in the wind tunnel building’s model display case.
There was a hack in which The Great Sail had a giant smiley-face sphere hung inside of it. A smaller smiley sphere was hung off of the Little Sail by Building 9. And an itsy-bitsy sphere appeared on the itsy-bitsy sail model in the wind tunnel building.
A long time ago, shortly after either Next or New House was built, the house manager was an extremely stingy fellow who insisted on only putting out enough toilet paper for that day in order to prevent students from stealing it for nefarious purposes. This produced a lot of griping, but then came the blizzard. The entire campus was snowed in for days; no physplant, and no new toilet paper. The students were, needless to say, furious; the manager refused to change his policy. During the next big blizzard, a student found a squirrel that had frozen to death in the cold; they took it to the manager’s office and shattered the icy corpse on his desk. Three days later, his office was about as unpleasant as the bathrooms had been in the last blizzard. The story is strangely silent about what happened next.
Rumor has it that once upon a time, there were tunnels out of East Campus that connected to the Main Campus buildings.
Long ago, Hal Abelson and Gary Sussman were partners who worked together on creating the 6.001 curriculum, which used Scheme to teach proud and clueless young’uns what programming really meant. In the late 90’s, however, Abelson became convinced that there was no longer any point in teaching functional programming, and that the way of the future was in Windows and Microsoft’s proprietary programming languages; not because they were better, but because no student would ever be using a non-Windows operating system after graduation, and therefore they might as well get that idea into their heads early. He pushed for Athena to be replaced with Windows for Workgroups, and for Scheme to be replaced with Microsoft J++. (Bet you’ve never heard of *that* one. There’s a reason.) Sussman, being a proud independent thinker, declared publicly that Abelson had sold his soul, and nailed “95 Theses Against Microsoft” to Abelson’s office door. (Thirty pages of paper. One four-inch steel nail.) Abelson saw the error of his ways, and although he still uses Windows, he no longer insists that Microsoft is the be-all-end-all of computing.
Kresge is 1/8 a sphere.
Philip Gale’s Suicide: For weeks, Gale had been asking classmates how to access the roof of MIT’s tallest structure, the Green Building. On the blackboard of the MIT classroom in the Green Building, he wrote out Isaac Newton’s equation for how an object accelerates as it falls, along with a sketch of a stick figure of someone tossing a chair. He signed the message, “Phil was here,” picked up a chair, hurled it and then himself through a window on the fifteenth floor of the Earth, Atmospheric & Planetary Sciences building, more commonly known as Building 54 or the Green Building. Friday, March 13, 1998
Tomb of the unknown tool. The “Unknown tool” was rumored to have originally lived in Baker.
In the 70’s, 90% of all LSD produced on the east coast could be traced back to Bexley.
East Campus residents have repeatedly tried to officially change the name of The East Campus Memorial Houses to Fred.
Several decades ago, the CIA tried to establish a secret field office in Technology Square, but was foiled by MIT students who hacked them so badly they left because their cover was so horrendously blown. The front for their office was “The Anderson Music Company”. They were in the same building as the Laboratory for Computer Science.
After the cover over Lobby 7 was removed, a hack went up: The Wheel of Tuition. It looked like a wheel of fortune, except it was full of ways that students could pay for their ridiculously high tuition (work study, loans, etc).
Before the end of the Cold War, Helmut Schmidt (Then chancellor of west Germany) gave the commencement speech at a certain graduation. A particular (forgotten) member of administration passed the word along to hackers to not try to hack the speech because it was impossible due to the vast amount of security, body guards, and Germans with big guns that would be around waiting to shoot anyone. Halfway through his speech, two banners, one saying “NOTHING’S” and one saying “IMPOSSIBLE” dropped down on either side of Mr. Schmidt, the hackers once and for all proving that they can’t be told what to do by the administration.
At some point, Harvard tried instituting a new tradition for them: the Freshmen plate. They engraved a giant silver plate with something and hid it in Harvard yard the night before orientation, with the idea that the freshmen class would have to look for it before orientation could begin, and bond or whatever. Well, MIT hackers thought they could find it first, so that night, they did. They didn’t know what to do with it after they found it, so they dropped it off on the desk of then president Paul Gray with a note that said something like “Some people up at Harvard are going to be looking for this.” Paul Gray put on his academic robes and funny hat and got the deans to do the same. Then, carrying the plate on a sofa cushion, he and the deans arrived at Harvard about thirty minutes after the search had started in a giant MIT-police escorted motorcade and presented the plate to the president of Harvard. The Freshmen Plate tradition never happened again.
