Since the infancy of com puters, hackers have been creatively solving problem s. I n the late 1950s, the MIT m odel railroad club was given a donation of parts, m ostly old telephone equipm ent. The club's m em bers used this equipm ent to rig up a com plex system that allowed m ultiple operators to control different parts of the track by dialing in to the appropriate sections. They called this new and inventive use of telephone equipm ent hacking ; m any people consider this group to be the original hackers. The group m oved on to program m ing on punch cards and ticker tape for early com puters like the I BM 704 and the TX-0. While others were content with writing program s that just solved problem s, the early hackers were obsessed with writing program s that solved problem s well. A new program that could achieve the sam e result as an existing one but used fewer punch cards was considered better, even though it did the sam e thing. The key difference was how the program achieved its results—elegance.