There are certainly antecedents and ancestors for hacker culture long before the 1970s, but in the post I was replying to, the term used was "hacker culture was established", and I would argue that none of these early anticipatory elements represented the "establishment" of a new culture.
It’s the same culture made by the same people entering and leaving across that full period. Hacker culture is really a continuation of the same ad hock machinist culture dating back to the Industrial Revolution. It jumped to computers from the days of analog computers.
You can trace things flowing all over the place with say MIT’s Tech Model Railroad Club being often sited as an early example. But it’s really just refinements of the same basic culture, and computers is one of the few places it survived unlike say pinball.
I think about this a lot with reference to the mechanics institute in San Francisco. Who were these mechanics and why did they have a 4 story institute still home to a chess club and private library? Certainly not a direct crossover to a modern car mechanic, even a "hacker" type car mechanic wouldn't stereotypically also be thinking along the philosophy of hacker culture, although I am sure some do.
