He wrote, with characteristic wit, the first editions of the Tech Model Railroad Club (TMRC) dictionary,[2] a predecessor to the Jargon File.
Steven Levy's Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution outlines Samson's interest in trains and electronics, and his influence in the club.
Levy explains how the club was in fact Samson's gateway into hacking and his ability to manipulate electronics and machine code to create programs.
[11] Samson oversaw manufacturing and engineering for hardware, including the central memory subsystem for the ILLIAC IV supercomputer complex at the NASA Ames Research Center.
[12][13] Samson appears in the Computer History Museum Mouse That Roared panel discussion recorded in May 2006 to celebrate the restoration of a PDP-1.