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[MUSIC PLAYING]

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But in addition to
solving our problems,

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which revolve around the
relationship between the man

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and his machine.

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I'd like to have you meet
Dr. Fernando J. Corbató,

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who it the associate
director of this center.

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Dr. Corbató, maybe you can
tell us about some of these

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problems, to put this whole
business in perspective for us.

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Well, to do that, we have to
go back about a decade, about

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the early 1950s.

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And the real problem was to
try and put together computers

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of this size and speed.

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Just to get computers to work.

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That's right.

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We were in an era
where computation

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was very, very difficult to do.

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Because the act of
programming was so hard.

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In the early days we
wasted a lot of time

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putting in each problem,
and taking them out,

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and bringing in the next man.

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And these computers
cost a lot of money.

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Yes indeed they do.

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They're between $300
and $600 an hour, so --

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So you don't want to waste time.

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No, we don't want to waste time.

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Well, we are trying to
develop, in the new scheme

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of using the computer, which
we call time sharing, which

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consists of attaching a
large number of consoles

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to the central computer.

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So CTSS was started out -- it
was almost, kind of, a hack.

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It was going to be a demo.

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It gradually, as it
succeeded, grew and grew.

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Time sharing was the
phrase, but the real goal

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was man-machine interaction.

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We actually save
quite a bit of time,

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in the sense that the person
is able to be more selective,

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be more shrewd, and if he
doesn't set it on brute force,

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it poses a problem.

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But actually, he probed
around, and examined

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some of the smaller
answers, first,

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before he decides to go ahead.

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The thing that I had
to remind myself,

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was, gee, that didn't look like
it was that important anymore.

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Except that it is, because
it looks so ordinary,

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because it's --

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What we did in those days,
is become omnipresent

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in everything we do today.

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And what we're trying to
do is superimpose on this.

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Instead of parallel
consoles, which are not

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all near the computer, in fact.

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In fact most of them are remote.

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And let the users use these.

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With a reaction time of
a few seconds rather than

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a few hours.

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In retrospect, we've influenced
the world of interaction.

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We see it today, in
our personal computers,

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and in our general
approach to computing.

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And, I think, the legacy
of those early systems

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is still with us.

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But, fortunately, in many
ways, we've moved on.

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And things have gotten
better and better.

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From the earliest
days of time sharing,

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we had already discovered
social interaction,

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in the form of messages
to each other, which

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later evolved into email.

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Initially, there were just
messages within the system.

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And today, the
social interaction

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extends to Facebook,
and even Twitter.

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Probably the most
frightening part, though,

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is the fact that we've really
made the computer extremely

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easy to use, here.

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And so it's very clear
that, in the long run,

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we're going to increase
the need for computer time,

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by a large amount.

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And we all knew about Moore's
law and I sort of believed it.

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But I can't, for the
life of me, figure out

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why I couldn't have
anticipated what's happened.

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I just didn't.

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