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But in addition to solving our problems,
which revolve around the relationship between the man
and his machine.
I'd like to have you meet Dr. Fernando J. Corbató,
who it the associate director of this center.
Dr. Corbató, maybe you can tell us about some of these
problems, to put this whole business in perspective for us.
Well, to do that, we have to go back about a decade, about
the early 1950s.
And the real problem was to try and put together computers
of this size and speed.
Just to get computers to work.
That's right.
We were in an era where computation
was very, very difficult to do.
Because the act of programming was so hard.
In the early days we wasted a lot of time
putting in each problem, and taking them out,
and bringing in the next man.
And these computers cost a lot of money.
Yes indeed they do.
They're between $300 and $600 an hour, so --
So you don't want to waste time.
No, we don't want to waste time.
Well, we are trying to develop, in the new scheme
of using the computer, which we call time sharing, which
consists of attaching a large number of consoles
to the central computer.
So CTSS was started out -- it was almost, kind of, a hack.
It was going to be a demo.
It gradually, as it succeeded, grew and grew.
Time sharing was the phrase, but the real goal
was man-machine interaction.
We actually save quite a bit of time,
in the sense that the person is able to be more selective,
be more shrewd, and if he doesn't set it on brute force,
it poses a problem.
But actually, he probed around, and examined
some of the smaller answers, first,
before he decides to go ahead.
The thing that I had to remind myself,
was, gee, that didn't look like it was that important anymore.
Except that it is, because it looks so ordinary,
because it's --
What we did in those days, is become omnipresent
in everything we do today.
And what we're trying to do is superimpose on this.
Instead of parallel consoles, which are not
all near the computer, in fact.
In fact most of them are remote.
And let the users use these.
With a reaction time of a few seconds rather than
a few hours.
In retrospect, we've influenced the world of interaction.
We see it today, in our personal computers,
and in our general approach to computing.
And, I think, the legacy of those early systems
is still with us.
But, fortunately, in many ways, we've moved on.
And things have gotten better and better.
From the earliest days of time sharing,
we had already discovered social interaction,
in the form of messages to each other, which
later evolved into email.
Initially, there were just messages within the system.
And today, the social interaction
extends to Facebook, and even Twitter.
Probably the most frightening part, though,
is the fact that we've really made the computer extremely
easy to use, here.
And so it's very clear that, in the long run,
we're going to increase the need for computer time,
by a large amount.
And we all knew about Moore's law and I sort of believed it.
But I can't, for the life of me, figure out
why I couldn't have anticipated what's happened.
I just didn't.