All right.
Well, I became interested in artificial intelligence
before I became interested in computers.
This was in 1949.
There was this symposium at Caltech on cerebral mechanisms
and behavior, the so-called Hixon Symposium.
And there were various bigshots there
von Neumann and McCulloch, and psychologists,
and physiologists.
And at that time, I began to think
about artificial intelligence from the point of view
of special purpose computers.
However, this was by no means my main activity,
since I was a graduate student in mathematics
and went to Princeton as a graduate student
in mathematics, and felt that these ideas were
too indefinite, although I continued
to think about them for a serious thesis
work at that time.
I showed some ideas to von Neumann
who said, write them up.
Write them up.
But they weren't good enough.
And I didn't write it up.
And I had listened to some lectures on computers
at Caltech that time, which were actually--
I remember the exercise was to program divide
for the SWAC, which was a computer which
was going to appear.
I don't think I understood it very well.
Or if I did, I forgot, because I don't think-- well,
there wasn't any SWAC to try it out on anyway.
There was eventually, wasn't there?
What?
There was eventually.
Sure, there was eventually, but there
wasn't at the time these lectures were given.
At least, we certainly weren't offered that opportunity.
My first actual contact with computers--
well, let's see.
Then I thought some more.
The first time I spent full time on artificial intelligence
was in the summer of '52 at Bell Labs,
where Minsky and I were hired by Shannon.
And again, I was interested in artificial intelligence
and machines were doing it, but paid no attention to computers.
Bell Labs at that time had IBM 603 or four,
which were calculating punches.
And again, no one thought that computers had much
to do with it.
Now, the one person who already had expressed the view
that computers were the key to artificial intelligence
was Turing who had written this article, "Computing Machinery
and Intelligence" that was published in 1950.
But I can't find anyone interested
in artificial intelligence who had
read that article, with the exception of Selfridge, who
claimed he'd read it, but didn't believe it.
At least, his approach towards artificial intelligence
was with computers.
Now, I became convinced first, that computers
were the key to artificial intelligence in '55.
And at that point, the idea of time sharing
was immediately apparent to me, because being
as I was thinking about artificial intelligence
already, the question was, well, how are you going to interact
with it, was the key question.
And therefore, the idea that one should be sitting comfortably
in one's office and interacting with a computer
rather than thinking of it as a point--
as people did at that time--
of computation, is that you have this computation that you
wanted to do, and you got a program
to run this computation, and then you ran the computer.
So the interactive use which was the immediate notion to me.
And so, then I began to look around and talk to people
and was very surprised that wasn't what everybody thought.
And now--
When was that John?
'55 or thereabouts.
But I was not in a position to do anything about it.
I was Dartmouth at the time-- went back to Dartmouth.
And I didn't actually do anything
until I came to MIT as a Sloan Foundation fellow in '57.
And at that point, I became interested in trying it out.
And because I was quite unself-confident
about hardware, I wanted to propose
the minimal modification.
And I proposed to D. Norden, who was, I believe,
Director of Research or whatever it was for the computation
center at that time.
Yes, that's right.
Since I was a visitor at MIT also, mind,
I was very diffident about things--
that we installed a switch on the IBM 704
that would allow it to be put into trapping mode
from the outside, and also install equipment
to allow six lines from flexor writer
to take the place of the sense switches--
to put it parallel with the sense switches.
So I think I'll stop at this point, which sort of gets me up
to the beginning of the idea of my interaction with computers.
Yes, John.
It does John, but let me push you
right back to the beginning, because you didn't tell us
how you got interested in artificial intelligence,
and what--
even before, you were in college--
Oh, the Hixon Symposium [INAUDIBLE]
it before the ideas of computing and of machine intelligence
were discussed by the various speakers at the Hixon Symposium
in 1949.
Where were you at the time?
I was a graduate student at Caltech.
Well, that's the--
Uh-huh.
And what was your subject?
Mathematics.
What particular aspects of mathematics?
Functional analysis, I guess.
But I was just beginning.
Did you--
And where did you come from?
Where were you born, where did you grow up?
In California?
Oh, all right.
I was born in Boston.
And we started moving across the country when
I was about eight or nine.
I think we got to California when I was 10.
So I went to the later grades of school from the sixth grade
on in California, and went to Caltech as an undergraduate,
and stayed there for one year of graduate work.
And then went to Princeton, where I got my PhD,
then I might as well finish it off, so to speak.
I stayed at Princeton for two more years
as an instructor then went to Stanford,
and then went to Dartmouth, and then went to MIT--
first as a Sloan Foundation Fellow
and then as an assistant professor of communication
sciences in the EE Department.
[LAUGHTER]
I can remember that.
Thank you.
That was essentially because the math department
couldn't take more than one computer specialist.
So Marvin Minsky was there.
Right.
Because Marvin eventually moved to the electrical engineering
department.
[INAUDIBLE] Now, this has sort of the aura of this
is your life.
Which I'm going to try to telescope
to the relevant parts.
[LAUGHTER]
But I think the thing that I didn't realize it
at the time, but probably the most--
one of the key episodes of my origins
was during World War II, when I was still in high school,
and facing the inevitability of being drafted.
And I had actually rushed through high school
and gotten into UCLA for a while.
And maybe I've somehow got approached
by the Navy recruiting office.
And they offered me this tempting opportunity
to do something interesting while in the service
rather than just become kind of an ordinary soldier.
And then, the thing they offered was the Eddy Program,
which turned in for electronic technicians.
And so I enlisted, thinking that was at least more interesting.
Indeed, after a year of training,
became an electronic technician.
And in the process--
so I basically had a high school background--
and in the process got exposed to working
with all the large electronic systems which
were developed World War II, which were radar,
sonar, Lorand, and on and on.
Most of them I didn't realize at the time
were developed here at the Rad Lab at MIT.
But that was a later connection.
But what I got out of that was something
that I realized afterwards, was working
with large systems, which one didn't fully
comprehend every module's purpose,
but one had a very strong sense of the interfaces
and modularity and functionalities
that were expected out of all the boxes.
So that turned out to be an important piece of background
for me.
After the war, I was able to use the GI Bill
and that helped finance going to Caltech
as an undergraduate, where I, along with most
of the other hotshots in the class,
thought physics was a thing to do.
And so, I got into physics.
And from there, I went on to graduate school
here at MIT, starting as a physicist.
And I can still remember Phil Morris one day
calling me into his office and saying,
how would you like to be a research
assistant on a new kind of project we have,
which is a [INAUDIBLE] I forget the exact title.
But it was basically a computational assistantship,
multidisciplinary.
So there were people from many departments.
But I was one of the early ones there.
And so I signed up for that.
And in the process, in the summer of '51,
began to learn about computing equipment,
ranging from punch cards to a Whirlwind.
And Whirlwind, we were just beginning
to roll with in those days.
And in fact, I think when we first
began to take lessons, or instruction on it,
they had maybe 256 18-bit words.
And it was still--
every month it was expanding by a factor of 2,
which more or less--
With a parity check every two minutes, right?
Yeah.
Maybe two, maybe six, but not more than 20.
[LAUGHTER] These were using those--
Williams tubes.
No, they weren't Williams tubes.
They were special designed.
In fact, that's what distinguished Whirlwind.
They had their own design of tubes,
which made them slightly more reliable
than the Williams tubes.
But that was a very pivotal exposure,
because in fact, I ended up doing my doctoral work
on molecular physics, primarily because it
required a lot of extensive calculations.
And in fact, somewhere in that period, in the mid '50s,
I began to get more interested in the computational aspects
than I was in the physics.
And so, after I got my degree, Phil Morris
approached me again.
This time, because he had been organizing
the start of the computation center at MIT
in '56, which was to acquire a gift from IBM of an IBM 704.
So I signed on as a staff member, an assistant director,
who's responsibility for the research assistantship program
that was one of the things that also went with the center.
And in the process, continued to try
to do some physics research involving computation
on molecular diatomic molecules.
But I experienced in that period, an observation
that computers were getting tougher and tougher
to get at, as people became to realize they were
very useful and interesting.
So the queues kept getting longer and longer.
And it was harder to debug programs in the old batch
processing style.
Computation centers were getting more
and more obsessed with trying to be more efficient.
And the users were getting squeezed out.
And debugging was getting harder and harder.
And that was another important piece of background,
because it was quite clear that it
was getting harder and harder to write programs
and to get things done.
And I guess it was about that time,
shortly after the center began, John showed up on the scene.
And the recollection was that John was probably
the most articulate in agitating for this new way of dealing
with computers.
Namely, trying to get more interactive.
My exposure to Whirlwind had been always
on the unclassified side.
So I didn't know about to say stuff, though I had some hints.
But certainly, the notion of being
able to get your hands on a computer
was part of my background.
So trying to make interactive computing accessible
was certainly something that made sense.
And when the actual thoughts began
to gel in the form of some of these early memos
that John wrote, and later Strachey, which I remember John
called my attention to--
Strachey's memo, or paper actually.
It seemed more and more obvious and to myself and everybody
else in the circle at the time.
And in fact, as we began to start a set of committees
to try to do something in an organized way.
And it was out of that set of committees
that we each began to look for what we could do.
John alluded to some of his attempts.
I can still remember [INAUDIBLE] and had to plug.
It was also to support John's [INAUDIBLE] connection.
But that's as far as I've got, I think.
I started on a quick and dirty version of time sharing,
which was supposed to be more of a demo system, which it later
got called a compatible time-sharing system, CKSS.
We'll probably come back to that.
And we were off and running.
And I think that's probably a good place to start,
because we'll pick it up from there I'm sure.
Go ahead bob.
Well, my story is a little bit longer,
simply because I come from further away.
[LAUGHTER]
And I was born in Torino, Italy, and I did four years
of engineering school there.
And I started--
I was going into electrical engineering.
But in Italy, the engineering is a five year program.
And the specialization comes only in the fifth year.
So when I came over here in 1939,
I still really had a full year of work
to do before I could get a bachelor's degree
in electrical engineering.
And I started at MIT in February 1940,
and finished, got my bachelors in 1941.
The question is, why did I go into electrical engineering?
I really don't know.
As far as back as I can remember,
I always wanted to be an electrical engineer.
And I have no idea why.
So I became an electrical engineer.
I must also say that there was another thing that
was very clear to me, it was that I
didn't want to be a professor.
[INAUDIBLE] I am a professor, and I
have been a professor, because of strange reason
that I won't get into it.
When I graduated in February 1941, I look for a job.
And it was practically impossible for me to get a job.
And the reason why, is that I was still an Italian citizen.
And essentially the whole electrical industry
in the United States was already beginning to do military work.
So a clearance was necessary, and which I could not get.
So I ended up with to work for General Motors
in the official body plant in Grand Rapids.
And without spending time on that,
I really didn't like that job.
And then, I remember that Carlton Tucker, who
was an executive officer of the department
had offered me a teaching assistantship when I graduated.
And I had said, no, because I was not
interested in a teaching career.
So I got in touch with him, and told him that at that point
I was interested.
To make a long story short, I started as a teaching assistant
in September 1941, and I haven't moved from MIT since.
Now, how did I get eventually into computers?
Well, I'd been a fill hopper from the very beginning.
First of all in teaching, because of the war,
since most of the faculty of the electrical engineering
department disappeared, I was asked to do,
as teaching assistant, things that were unheard of.
Like being in charge of a graduate course
after two years that I had been a teaching assistant
in microwaves.
I had taught all sorts of things--
electronics, for communication, microwaves.
And then, in 1944, finally they opened the door
to the radiation laboratory for non-citizens.
So I moved to the radiation laboratory,
where I was what was being called a microwave plumber.
And at the end of the radiation laboratory,
I was one of the founding research associate and graduate
student of [INAUDIBLE].
I finished my doctorate in June '47,
and I went on into faculty.
Now, after getting my doctorate, and my thesis
was in network theory.
So I had been in microwave and network theory.
By then I got interested in information theory.
There was a field for a little more than a decade.
Now that got me in the direction of computers
in a certain sense.
And I remember that around 1960, I
got involved into computer affairs, simply
because there was a great scarcity of senior faculty--
I was a full professor by then--
that had any connection whatsoever with computers.
So for instance, when a committee
was set up to look at the future of computation,
chaired by Philip, or was Al Hill?
No, I started it.
Yeah.
I was asked to be a member of that committee.
I knew practically nothing about computers.
But another thing that I recall very well,
that in my work in communication theory,
I became very evident in the late '50s
that the process of signal structuring
and particularly the process of the texting signal
in the presence of noise and decoding
involved very complicated operation.
And at that time, communication engineers
were thinking primarily of decoding or detecting
in terms of primitive hardware.
Hardware primitive, I'm sorry.
Like an amplifier, an oscillator, a detector,
and so forth and so on.
And it occurred to me that since computers existed,
we ought to be thinking instead in functional terms.
And then the operation that was logically possible
would eventually be possible to implement
by means of a computer.
This is what got me started.
It so happens that in 1961, I completed various things
that I was working at.
I completed in my book an information theory.
I completed the book on electromagnetic field,
that later was the textbook for undergraduate.
It so happens also my doctoral student finished that thesis
at that time.
So I was a free bird.
And I went on sabbatical in Lincoln Lab
in the academic year '61, '62.
And I decided at that time, that I
had enough with information theory and communication
theory, that I wanted to get in the computer field.
So when I came back in fall, I had already arranged
with Bob Gallagher to take over my graduate course
in information theory.
And I was ready to go.
When project Mac happened.
And probably I should stop at that point,
because we will talk about it, essentially
how I got into the computer field not as a worker,
but as an administrator.
Probably I should stop at that point.
Project Mac didn't just happen.
Hmm?
Project Mac just didn't happen.
[LAUGHTER]
No, I mean, the opportunity to start Project Mac came up.
OK.
Perhaps I should say just a couple of words about it.
That fall, [INAUDIBLE] started coming around MIT,
was at the [INAUDIBLE].
Yeah, he couldn't make it today.
[INTERPOSING VOICES]
[INAUDIBLE] was at MIT in the immediate post-war period.
And I knew very well that he went to [INAUDIBLE] Neumann.
And then eventually, he got interested in computing.
He wrote the classic paper about men, machines, and [INAUDIBLE]..
He went to the Pentagon, essentially,
to get that sort of movement started.
And he got funded by IARPA.
And he started going around the country building up enthusiasm
for man machine interaction and time-sharing.
Of course, he came to MIT also.
And he was quite anxious to get a big operation started at MIT.
I recall he wanted to get a few centers of excellence--
that's what he was calling them--
set up in universities.
And he wanted in particular one at MIT.
And it was quite clear that the problem of getting such a thing
started there at MIT was serious.
And the reason was that all the computer faculty
were young at that time.
John McCarthy was an assistant professor.
You had just joined the faculty, perhaps not even yet.
Marvin, I don't know why he did--
I'm sure that Marvin didn't have tenure yet.
That's right.
The only senior person involved with computing
was Phil, who was director of the computation center
and had his hands full, because he also
was doing lots of other things.
So it became immediately clear that something
was going to happen.
That MIT had to be pushed by somebody who was not a computer
person, but came from a field sufficiently related
to make some sort of a sense out of that.
Well, I became quite interested in the matter, largely because
of the point of view that John McCarthy had introduced.
This was in the lecture that he gave at the what was it--
50 years ago?
That is in the book edited by Greenberg.
Yeah.
[INTERPOSING VOICES]
Computer--
[INTERPOSING VOICES]
Management in the computer of the future.
That is what really appealed to me was the notion of a computer
utility, and all the implications that
had for a lot of things.
So essentially, the whole thing was decided in a week.
And I think I want to mention the story,
because that is typical of the sort of things
that were happening at MIT.
[INAUDIBLE] kept talking with me,
and trying to get me hooked.
And we were together at a meeting
organized by [INAUDIBLE],, down in Virginia, in a homestead.
And we talked a lot.
We talked a lot on the train coming back.
And it was the day before Thanksgiving.
And I kept thinking about it.
Then on Thanksgiving Day, I decided, I'm going to do it.
What the heck.
This is in what year, '62?
That was '62, on Thanksgiving Day.
On Friday, in those days, MIT was open the day
after Thanksgiving.
I had an appointment with the provost, who
was Charlie Towns at that time, because I was also
chairman of the Computer Science Committee.
And I had to talk with him about it.
And I told him about the idea.
And I said, well, why don't you think about it?
Let me know what you think.
That's something we should do.
And he said, oh yeah.
That's a good idea.
Go ahead.
So over the weekend, I wrote a two-page memorandum
outlining what I had in mind.
On Tuesday I met with Jay Stratton,
who was President of MIT at that time.
And the main question that he asked me was, where are you
going to do it?
Because as Phil Morris said at that time,
MIT was caught with [INAUDIBLE].
And by then, I had heard that the eighth and ninth floor
of the new technology square building that was not up yet
had been leased by CEIR.
The CEIR wanted to get rid of that lease,
because they weren't doing so well.
So I told Jay Stratton, I heard this,
and then maybe we can get that space, and he said, fine.
And then, on Thursday, [INAUDIBLE]
had already plans to come to MIT from Washington.
And we all met in Jay Stratton's office and kind of formally
agreed that was going to happen.
So in a week span, essentially the decisionary principle
was made.
And that's--
Let me ask you one question.
Yeah?
Somewhere along that line, and I'm
interested to know where, you met in the hall.
Yeah.
I think it was at the corner of Building 6.
And you said, look.
This project is going to get started.
Don't you want to be the director?
That's right.
And I said, no.
That's right.
And you said, why?
And I told you.
And you started giggling, and said, thanks, and went off.
Yeah.
Well I think this was probably before--
Yeah.
--was at the time when I felt that something ought to happen,
and obviously you were the right person to do it.
So I asked you.
Let me add another slight footnote.
Yeah.
[INAUDIBLE] came up-- there were several meetings when
Lech first approached us.
He came up to MIT, and there was about a dozen people in a room,
it was in the old Busch room.
And I can still recall the meeting, where everyone sort of
said what was on their minds in response to [INAUDIBLE]..
And it was kind of a cat and dog fight.
And it sounded like a miss.
And the result of it was, that you came out of that meeting
Bob, saying, we can't--
we've got to do something about this.
You were very appalled at the fact
that we had such a disorganized front.
And I think that was the actual point where you first
began to seriously think about doing something.
Well, really, the critical time was when
I was down at this meeting in--
Yeah.
That's when it gelled.
Because I became clear on what a mess
the information processing field was at the time,
and that something had to be done
to try to think through the issue
and do something about it.
Of course, I was already familiar by then
with all the work on time sharing,
and I had been influenced by John, and so forth and so on.
Yeah.
And it seems to me that it was very
hard to recreate the incredible arrogance
and rigidity that manufacturers had already taken on.
[LAUGHTER]
Yeah.
And that was one of the reasons why we had to get organized.
Only matched by our own.
Maybe so.
But why don't we keep going around, because we'll
get into a long distraction.
Yeah, I'm going to touch on that too.
Well, you finished?
Yeah.
So I'm a little bit of a place here,
because I never have been a computer specialist neither
for hardware nor software.
But as a physicist and later as someone
interested in operations research,
I've always been interested in the use of computers
and got more and more convinced that somehow
or other every person going through a technical school,
and eventually any college, ought to know something
about computer.
I started way back pre-war.
Got my bachelor's degree at Case under Dayton Miller
in the '20s.
Went on to Princeton, got my doctors degree there
in physics.
Finished my thesis in a couple of years.
And then, spent my last year--
you couldn't get a doctor's degree
in two years at Princeton then.
Spent my last year helping Ed [INAUDIBLE] write
a text on quantum mechanics.
And I came up to MIT at the time that Compton
moved from Princeton up to MIT.
And been in the physics department ever since until--
well, I still got an office down in the physics department.
But very early, I got interested in computers,
because the work we were all doing in quantum mechanics
got more and more complicated and needed
more and more computing.
So two of my papers that were published during the '30s
were based on some work that I did with the Bush differential
analyzer.
Then during the war, when I was down in Washington
working with the Navy, I think my group
introduced the first computing equipment to the Navy.
It was a straight punch card equipment, with a sorter,
and so forth.
We did a lot of statistical work on it.
Kept a great deal of data on it.
Reported on all of the contacts with submarines--
the German submarines in the Atlantic on it,
and reported every morning to Admiral King's staff.
Question.
Yes?
Did you know anything about the electronic computing
that was going on for cryptograph data systems?
I knew nothing.
I was too very much busy at that time.
Matter of fact, I didn't get in contact with anybody working
in the digital computer line until I came back to MIT in,
I think it was '51 or '50, when I started
talking to Jay Forrester.
No, I was I was convinced that we needed computing,
but I knew very little about what
the developments were going on.
When I got back to MIT, I soon began talking to Jay Forrester.
He was, of course, very busy designing and building
[INAUDIBLE].
But my interest was to get students,
to start with graduate students, all
around the Institute acquainted and familiar with computing.
And the more I talked to Jay--
this was of course second hand, because I
wasn't doing any work along that line-- the more I talked
to Jay, the more I got convinced that the digital way was
the way to go.
I can remember some very strong arguments I had with van Bush.
[LAUGHTER]
Van was quite convinced that digital computers
were the wrong way to go.
I remember very well, that in [INAUDIBLE] of Project Mac,
you suggested that in the fall that we should
have launched with van Bush.
And we had lunch, the two of us with them, at the faculty club.
Yeah.
And I was completely flabbergasted
by the powerful emotion that there were in Van
against digital computers.
And then it became clear, that what
he meant by digital computer was binary computers.
He didn't mean discrete.
And he was perfectly willing to buy--
and in fact, he said there was a lot of need for computation.
But he had in mind something other than binary.
I could never understand why in particular, he
was against binary computers, unless it
had to do with some early history or argument with--
Yeah, I think so.
--Norbert Wiener?
Was that it?
Well, I don't know whether it was Norbert Wiener or not,
but it certainly was--
No.
It was, he didn't like to--
I talked to him before Project Mac as part of the study.
Yeah.
And his hatred of binary was as an engineer,
he didn't like the idea of using 10, ones, and zeros
to represent something he could do with three decimal number.
That was it?
That was it.
[INTERPOSING VOICES]
But there was really powerful emotion--
I don't think-- I tried to explain to him,
that we can make a converter for you.
There were--
Did you know his work?
--terribly powerful emotion behind it.
Yes.
And really, I could not justify on the basis of--
[INTERPOSING VOICES]
Historically, it was--
[INTERPOSING VOICES]
--by Norman Snowdon at one point.
[INTERPOSING VOICES]
In other words, there was something--
there was something about--
Bizarre.
He felt he lost out during the war.
I mean, he built up this very complicated differential
analyzer with vacuum tubes and so on,
which was in the middle of MIT.
And it never did anything.
And he felt that people just passed it by and didn't
pay any attention to it.
And that was as well part of it.
[INTERPOSING VOICES]
Did you know if his work in trying to build a digital base
four computer in about 1938, to '39
with Ratford and [INAUDIBLE]?
This is the Rockefeller?
No, before the Rockefeller analyzer.
There was a--
[INTERPOSING VOICES]
Yes.
--computer project in the EE Department
just before World War II.
And Ratford among others was involved.
Truman Gray also had some--
[INTERPOSING VOICES]
Sam Caldwell
Sam Caldwell.
I found out about it from Carl [INAUDIBLE] right up.
Yes.
And he was focused primarily as I recall now
in the development of a vacuum tube that
would do the switching.
Yeah.
And of course, the project was stopped at the beginning
of World War II.
It was restarted, according to Carl,
immediately after World War II.
And then the [INAUDIBLE],, who was the [INAUDIBLE]
at that time, came to the conclusion [INAUDIBLE]
involved that there was no point in having a computer
project in the department on an essentially shoestring support
when there was Whirlwind next door going on
with the millions of dollars of funding.
So he was stopped.
And [INAUDIBLE] returned to the sponsor,
it was a foundation of some sort, a check,
for the balance of the unexpended money.
And probably that it might have been the last time
that MIT returned any money to a sponsor.
Anyway, when you said--
What was the year of that luncheon that you talked about?
That was the before '62.
In '62.
That's right.
The decision to go ahead with Project Mac had been made.
Yeah.
And I was in the planning stage, and I had a lot of contact
with Phil at that time, and he made
that suggestion, which was--
Well, I had talked to them much earlier
and got some of that feeling.
Of course, we were reasonably close back
the '30s when I worked with his machine.
Anyway, coming back to Whirlwind, after--
it wasn't much more than the six months that after I arrived,
I became convinced that something
had to be done to make most of MIT
aware of digital computers-- of computers in general.
And Whirlwind was the obvious.
And Forester admitted, a little grudgingly,
that there was some spare time, and that people
could come and use the machine when they weren't busy.
So I went down to my friends in the Navy, ONR, and said,
look, why don't you add a little bit to the Whirlwind
funds to set up a set of research assistants
to use Whirlwind.
And I'll set up a committee at MIT.
And we'll appoint research assistants
in as many departments as are willing to take them.
My feeling was that the only way you
were going to get faculty interested and using computers
was to get a graduate student under their direction using
computers.
So ONR agreed.
And I forget when it was, '53 or '54,
something like that, when the first assistantships were
available.
No, it was earlier.
Was it earlier?
Oh yeah.
[INTERPOSING VOICES]
I started the summer '51.
Really?
I was in the first crop.
Well, then it went faster than I thought.
Anyway, we had somewhere between six and eight assistantships
all spread around.
There were a couple in physics, and there
were a number in math, and there were
a number in the various electrical engineering
departments.
And one or two in economics even somewhere along the line.
So things began to build up.
But it was obvious that very soon,
the available time in Whirlwind was going to be saturated.
And something would have had to be done.
So I can't remember how I got acquainted
with Cuthbert Hurd in IBM.
Somewhere along in the early '50s, he started to visit here.
And I was telling him some of the complications.
And one of the things that I kept pressing on him
was the point that the first computer manufacturer that
installs a machine in a place like MIT
was going to have a great advantage in selling machines
after these graduates got out.
You'll notice that you're not acquainted with Cuthbert
Hurd through Fortran?
Is that correct?
Could be.
Mrs. or Mr.?
Fortran is another story.
Because IBM persuaded--
[INTERPOSING VOICES]
I vaguely remember that the Whirlwind people were very much
against compilers--
Fortran in particular as it was being developed.
Because it was going to use a lot more of computer time.
They had to run the problem through twice.
First to compile it, and then to run the problem.
And the old timers didn't like this.
[INTERPOSING VOICES]
--some of them, but not all.
No, that's true.
There were a number of them took part of it.
And considered amicably, they became old timers after that.
[LAUGHTER]
Did I recall, Corby, in '51, didn't Charlie Adams
have a summer thing?
And a couple of his people, Sheldon, something or other--
Sheldon Best.
--put together an algebraic compiler.
And then, by the time I came back to MIT '55,
I heard rumors they'd gone to MIT to work on Fortran.
Yeah.
Yeah, there was--
We had a session on that.
Yeah.
Maybe Sheldon did do something.
Of course, Hal Lanning was the one
who did it in the instrumentation lab,
did the early algebraic interpreter.
Was he at Fortran too?
No, he never got related to the--
he just stayed within the Draper orbit
and continued to work with compilers for them.
Lanny was here, and sort of interesting story quickly,
because it's a diversion really, but you'd be interested.
He developed a compiler, and he's
so good at [INAUDIBLE] which is still is
that you just never trusted the compiler.
Wow.
And when he was sitting here, he said he still
doesn't trust compilers.
It's much easier to do it with the sounding language.
He pushed it.
And so, you get that kind of personal thing.
But they did do it around '54 I think it was.
Yeah.
Well, they're always people that have clung to the details.
But no, Phil basically right.
I don't quite know how the liaison got started.
But MIT had showed them-- and wasn't there
another-- one other person?
Yeah there was somebody.
I can't remember their name.
And Sheldon was part of that original--
[INAUDIBLE]
Now, there was another MIT person.
Sheldon was part of that original team,
and it was the one that got involved
in the index [INAUDIBLE] dropped optimization, which
became a monument to obscurity, in the sense it was very
effective, and people never understood it
for about five or 10 years later how they did it.
Because they didn't write it up very well.
[INAUDIBLE] at all.
But it was one of key.
Anyway, Cuthbert, I guess, managed
to persuade the top people at IBM
that something had to be done.
And the next thing I heard was that Jim Killian called in
and said, they understood that Watson
wanted to donate to a big computer to MIT.
Because he was mad at Harvard.
[LAUGHTER]
Hmm?
So that's essentially the way the thing got started.
MIT was building the Compton building, what is it 26?
Building 26, right.
And the ticker was that IBM would
pay for some additional amount of the building,
plus a hunk that stuck outside, that
was going to be the housing--
the place for the computer.
So we had a lot of arguments as to how the thing be installed,
and how to cut down the noise on the air conditioning
and all the rest of the stuff.
But it got in.
In the meantime, IBM was willing to donate additional money
for research assistants.
Both at MIT and at New England universities, a dozen
each, I believe.
So I had to set up committees, both inside MIT
and with their related colleges.
I don't know, was that the time that you got acquainted
with the fact that we were going to get a computer,
or had you heard about it earlier?
I became acquainted with it when two IBMers--
all I remember is that they were two tall men in dark suits.
[LAUGHTER]
Wearing ties.
And one of them was Truman Hunter,
and the other one was either Cuthbert Hurd or Nat Rochester.
I've forgotten which, but I think
it was probably Rochester.
Came up to MIT to-- sorry.
Came up to Dartmouth to sell this concept.
And their main contact with John Kemeny.
And then I went to lunch with them
and became acquainted with Rochester
and harangued him about something.
I suppose it was AI.
And he offered me a summer job, which I took so.
I was with IBM in the summer of '55.
And then I became, I guess, Dartmouth's representative
to the school.
Right, you did.
Right.
That was my first acquaintance.
At any rate, when we got going, sometime in '57
I believe the machine got in.
We began to roll.
And the machine very soon got overloaded, of course.
As more and more people began to use it,
as more and more faculty began to learn what could be done.
It wasn't very long before these ideas that you,
and you too, began to percolate.
The idea of interactive work, or [INAUDIBLE]
and some of his early work too.
And I started talking about it to IBM.
Well, they weren't interested.
This was one of these fancy long-haired university
sort of things that would never get off the ground.
And they were perfectly willing for us to play around with it.
But first, we're not at all interested in helping out
with additional equipment.
It soon became quite obvious that in order to get very far,
we had to have more memory anyway.
I would add a footnote, that there
was very little recognition in those days
of the rapid obsolescence that would characterize computing
equipment.
And I can still recall a kind of battleship.
In those days, there were no false floors.
And the original computer floor was steel, maybe a quarter
1/2 inch, or maybe 1/2 inch steel plate, which
a welder would come in with a cutting torch,
make a hole for cables to go down underneath the floor.
It was a gigantic construction project that
would lay off the machine room.
And every time you wanted to change the machine room,
you have to get new steel plate, or weld up the holes.
It was really wild.
And then, you had persuaded them over this noise issue,
that they should customize the airflow on each of the units,
so that in fact, they were inducted directly
from the plant and rather, all the internal fans
were taken out.
Much against IBM's--
IBM objected pretty hard to it, because --
Yeah.
--and we'd never do that ever again.
But it seemed like a good idea at the time.
Yeah.
Well, it quieted things.
Yeah.
It also led to silver migration, because our air conditioning
unit was--
this is really a footnote on a footnote.
Our air conditioning unit was the usual crude affair.
And we got excessive moisture condensation
around the terminal strips of the 704.
[LAUGHTER]
And it turned out that--
Forgot about that.
--it was a design, a production flaw back at IBM,
which they didn't really find out about until about two
or three years later.
That somebody had substituted silver as a contact material.
And that led to a phenomena which was well
known in the research literature,
but the production people didn't understand,
that the silver ions would migrate across the insulation
and proceed to form a high resistance bridge, which
would lead to shorting and signal failures, and so forth.
And about the time we shipped out that 704,
it was just about ready to be scrapped anyway,
because we were getting silver migration problems everywhere.
Well, my problem at the time was to keep up
with the demand for computing.
At the same time help out as much
as I could by persuading [INAUDIBLE] to add equipment as
needed.
And I felt myself a little bit between two hard rocks.
I guess I can jump ahead and let the rest of you
fill in in between.
About the time that ac got started, of course,
there was a general feeling that IBM was not the manufacturer
to help out with time-sharing, because they've been pretty
much against it right along.
[INAUDIBLE] complicate it.
Yeah, I know you will.
And so, when the final decision was
made to get a GE machine for the Mac,
I was the one that got it in the neck.
I got called in by--
or no, I guess, I forget the guy's name.
Head of IBM for New England.
Bradley.
Phil Bradley.
Yeah Phil Bradley, came in and gave me the worst
dressing down I have ever had.
[LAUGHTER]
MIT was--
[INTERPOSING VOICES]
--just didn't have any conscience or--
Harvard had betrayed them before.
[INTERPOSING VOICES]
Any gratitude toward a company that
had befriended the institute for so long,
we went out of our way to rub IBM's nose in the dirt.
It took about a half hour before I
had a chance to even say thank you or goodbye.
Well, IBM in those days would punish people badly,
financially.
Oh yeah.
What happened to Bradley?
He survived a few more years.
With an account in [INAUDIBLE]?
But the person that really caught it
was Lauren Bullet, who worked in the IBM--
[INTERPOSING VOICES]
--university representative, and who
had been one of our staunchest friends in trying to help us.
And they of course, in standard fashion,
punished him the worst.
Yeah.
Why don't we go on to Herb, because--
Yeah.
I think so.
--there are many things in this conversation
which I would consider to be quite inaccurate.
OK.
But let's sort of go through the preliminary part first.
Herb, you're on.
OK.
One footnote or aside before I start.
This is 20 years ago.
And as Bob [INAUDIBLE] pointed out,
we were awfully God damn young.
And we were awfully insecure.
And we didn't know each other very well, truth be known.
I've heard John and Corby say things about their background
I never knew.
And I rather suspect there are things in my background
they never knew.
We never got to be friends.
And that's a pity, because I think
computing and time-sharing and the whole megillah
might have gone off in a different direction
if we hadn't been quite so pitted against each other.
If there had been a little more of a vector dot product.
Be as it may, I was born in Ohio.
I matriculated high school in Brooklyn, New York.
I was a real pain in the ass.
I was a hot shot.
I won a Westinghouse as a senior,
and figured I was one of the smartest kids in the country.
I came to MIT convince of one thing.
I did want to be a professor.
My dad had tried the industrial route,
and I watched him bleed a little bit too much.
And I thought there was such a thing as an ivory tower.
And I couldn't decide what I wanted to be.
So I solved the problem by tripling
in electrical engineering, physics, and chemical
engineering.
One of my dad's good friends was a chemical engineer.
[INAUDIBLE]