The history of time-sharing is the subject of the lecture.
And I'm not going to try to address that.
Instead, I want to address the context of our speaker, who's
played a key role.
And I want to go back to his roots a bit,
because I want to explain why he's in a position to give
this distinguished lecture.
I won't discuss his books.
He has several.
I won't discuss his long list of papers.
I won't discuss his patents, the awards,
or the many academies he belongs to, has been elected to.
He has a truly distinguished record.
As the program notes briefly outline,
Bob Fano was born in Torino, Italy.
He came to this country when Europe came
under the totalitarian grip.
He came to the US, and MIT in particular.
He got his bachelor's in 1941.
And he went on from there as a student engineer
at General Motors whose specialty
was power engineering.
And he tells me that he was in charge of maintaining
the welding machines.
And he lasted all of six months.
And he decided that was not for him.
And came back to MIT to enter graduate school--
clearly a great decision.
As a graduate student, he went through a--
had a nice career of being a TA and then an instructor
when that was a meaningful rank in those days.
It still is.
He became a staff member of the radiation laboratory
during wartime, moved into working with microwaves,
antennas, basically traditional electromagnetic
or modern electromagnetic applications.
He got his doctorate in 1947, just after the war.
And he joined the faculty as an assistant professor.
At that point, he moves into his second career,
because one of the amazing things about Bob Fano
is he's had about-- at least four careers,
depending on how you count.
The first was this power machinery.
The second was communication theory and information theory.
And that was a very fruitful period.
It lasted for approximately a decade.
And he also, at that time, became very active
as an educator.
And he was part of the curriculum revolution
that MIT led and which led to our current notions of a core,
and in particular, led to a couple of books, which he
and Dick Adler and Lan Chu authored.
By the early 1960s, the time was ripe for time-sharing.
But it hadn't yet happened I'm not
going to discuss that, because I know our speaker is
going to talk about that.
Suffice it to say, it was a very--
it was a watershed period, a very important period.
And Bob was right in the thick of that.
But he also played an even more important role.
And that was, he played the role of establishing
computer science at MIT.
And this is not as well known.
So let me spend a moment to outline it.
The situation in the early 1960s was
that we had all the ingredients of a computer science
department.
But we didn't have the focus.
And we certainly didn't have the leadership.
Most of the participants were relatively young.
And we were missing the leadership.
Bob Fano was the person that recognized that, and stepped
in, and supplied it.
And the major outgrowth of that was Project MAC,
which has in turn evolved.
And it now comes in two flavors, the Laboratory for Computer
Science and the AI Laboratory.
But out of that same framework, which the time-sharing served
as kind of a nucleating base, came the first beginnings
of a computer science major and what
has eventually evolved to be a de
facto department within EECS.
The computer science undergraduate curriculum
was basically started and established
under Bob Fano's urging.
And it now accounts for approximately 10%
of our majors--
undergraduate majors, of course.
A few years later, Bob Fano became the first associate head
for computer science.
And that in turn was a recognition
that in fact, the subject had become sufficiently important
and required enough attention, that in fact, it
needed further management.
And finally, let me--
before introducing Bob, let me just
leave you with one brief anecdote about names.
We all know names are terribly important as symbols.
And I hope Bob will go into the name of how Project MAC got
to be what it is.
But I won't mention--
but he probably won't mention that when Bob first
came to this country, he was named Roberto Fano.
And when he finally came to be naturalized,
he was debating whether to change it
or not to Robert Fano, said to be a little more American.
And he got to talking with his friend, Professor Al Hill.
And apparently, Al Hill came up with a brilliant thought,
that since he was in the Boston area,
that the way he could really get ahead was to make a change,
but not to change the letters, but to change the punctuation,
and that all he really ought to do
is change his name to Robert O'Fano.
[LAUGHTER]
Well, the loss to Boston politics has been our gain.
Let me introduce Robert Fano.
[APPLAUSE]
Thank you very much, Corby.
Al Hill still calls me O'Fano.
That's a true story.
I will be talking tonight about events
that took place in the decade of the '60s, 20 years
plus or minus 5.
I will say that was a golden year for computers,
for computation, at MIT.
A lot of things happened beside time-sharing.
And more importantly, as Corby mentioned,
the foundation of the educational and research
program in the department were indeed
established at that time.
There is no question that time-sharing
was at the center of the scene, both as a research topic
and also as a tool for a lot of other work.
But it was by no means alone on the scene.
A lot of other computer science research
was going on in that period, particularly
the artificial intelligence group, which was originally
part of Project MAC.
I was very active in that period.
And I hope that some of the other topics in computer
science will be discussed at further meeting.
I have barely, barely enough time
to talk about time-sharing.
Now, I'm not going to make this an historical talk.
I won't talk about facts and dates.
It's not my style.
And I would be very boring.
What I'm going to focus on is the ideas, the interaction
of ideas that took place at that time,
and the people in whose mind those ideas were
born and evolved.
So that's going to be the subject.
I wish I could do something more.
I wish I could bring to you the excitement of the period.
But that's very hard to recreate.
Now, to start with, I would like to describe to you what
computation was around 1960 so that you can see
how time-sharing came about.
While there was a computation center at MIT,
it had been established in 1956 by Philip Morse.
Morse was, I should say, yes, a very distinguished physicist.
He's also well known because his work
during World War II laid the foundation
for a new discipline that got to be called operations research.
And as a matter of fact, he established the Operations
Research Center at MIT.
Now, in 1956, he persuaded IBM to establish at MIT a IBM 704
installation to serve one shift MIT research and one shift
research in other New England colleges.
This was established, of course, charge free.
But MIT promised in return to put up a building.
And building 26 was then being built.
So they decided in a hurry to add a wing to it.
And that wing is where the physics library is now.
That was the computation center, established in 1956.
Now, originally, the machine was a 704.
It became a 709 in 1960.
7090, which was the first IBM transistorized machine, that
is the 709 transistorized, came in, I believe, in 1962.
And the 794, which was just the addition
of a floating point, arithmetic unit,
came in shortly thereafter.
Now, I want to show you what--
well, first of all, let me say, a computation center
was something special in those days.
It was both a showpiece in the sense
that every group touring MIT will stop in front
of the computation center.
There were big windows.
And you still see them over in building 26.
And you saw all the time crowds gaping
at this marvel of modern engineering, the computer.
But they couldn't get in, just look through the window.
It was also a temple with his own high priest.
Now, I want to show you what it looked like then.
Well, let me see if it works.
I'd like to get a picture if I could.
We're being observed.
Huh?
We are being watched.
OK.
It will appear.
Well, that is the computation center.
And right in the middle of it, there
is the associate director, Dr. Fernando Jose Corbato.
Of course, he didn't have a beard in those days.
And you look a little bit younger, I must say.
Now, he was associate director.
And I must mention that one of the major contributions
that Philip Morris made to sharing
was that somewhere in the early '50s,
he gave an assistantship in computation to Corby, Fernando
Jose Corbato.
He's generally known as Corby.
And that's how he cut his teeth on software,
by working on Whirlwind.
Now, when the computation center was established in 1956,
Morse had the further good judgment
of offering a research associateship
to Corby, who had just completed his doctorate
in theoretical physics.
So without knowing at the time, he
made sure that the future Mr. Time-Sharing
would stay in computation.
So that's a significant contribution to time-sharing,
because of course, you all know, there really
is Mr. Time-Sharing.
I'm just talking about what he did.
It's a long-established tradition, as you will hear,
that he does a thing, and I talk about it.
It's kind of an act we go about.
I'm the front man.
Well, now, the computation center
was operating in what was then called
a closed shop, which meant that people who had a program--
and incidentally, the program were all
punched on so-called IBM cards.
Each of these-- well, let me say,
this box here contains 1,000 of these devices, the IBM cards.
And there are four more down there.
Now, altogether, they have a storage capacity
essentially equal to a garden-variety
double-sided diskette, roughly.
Now, that gives you some proportion, you see.
Now, all program had to be punched on these cards.
So people arrived at the computation center.
There was a counter.
And you gave them a batch of cards.
They will take them.
They will go-- very efficiently operated--
will go to a machine that will translate, read the cards,
and put them on tape.
Then the tape was run on the computer.
Then the output, again, went into another similar machine
of the same, which will generate some printout of some
of the cards.
All right, now this whole-- the whole process turnaround time
was pretty long, something like one or two days, often.
Am I correct?
It was about that.
Now, and people printed each printout for two reasons.
One was that to debug your program,
you had to get what was called a memory dump, all right?
That's one reason.
The second reason, that you could get at a computer
so seldom that when you got to it,
you'd better compute anything that you could possibly
think and print out anything that you could possibly think,
you see?
To make sure-- because otherwise,
it would take a while before you got another shot.
So that was the type of operation.
Now, to give you another order of magnitude,
the 7094 that existed in that period-- that's the 7094.
I read it carefully.
You will see 7094 written on the console over there.
But you are too far away.
7090, I'm sorry.
And a core memory of 32,000 36-bit words, right?
Now, that memory rented, list rent, for $17,000 a month,
all right?
The arithmetic-- no, I'm sorry, the instruction processing unit
rented for about that much too, $17,000.
The arithmetic unit, which was a separate unit,
was half that much.
That gives you some idea of the cost of those days.
And it's important to keep in mind that.
Now, the speed, I believe that the memory cycle
was something like 2 microseconds, something
like that.
So you realize that it wasn't quite the horsepower of a PC,
see?
Now, keep it keep that fact in mind, because it's important.
Now, there was a lot of frustration,
as you can well expect, because if you misplaced
a comma in any program, well, it was two days that have gone.
You know, you corrected the comma quickly.
But then you had to wait two days to have another shot.
So that was very frustrating.
Now, this is the typical mode of operation of university
computation centers.
And in industry, it was the same thing, was typical operation.
But at MIT, however, there was another style
of computing as well.
And that is very important.
It has a lot to do with time-sharing.
This alternate style of computing
that I will call it online computing
really dated back to the Whirlwind computer.
Since it was a home-grown computer,
people were not so worried about how much
it cost if you sat there and fiddled around for a while.
So people started using it online.
Now, the Whirlwind computer was ready to be
demolished around 1951.
And suddenly, a competitor discovered
that you could build an air defense
system around a computer.
That's how Lincoln Laboratory was born.
So the Whirlwind computer became the primary tool
in the original experimentation on the air defense system.
But other things happened.
You see, the whole group under Forrester--
I'm sure many of you heard this talk.
It was the first talk in the series--
moved to Lincoln Laboratory with him.
So a tradition of online computation and development,
Lincoln Laboratory got established.
Now, there was a person that was very critical in that respect.
His name was Wes Clark.
He was a top computer designer.
And he designed the TX-0 computer,
which was shortly thereafter loaned, permanent loan,
to electrical engineering department and started students
here working online--
very important-- and then developed the TX-2 computer,
a much more powerful computer, which,
because Clark believed in that, was used online.
That is, you signed up on the board.
You wander for half an hour, for an hour.
And as long as there were slots available,
you would have had the computer totally at your disposal.
That was a computer with 64,000 words of memory.
It was the first big core memory ever built, you see?
He also built another little computer this time called LINC.
And that was a computer that was specifically
designed for real-time laboratory experiments.
And that had tremendous influence too.
So there was this whole tradition of online computation
and computers in Lincoln Laboratory.
Now, let me-- now, I may mention also
that one of the people that were in the team that built the TX-2
computer happened to be Ken Olson, who
left Lincoln Laboratory shortly thereafter and started DEC,
you see.
And he's still chief executive officer of DEC.
Now, that tradition went into DEC.
That's why they came out with the PDP-1 computer around 1960.
Was it '60?
Something like that, yeah.
All right?
For online use.
So a whole tradition of online use
small computer, minicomputer, grew out, really, of Whirlwind,
right?
Now, there was another path, however.
Well, let me show.
One of the very important pieces of work done on TX-2 was what
was called a program called Sketchpad by--
that was a doctorate thesis by Ivan Sutherland.
Now, Ivan Sutherland did this work--
his thesis was completed in 1962.
And you see him there at a console of the TX-2.
Now, a scope was the routine thing for those computer--
I wouldn't call that a minicomputer.
It was a big one in those days.
You see, and he's there.
He developed the first that I know
honest-to-goodness computer-aided design graphical
system.
And that's it, you see?
Now, but there was another ramification.
You see, Whirlwind was--
grew up in one of the department laboratories, which,
at that time, was called the Servomechanisms Laboratory.
It changed name when Frank Reintjes over there
became director and became the Electronic System Laboratory.
And now it's called LEDS.
So it's changed name, but still the same laboratory.
You see, since the Whirlwind was born there, several people who
stayed, who didn't go to Lincoln,
were permeated with the same ideas.
And there were some very significant computer projects
that took place there.
First of all, there was a numerically controlled machine
tool very early, you see, and then the APT language
for programming that machine--
for generating the tapes that control the machine.
And then, finally, the laboratory
got together with the mechanical engineering department.
And by 1959 or '60, they had a project
on computer-aided design.
Now, one of the people who cut his teeth in APT is over there.
His name is Doug Ross.
And I think I've seen him over there.
Stand up, Doug, so that people can compare.
[LAUGHTER]
Now, Doug, continuing his work on the language that
was called automated engineering design, and then, not long
thereafter, left MIT, was the founder of SoftTech,
and is still chairman of the board,
but now is part-time lecturer in the department again.
Now, at about that time--
I'm talking now '62--
no, 1960, there was a very important paper
that was written and that created a great deal
of interest in the community.
The author was JCR Licklider, who wrote a paper called
"Man-Computer Symbiosis."
Now, you see, from Lincoln Laboratory,
these ideas permeated the firm of Bolt, Beranek, and Newman,
where Licklider was vice president.
Now, I must also say that Licklider
was a distinguished experimental psychologist
and was on our faculty just around 1950 for a short period
before going to BBN, so was a member of the family.
And he got enamored of computers and wrote this very influential
paper called "Man-Computer Symbiosis,"
where it was emphasized the advantage that one could draw
psychologically from man-machine interaction.
That was a very influential paper.
All right, now this is the environment
that existed in 1960.
All right, who invented time-share?
Well, obviously, it was a very favorable environment.
Far as I know, the first written mention of something that I
would call a time-sharing system was a memorandum written--
dated January 1, 1959, and written
by John McCarthy, who was a member of the faculty
of the department at that time.
A couple years, three years later, he left for Stanford,
where he's been ever since.
Now, let me say a few words about John McCarthy.
John McCarthy is well known for a number of things
at about the same time.
As a matter of fact, a year later,
he invented LISP, just plain that,
and wrote a classic paper with a theoretical foundation
for LISP.
At the same time, he was a member
of the international committee that defined ALGOL 60.
So he was a major figure in the computer field.
So he wrote this memorandum.
This was a memorandum to the director
of the computations center, which
was Professor Philip Morse.
Shortly thereafter, in June of the same year,
1959, a Britisher by the name of Christopher Strachey presented
a paper at an international meeting,
essentially made the similar, same suggestion.
Now, a couple of words about Christopher Strachey.
Christopher Strachey, I think, was an EE by trade, I believe,
or a physicist.
I'm not sure-- one or the other.
But he became an exponent, a very important figure
in computer science in England.
He worked on theoretical linguistics.
And as a matter of fact, he was, in the '60s,
a visiting professor here for a year.
And we gained a great deal in the development of a curriculum
from his teaching.
Unfortunately, Christopher died relatively young.
I think he was still in the 50s in 1975.
I had the privilege of spending an evening with him,
I believe, something like a couple of months
before he died in Oxford.
He was at a chair in Oxford.
All right.
Now, what were the goals of time-sharing?
Obviously, one strong motivation,
certainly on the part of McCarthy,
is to eliminate the frustration that
resulted from missing or misplaced commas
that he was after.
Then he shortened the turnaround time to practically nothing.
So that was his goal.
He felt also that big computers were not efficiently,
in a real sense, utilized.
He wanted to have an efficient utilization.
You see, you got to be very careful about efficiency.
When the community of users puts out large print-out
and computer everything that you can possibly
compute to save themselves time because of the long turnaround,
it is not an efficient operation.
So if you look at the overall efficiency,
there was a great deal that could
be gained by what got to be known as time-sharing system.
Now, he also had another agenda that had to do with AI.
John McCarthy was an AI guy.
He had invented LISP.
Of course, he used a lot of memory, all right?
So he wanted a big memory.
But you know, big memory, particularly then,
very, very, very expensive.
So he was looking for a way of building economic justification
for a large memory.
When he didn't use it, somebody else could use it.
So that was clear.
I remember very clearly that was part of his agenda.
And he was right.
Well, generally speaking, what he had in mind
was to combine the power--
in those days, it was great-- of the 7090.
Even if I denigrate it now by comparing to a PC,
it was a very powerful machine for those days.
And combine that with the easy access that had become
characteristic of the TX-0 computer that was more or less
next door-- it was one floor up--
which was an 18-bit machine.
It had the power that an 18-bit machine and a small core memory
had, although it was far from trivial.
So he wanted to combine the two, all right?
Now, John McCarthy also gave a lecture.
As part of the centennial celebration of MIT,
there was a series of lectures in 1961.
And he came out in that lecture with the idea
of a computer utility.
Now, this is a very important notion.
You see, it's one thing to think of time-sharing a computer,
another to think about a computer being
a sort of a public utility, to supply
computer power to all people.
And as a matter of fact, it's this notion
that really got me interested.
And in those days, I used an awful lot
the analogy in talking and writing
or computer power and electric power.
The real big difference, that a distribution system,
as you could do with electric power made,
was that power tools were available to individual
as individual, amplifying the capability of the hands.
Without an electric distribution system,
you could have power tools only in the faculty,
with a steam engine running the whole thing.
And my vision of what a computer utility meant,
and John McCarthy's vision, was that you could distribute
computer power to amplify the intellectual capability
of people, just like power tools amplify the physical and manual
capability of individual.
That was kind of the image that arose from his talk.
Furthermore, MIT was very worried
about its computational facility,
because computation was just booming around 1960, '61.
So a committee was appointed to study
the computer needs of MIT.
And that committee, which, in the end,
was chaired by John McCarthy, wrote a report
which strongly recommended the establishment
of a time-sharing computer system.
By that time, work in the development
of a computation-- a time-sharing system
was already going on, of course.
But that was a very strong recommendation.
Now, before I get to the time-sharing system itself,
let me point out that while the notion of time-sharing
gained quickly a lot of support, that was by no means unanimous,
by no means.
And some very outstanding people in the computer field
were dead set against it.
I'm mentioning this because it clarifies some of the problems.
Well, your position largely, but not exclusively,
was based on efficient utilization
of this very precious resource called computer time.
It was a very precious resource.
And many people were so worried about it
that it didn't occur to them there was also
something else called precious human time,
and that one had to make a reasonable compromise
between using the two efficiently.
It was not all one way.
Well, let me mention some examples to be very clear.
I remember visiting Dick Hamming of Hamming Code
fame and the Bell Telephone Laboratory.
And he took the attitude that it was essentially morally
wrong to allow somebody to type in instructions to a computer.
He was serious.
He was serious, all right?
Well, a little bit at a lesser scale,
there was Gene Amdahl, who gained a lot of fame
as the designer of the 360 system for IBM,
who just felt it was a bad idea to interrupt a computer
while it was running--
I mean a program while it was running.
He just thought it was bad--
again, an efficiency reason, and for reasons
the designer of the 360 showed very clear
this very strong feeling that he had about that issue,
all right?
I remember sitting next to Clark--
Wes Clark, I mean, the Lincoln Laboratory Clark--
at a committee meeting in the department.
And somebody mentioned time-sharing.
And he turned to me and said, what there is to share?
That is, his view was that computers were--
the power of computer was so small
that there was not enough to share.
It didn't make any sense to talk about sharing.
Now, I know the view was that it was somehow intellectually bad.
Jay Forrester, for instance, who is, of course, an expert,
I remember him saying, well, when somebody makes a computer
run, he ought to sit down and think about the result
before he makes another run.
He shouldn't be in a position-- it's a bad habit
to keep trying things.
He should sit down and think.
Well, he changed his mind awfully quickly once he tried.
I'll tell you later the story.
[LAUGHTER]
So it was by no means-- these are not inconsequential people.
I want to mention their objective,
because it gives you some idea of the thinking of the time.
Well, time-sharing-- the first time-sharing system
was developed by none less than Corby
with his associate in the MIT Computation Center.
And the first version was still on the 709
and was demonstrated in November 1961.
Now, a much improved version--
the improvement continued.
This was for the 7094--
was in regular operation by the summer '63.
But a lot of problems had to be solved.
I believe that it could handle something like 10 or 15 users
at the time.
There were a lot of problems to be solved.
Now, people have often asked, what made time-sharing possible
at that time?
And my answer is two things.
First of all, you needed a transistorized computer.
A vacuum tube computer, they were just not up long
enough to make time-sharing worthwhile, just simply that.
You had to have a transistorized computer.
The other thing was the fact that IBM came out
with a very nice device called a disk file in
just about 1962, '63.
And now let me show you what it was.
That huge box was the 1301 disk file.
It was a marvelous device.
It had a stack of disks and arms that
move independently in and out to get on the tracks on the disk.
I think the 1301 was 9 or 18 million words, something
of that order of magnitude.
But that made time-sharing worthwhile.
Before that, mass storage was tapes.
And we had a beautiful demonstration of the difference
that the disk file meant.
That means relatively quick access
to programs and data in a mass storage device.
That made a tremendous difference.
Now, another thing that was developed at that time
was a fast ROM.
That was also big box.
But it was essential for swapping programs
in and out of memory.
Now, you know what time-sharing is.
So I won't try to describe the time-sharing technique.
Now, this wasn't-- during that period,
a lot of other time sharing projects got started.
At MIT, there was a time sharing system on a PDP-1
that Jack Dennisd where is Jack?
Some place there.
I'll come back to that later--
developed.
At Bolt, Beranek, and Newman, there
was another time-sharing system on the PDP-1.
There was a very serious time-sharing effort
at the System Development Corporation in Santa Monica,
using a surplus computer of the state system.
I don't remember what the number was.
Q32.
Q--
Q32.
I thought it was something like that.
All right.
Then-- very interesting and had a lot of consequences.
You see, that machine did not-- that system did not
have a disk file.
And you could tell the difference between CTSS,
the Compatible Time-Sharing System that Corby developed
and the system of SDS because of that.
Everything was stored on drums or tapes.
And it takes forever to get to data program.
Now, the other very important time-sharing actually
was at Dartmouth College, originally
spurred by Professor Kemeny, who eventually
became president of the Dartmouth College
and the creator of BASIC.
That was a little different time-sharing system
in the sense that it was a one-language time-sharing
system.
You could only program and use BASIC.
It was built essentially around a BASIC interpreter,
while the systems that I talked about were multi-language,
were really truly general-purpose time-sharing
system--
and a lot of others.
I won't get into that.
Now, at that time, that's the time
when Project MAC got started.
And I want to tell you how it got started.
Licklider, about whom I spoke before, in 1962,
became director of the information
processes branch of the Advanced Research Project Agency
of the Department of Defense.
Now, he decided that he was going to start a program.
He used the term centers of excellence
in computing in several universities
to push man-machine interactions with time-sharing.
That was the goal.
Well, he started running around the country,
trying to build up interest in doing that.
And of course, he came to MIT.
And he wanted very much to have MIT start the big research
effort on that basis.
The trouble was that the people that
knew anything about computers were kind of young.
You saw the picture of Corby.
Professor Morse, who was director of the computation
center, had already too many fingers in too many pies.
And he didn't want to stick his finger in another pie.
So nothing was happening.
That's where I got in.
I felt very strongly that MIT had to have a big research
effort in the computer field.
And I couldn't see anybody ready to do it.
And well, I hated the idea of managing anything
in those days, and still do, but kind of
got caught by Licklider's what I call contagious enthusiasm.
So what happened is that there was a meeting in Virginia
in which I spent quite a bit of time talking with Licklider.
As a matter of fact, there was a long, long train ride
back to Washington.
That's when I talked with him.
It was the day before Thanksgiving.
I want to tell you the story, because it shows
you something about the MIT.
Things can go very fast at MIT sometimes.
Well, the next day, it was Thanksgiving.
And I kept thinking about this.
And I said, oh, hell, I'll dive in and close my eyes.
So I decided to start Project MAC, what became Project
MAC, on Thanksgiving day.
The next day, I had a date with the provost, who at that time
was Charlie Townes, the Nobel Prize, the laser guy.
So after talking about the other business,
I said, hey, I got this crazy idea.
Would you think about it, see if it makes sense to you?
He said, oh, go right ahead.
It makes sense.
So over the weekend, I wrote a two-page memorandum.
The next Tuesday, I had a date with the president, who was,
that time, Julius Stratton.
I told him what I had in mind.
And he said, where are you going to do it?
Well, as Professor Morse said at that time, MIT
he had been caught with its building down, quote unquote.
There was no place.
But by that time, I heard a story--
you know, Technology Square was just going up at that time.
And the top two floor of the building
had been leased by CEIR, which was a computer service company.
They intended to put a stress computer on the ninth floor.
That was the dream in those days-- the most powerful
machine in the world.
But by then, business had not gone to well.
And they were instantly getting rid of the lease commitment.
That was the eighth and ninth floor.
So I jumped in.
I knew already about it.
So I told Stratton, yeah, the eighth and ninth floor
look like they may be available.
Fine, he said.
Well, on Thursday, Licklider happened to be at MIT.
So we all gathered in Stratton's office and shook hands.
And that was it.
Then, of course, you had to write a proposal.
But everything was decided within a week, really.
There was a commitment of all those people within a week.
That's kind of unusual, but it does happen.
Well, all right.
Well, we wrote a proposal by January 14, I believe.
If you want to see it, here it is.
It was presented and approved in principle.
And we were given the authorization
to start spending money by March 1.
Well, I'd been planning.
So I had to hire somebody who was
going to be assistant director for administration.
And he showed up on March 1.
So I told him, you know, you'll go around the institute,
get your keys, get a parking permit,
get everything you need.
So he showed back in my office shortly thereafter.
He said, they won't give me a parking permit.
They asked me what I was going to work for.
And there is no name.
[LAUGHTER]
So I realized that either I had to create
a name, or otherwise, have the project go
by the name that has been used.
You see, when I wrote that memorandum,
as a matter of courtesy, of course,
I gave that memorandum to the dean of engineering, who
was Gordon Brown at that time.
And not long later, I went to see him about this.
And he told his secretary to get the memo out.
You know what he told her to do?
To file under FF, Fano's Folly.
[LAUGHTER]
So I either was going to be called Fano's Folly,
or I had to think of another name.
That's how Project MAC--
within a day, Project MAC, the name was coined.
Now, MAC stood originally for two--
had two meanings.
One, the goal, Machine-Aided Cognition, and the other,
the tool to achieve the goal, Multiple-Axis Computer.
Now, of course, a lot of meanings were coined.
One that was coined pretty shortly was--
and came from the West Coast, obviously--
was More Assets to Cambridge.
[LAUGHTER]
Now, by October 1 of 1963, a copy of CTSS,
as it existed in the computation center,
was installed and in operation under Project MAC.
And that becomes the basis of what
was later called a MAC system.
It was originally just plain a copy of CTSS,
and then evolved with time.
Now, I won't go through all the evolution.
By the end, it could support something like 30 users.
It rented for about $62,000 a month
with a 60% educational discount, which
meant a rental for something like $155,000 per month.
Now, let me show you what it looked like.
Oh, I haven't done things right.
I should have switched these papers.
Now-- oh, up instead of down.
Now, an interesting thing-- it has two banks of memory.
Each one had 32,000 36-bit words.
One was used for the system supervisor.
And the other was available to the user.
Now, you see, there is a lot of data channel.
There was a disk file there.
There were drums to speed up the swapping between core memory,
in and out of core memory.
There was also a card punch, card reader for--
to accommodate the past, and magnetic tapes.
There were two graphical displays.
And as a matter of fact, it was more than that.
And I'll come to that in a moment.
And then there was a transmission control unit,
which was called 7750.
It was a huge thing.
There was one person that knew how to program it.
And I still remember his bald head.
Terribly difficult to program, but it did the job beautifully
when it worked.
And that connected to the MIT, a private branch exchange,
so that we could dial in from all over the place
into the computer, and 30 lines eventually going
to the private branches exchange.
We also connected to the Telex international network operated
by Western Union and TWX national network operated
by AT&T. Now, I've talked about the computer, the operating
system.
But remember, to have good time-share, you need terminals,
and you need communications.
And let me talk a little bit about it,
because it was quite interesting.
Well, originally, we used something
that was called the Model 35 Teletype, which
was used by the TWX AT&T system for telegraphy.
Now, what you see there, sitting--
that's a Model 35 Teletype.
And you see Dick Mills, who was assistant director.
He was a graduate of this department that
got a master's in management.
After being in Project MAC, he became
head of information processing services at MIT.
And then he left for a big bank job in New York.
And he's now a private consultant.
Next to him is Oliver Selfridge, who was, for a couple of years,
associate director of Project MAC.
He was interested in artificial intelligence.
He was at Lincoln Laboratory.
And he was loaned to Project MAC to serve as associate director.
Now, those are the Model 35 type.
There were other people there also.
You see, there is a strange guy over there
sitting at a Model 35.
And that happened to be Moses without a beard.
And I don't know whether you were still
a graduate student or just an assistant professor-- graduate
student still.
Well, I stole it from your book, so you ought to know.
So there were all sorts of people in those terminals.
[LAUGHTER]
Everything.
They went places, all right.
Now, I said that we were connected to the Telex they
brought it abroad.
And in April '63, really shortly after Project MAC was started,
we had the first, I believe, operation
of a time-sharing system across the Atlantic.
And this is an historical document.
So let me show it.
Sitting at the other end was Professor Maurice Wilkes.
Now, Wilkes is the man who built at Cambridge the first storage
program computer.
He didn't invent it, but he built it first.
He retired from Cambridge when he reached the critical age
of 65, which was a few years ago,
and is now a part-time professor in the department.
I hope that some of you have met him.
He is called an adjunct professor.
The "adjunct" simply means part time.
Now, this is what it looked like.
This is actual from the printout that came--
I don't know whether this was the printout here
or the printout in England.
I'm not sure.
But that's what it did.
It gave a demonstration.
And then at the end--
this was at the meeting of the British Computer Society
and was an enthusiastic reception.
The president ran a program himself and was all excited,
all psyched up, particularly because there
was an electrical engineer in the program who
designed filters.
And this is the end.
And you see the message, all this absolutely magnificent
Edinburgh Computer Conference, so forth and so on.
So it was a great show.
Now, you remember those displays?
Well, there were various things connected there.
One was a PDP-1.
And look who is sitting at the PDP-1--
nobody less than Marvin Minsky.
See, that PDP-1 was connected to the computer.
Now, accidentally, I'm on the side there.
But that doesn't matter.
Now, there was another terminal.
Now, let me explain a little bit here.
Well, you see me there without glasses,
because the TV didn't like glasses.
But what you have on the right is a very, very powerful
display terminal for computer-aided design,
very powerful in those days, which was affectionately
known as the kluge.
John Watt, sitting right over there,
was inside of that whole development.
Now, the kluge was a really wonderful machine.
You see that globe on the side there?
Yeah, it's hard to see.
You could turn it just like a joystick.
And what it did, if you define in the computer
a three-dimensional object, would make that object rotate.
That is, it had hardware to make the transformation
of coordinates so that you saw the object rotate
in front of you.
This was 1963.
Now, one of the people that was quite effective this device
was professor Cy Leventhal in the biology department, who
just one day came over to see me and wanted to have some advice.
And I said, well, we'll talk about it later.
I had something in mind.
Let me show you around.
So I took him here.
And as I expected, he caught fire, real fire.
I was going skiing the next day.
And I had to make all the arrangements so that he
could start the next day.
This was just before Christmas.
What he saw was the opportunity to study complex molecules
in three dimensions.
And he did a lot of work.
He left for Columbia, unfortunately,
because he's a New Yorker.
And he had an offer from Columbia.
He had to go there.
But he kept doing this sort of work.
Now, let me get back a bit to the communication problem.
See, the Model 35 Teletype had only capitals.
Everything in the computer field was only capitals.
The big printers were all capitals.
Well, we wanted lowercase.
[LAUGHTER]
Well, fortunately, there was a little group
of people in Cambridge area that had
formed something that was called the reactive typewriter circle.
Now, I never know--
I don't know why they call it.
Was a man by the name of Calvin Moore, who was a computer type.
And then there was another man by the name
of Stewart Ferguson, who was a a computer type, all right?
And they were beating the drum for lowercase
and for other things.
So among other things, they arranged for a visit
to the Teletype Corporation in Skokie, Illinois.
And I asked the chief engineer about getting lowercase in it.
He said, you know, we made recently a survey of people,
whether they wanted lowercase.
It was negative.
They didn't want lowercase.
Of course, if you ask anybody what
he would do with something that that he never had before,
he can't think about.
Very few people can envision what
they can do with a new tool.
So well, eventually, Teletype produced the Model 37
that had also lowercase.
But in meantime, mother IBM came to help.
IBM had gotten out, not long before, the Selectric
typewriter-- you know, the golf ball machine.
So it was not very hard to put some electronics
and make it into a computer terminal.
That's what they did.
And it was called a 250, then 50.
And that was really a major tool.
But let me get back to communication.
Yeah, when we first approached New England Telephone
about connecting a computer to the switch network,
you can imagine what they said.
It's possible.
It's never been done.
In fact, that's what they said.
Fortunately, we got to some very helpful people in AT&T.
And they really were very helpful in organizing things.
One of the problems was that the telephone business,
particularly in those days, was highly regulated.
You couldn't do just what you wanted.
So they found a way of getting around.
And we started using the WX network.
I gave demonstrations from all over the place.
And they always worked, except at Brandeis,
where they had the wrong character set.
I don't know why.
But now, I have to tell you a story.
And pardon me if it's just slightly sexy--
sexist, I should say, not sexy.
[LAUGHTER]
Well, a person from AT&T that was helping us a great deal
was a fellow by the name of Earl Vaughn, who was
pretty high in AT&T, long line.
And I remember, I spoke at one of the meetings
of the reactive typewriter circle.
And he and my assistant director, Dick Mill,
was sitting in the front row.
In those days, I made speeches about the marriage of computers
and communication, because that's
what we were trying to do, marry computer and communication.
And Earl Vaughn, I understand, turned
to Dick Mill, who was sitting next to him, and said,
yeah, sure, a marriage of computer and communication.
But who is going to be the groom, and who
is going to be the bride?
Of course, that question has never been settled
and will never be settled, because the rules of the game
have been changed now.
All right, now let me get to something, in a sense,
more serious.
Now, the goal of Project MAC was to create an online community
and somewhat simulate a computer utility.
That was really the goal.
Well, within six months, we had achieved that goal.
That was incredible.
By spring '64, there were something
like 100 terminals around MIT, some 200 users
from 10 different departments.
All sorts of things were happening.
One thing that I am very sorry that I never did
was to hire real smart psychologists,
social psychologists, to really see
what was happening, because the phenomena that were happening
were very, very interesting from a sociological and
psychological standpoint.
Everything happened, from people making friendship
to the computer, to keyboards smashed by fists.
All sorts of things happened, all right?
It was extremely, extremely interesting.
Now, we also had regular users from other universities coming
in from the Teletype network.
Now, let me show you a paragraph.
Oh, there is a picture that I didn't show.
And it's going to mess up the sequence.
But I'll show it in a moment.
This is a paragraph from a report that I wrote,
a paper that I wrote in the spring '64,
just about six months.
It is becoming increasingly clear
that the system's ability to provide the equivalent
accessibility of a private computer
is a secondary, although necessary, characteristic.
What users find most helpful is the fact
that the system places literally at their fingertips
a great variety of services.
That was the important thing that became clear immediately.
The system users themselves are beginning
to contribute to the system in a substantial way
by publishing their work in the form of new commands.
Now, this was an amazing thing.
Before that time, nobody, nobody,
ever wrote a program expecting anybody else to use it.
It was too awkward.
Suddenly, it became easy.
And people started looking at a program as a publication
and make it-- specifically try to design it so that they
could use by other people.
It was just a phenomenon that occurred very quickly
and was very important.
Now, as a matter of fact, an editorial board
is being established to review such work
and formally approve its inclusion in the system.
We established an editorial board
and worked very hard on it.
Thus, the system is beginning to become
the repository of the procedural and data knowledge
of the community that it serves.
This last sentence is indeed the purpose of time-sharing.
That is it.
It's a communication system between users.
That's the primary function.
The process is almost secondary to it.
That's a point I want to make very, very strongly.
Now, lots of things were developed.
I want to mention a particular one.
And let me show you a picture.
Well, I have to skip a couple of them.
What is this?
Oh yeah.
All right.
The fellow on the side is Professor Jerry Saltzer.
He was a graduate student there.
And when he was a graduate student,
he wrote two very important programs
called Typeset and Runoff.
Typeset was the first context editor ever written, right?
It was fantastic.
And Runoff was a primordial scribe, you know?
But was quite capable already.
In fact, we used that system to write all our reports
and for a lot of other purposes.
I even used Typeset for accounting purposes.
I won't bother to tell you how.
But it was very powerful in many ways.
Now, it's interesting how he wrote it.
All of you who have done any writing or any work that really
requires a lot of concentration know that when, at some point,
you say, I got to do it, I got to do it, I got to do it,
then you pick out papers, a pencil.
And you go and sharpen one by one,
trying to delay the time when you really have to think.
[LAUGHTER]
I've done that, I know.
Jerry Saltzer wrote Typeset and Runoff in that spirit.
He had to write his thesis proposal.
[LAUGHTER]
Now, this is real history.
It's a fact.
Well, now, let me show you something else.
Time is flying, but let me show you something else.
Oh, no.
I want this.
Now, there was this user community around the computer.
And in a paper that Corby and I wrote for Scientific American,
I tried to make a sketch of the user's
view of this marvelous time-sharing system.
You see what I see?
That's a network of personal computers.
Well, they are called pseudo-processor and
pseudo-memory.
Take the "pseudos" out.
They have a file server, of course.
They have a message center.
They have also some services.
What DAEMON was was like a user, automatic user.
What it did, when anybody logged out and went
to look at the file, if anything has changed,
it was copying it in background, was copying it and back up
automatically.
FIBMON Was Foreground Initiated Background.
What it did, from a typewriter, you
could write a program when the computer had time
and put it in my file.
And I'll look at it tomorrow.
I combined online use with batch processes.
This was more traditional for.
No, DAEMON was that?
Yeah.
What did I have in the BACKGROUND?
BACKGROUND was a traditional background.
Was a traditional background, yeah,
where you just ran the program when the computer had time,
right?
Now, I was surprised when I saw it.
It is, has the geometry of a network of personal computers.
As far as I know, none with those features
are in operation today.
I'll come back to that, although I understand from Professor
Saltzer that indeed, that is sort of a goal
he has for Project Attila.
Now, let me move on.
Very early in Project MAC, we started
planning for the next system.
It was quite clear that it was unbelievable what you
could do with your old 7094.
But that machine was certainly never designed
for time-sharing.
So we wanted to get a new one.
So we started talking with manufacturers
and so forth to find the right machine.
Well, during one of the visits at UNIVAC,
you see some strange character over there, Professor Dennis.
Stand up so they can see you in the corner.
There's Corby, whom you know.
And that is Arnold Cohen from UNIVAC.
We invested quite a bit of time in looking around.
We also did a lot of thinking.
And from our experience with CTSS,
it became quite clear what the general organization
of a computer utility ought to be.
First of all, let me give you a sketch.
This is what is in the program that was given to you.
There were several ideas.
First of all, it is a memory-centered system.
This, incidentally, was also in the 1965 Scientific American
article.
That's where it comes from.
It's a memory-centered system.
All the communication goes through the memory.
That was a very important view that
had come out of experience.
That's how the user viewed the system, as a memory,
with a processor poking into it.
That was very important.
Also, as you see, there are pools, more than one,
every single box.
There are two processors, four banks of memory,
two drum controllers, two disk controllers,
two general controls.
But it was a pool.
And the idea was that if any one went bad, well,
you could run it.
This was, again, the idea of a public utility.
You don't stop to fix things.
You keep running.
Now, as a matter of fact, we established certain goals.
And I want to put them on the slide
so you can see what they are.
Continuous operation-- that's public utility.
Pools of identical units.
We wanted to reconfigure the system online without stopping.
Communication to memory-- this was a technical point.
You want a clean communication system.
Now, the hierarchy of memories with automated migration
of program-- these are all things
that you see now, but didn't exist in those days.
Now, to save time, I want to go to this point, execution
of unbound modules.
This is what is often called segmentation,
or the two-dimensional addressing.
Now, that idea, if you really look back,
came up in conjunction with the design of the B-5000 machine
way, way back.
But as far as I know, the person who really understood
the implication of this was Jack Dennis, I mentioned before.
As a matter of fact, I remember vividly
a scene that took place toward late spring
or early summer '63.
Jack was giving a talk on program segmentation
for an [INAUDIBLE] program.
And I was sitting next to Corby in the front row.
I was the chairman of the affair.
At a certain point, Corby started
getting all excited-- yes, yes, that's
right, what you're doing.
Yes, yes, yeah-- really got excited.
That that's how segmentation got into the Multics system.
Sometimes communication takes place in a strange occurrences.
Well, I think that some of you may not
know what a segment of visual memory is.
It's a great idea.
I believe so.
Segments are distinct procedural data modules.
They are the basic unit of computation.
Segments are files.
There's no distinction between segments and files.
A file is a segment.
A segment is a file.
It's choice, individual.
You are using, essentially, two-dimensional addressing.
That is, one dimension is the name of the segment.
The second dimension is the location, just like a book.
If you want to make a reference to a book,
you give the name of the book and the page
in the book-- you know, location in the book.
Seems very straightforward.
Then segments are divided into pages, just like a book, right?
That's the paging mechanism that you are all familiar with.
Now, paging is not seen by the user.
It just goes on automatically in the machine.
But the users are very conscious of segment.
There are names that they know and they use.
The very important thing is that segments
are bound to one another in a computation and execution time.
You don't have to pre-prepare anything.
You don't have to load programs together.
They're separate things.
Now, the analogies that I often use is, if you read a book,
it makes reference to other books to paper.
What is the traditional way of loading program
will correspond that you give a book.
You have a book.
You give it to somebody to Xerox all the paper, and all
the pages, and everything that the book refers to.
Then they are all assembled together.
And the references are changed to make reference
to the various things.
And then you read it.
That's the normal loading.
This is what we actually do with books and papers, right?
Now, there are lots of other things
that I don't want to get into.
But that, putting paging and segmentation together
was a real difficult goal.
Well, Multics project.
Well, we talked with all sorts of manufacturers.
Eventually, three companies, IBM, DEC, and General Electric,
made a proposal.
It turns out that the architecture of the new 360
system and the architecture of the PDP-6 just plain
were not suitable for our goal.
We wanted the memory-centered system.
And those were processor-centered system.
So we went General Electric.
It was a memory-centered system.
But a lot of hardware still had to be
designed to get what we wanted.
And I wanted to mention another name, the name of Ted Glaser,
who was a member of our faculty at that time.
He was a superb designer.
Incidentally, he was also--
he is blind.
But he had overcompensated--
I tell you, really overcompensated for being
blind.
He had a memory that was fantastic
and an ability to find--
I went with him to visit the company.
And he was-- the way he said it, he
was looking at a mechanical device.
Somebody opened it and just went out,
where they said, ah-ha, ah-ha.
Oh, that's what you do, yeah.
He had understood the operation of that machine--
just incredible.
Well, Ted Glaser was a major contributor
to what turned out to be the Multics system.
Unfortunately, he was not here to the end.
He got offered chairmanship of the computer science
department.
So he left.
Well, the Multics project, which had those ambitious goals--
I don't know when it started.
I would say '64, we decided we'd get that equipment.
In 1965, we had the four joint computer conferences.
A series of papers on the design of the system
were presented-- the same four.
The hardware was frozen.
To make a long story short, it finally
got into operation in November '69,
two years later, because you have no idea what a project
it was.
Everything had to be done from scratch.
There were no software tools.
When the machine arrived, it had to be debugged.
A compiler had to be written for PL1,
because it had to be written all in PL1
It was a major undertaking.
It was completed, I say, quite honestly, because of Corby.
He is the only leader in the team involved
with three organizations, Project MAC, the Bell Telephone
Laboratories, and General Electric, and later,
Honeywell--
was the only leader of that effort
that was there at the beginning and was there at the end.
I want to tell you something else about Corby,
because it's important.
When people design complicated things,
they say, now-- they scratch their head, and they say,
now, suppose if this happens.
What should I do?
Corby never does that.
He is a firm believer in Murphy's law.
Everything that could go wrong will go on.
So he always says, when this will--
when this happens, what will I do?
And that is the secret of the time-sharing system
that he has developed.
He always knows what to do with that.
Now, let me make a couple concluding remarks,
because time is really flying.
We are going through a microprocessor revolution.
Now, essentially, microprocessors
having invalidated what used to be called Grosch's law.
Now, Grosch's law, way back, said
that you always get a bigger bang per buck
with a bigger machine, right?
That's what it said.
And that was, to a good part, the rationale
for time-sharing a large machine rather than
having separate computers.
That was the rationale.
Now, clearly, Grosch's law is no longer valid.
So this is just changing the entire technological
environment in which time-sharing grew up.
But the technology of implementation
may be different.
But the goal is still valid--
communication between people, sharing, online computation.
That is still valid.
But you will probably want to implement
in the future in a different way.
You may want to have the computational power
at the terminal rather than central.
But you still need mass memory.
You still need communication.
Well, finally, I think I ought to give you
my view on the successes and failures
of the time-sharing movement and our effort at MIT.
I think, from a research point of view,
I think the time-sharing work at MIT
was a major, major contribution, in many ways.
The variety of techniques that were developed just
went out in the field.
And you find them today all over the place.
Virtual memory, in some sense, was started
in those time-sharing systems.
Now everybody uses virtual memory.
And a lot of techniques went out and are in actual use.
It certainly fostered research, online research,
in universities, certainly did at MIT.
There was really a sudden growth of computer-based research
at MIT in the '60s.
There is no question about it.
It did provide people with physical access
to a computer from wherever they might be.
Certainly, it did that.
It failed to provide the corresponding intellectual
access from wherever people might be.
The reason is that when you work on this system,
you're always in a learning mode.
And it makes a great deal of difference
whether sitting in the next office
is somebody that has used the program that you're
going to use next, or you are isolated miles away
from anybody that knows what you would like to do.
Well, at one point, we tried to do something about that.
But it never came out.
So the intellectual access is still a problem today.
While it was successful, the research community
at MIT, online community, I think
that the movement failed to create
online communities, certainly outside university,
and even within universities.
That is, for instance, we didn't have an online student
community at MIT.
We are just beginning now to have some.
It was just [INAUDIBLE].
The major reason is cost--
has been too expensive until now.
We are just getting now to the time in which it's cheap enough
to do it.
But there is another reason if you go outside the university.
You see, the kind of time-sharing system that
I've been talking about are really designed with one
objective in mind--
to create decentralized communication and control.
That is, it's a decentralizing system.
It's inherently so.
That was the intent.
And then, of course, that runs against the grain
of traditional management.
That's also quite clear.
And I can give you examples.
Now, the situation, I believe, is changing.
Well, let me give you an example.
You remember, there was the celebration
of the telephone a few years ago.
Among other things, there was a series
of seminars with speakers coming from all
over the place, organized by the late '80s boom,
on the sociology of telephony.
Now, you are all aware that in this country,
telephony has been a public for the public from the beginning,
because that was Bell's idea.
He had a choice.
But that's what he decided.
It was very interesting that a French sociologist came over
to speak.
And I never realized before that the situation in France
was and is still very different.
Telephony was used as a tool of government and of the military.
The reason was-- and it remained that way, in fact, still--
well, 10 years ago.
I can't say today.
If you try-- I tried many times to call Paris from Switzerland.
And the communication was lousy.
The telephone system was behind other European countries,
and certainly the United States, because it was government
policy not to push it.
France is run in a very centralized way from Paris.
And the government never wanted to provide the tool
to bypass Paris.
That comes from a French psychology--
I mean, social psychology.
I'm not inventing this, you see.
Now, you see the similar thing relative
to time-sharing systems in organizations.
I think the situation is changing,
because there is a tremendous pressure now
on individual productivity, improving individual quality,
that this is what online use of computers does for you.
The second is that the cost of computers is going way down.
So I think that we are going to see a change.
The technology will lead to a different types of systems.
But the goal will be the same.
Well, I talked way too long.
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]