To: all-ai
Subject: GSB, Friday March 3rd, 5:30 PM 7AI
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After Patrick told us on Tuesday that we've never had it so good, I decided
to wander over to the Media Lab and ask the people who founded AI just how
bad things were back in the days of yore.  Here's one of the stories I
got...

"At one point tk, a new student, decided to build the pdp-0.  We didn't
really have advisors back then- generally it was easier to just rederive
any results you needed from Newton's second law and Occam's Razor than to
find someone who knew anything- so he called up Lyndon directly and got a
few bucks diverted from some NORAD boondoggle and set up shop.

Now, it wasn't like today.  Resistors weren't color coded back then.  You
know "Bad Booze Rots Our Young Guts But Vogka Goes Well"- well, not until
the mid seventies.  So the first thing tk does is to set up this giant
bin-sorting device to figure out which brown thing has what impedence and
puts some big blue tarp over the thing to keep the snow from coming in.  We
had winters back then and they hadn't completed the eight floor yet.

Picture it- snow everywhere and this thrashing machine under a big tarp-
that was AI.  UROPs would wander in to check out what was going on and
usually end up huddled under the tarp.  Occasionally one would fall into
the sorter and get shredded, and then one of the feeders would misalign and
every third bin would be switched.  Since the old pdp-0 ran through
components like mad (you don't know what using a refitted DC-3 engine and
alternator for a power supply can do to electronics) you could usually tell
when there would be a little black death box on the front page of The Tech
by how many of the 32 bytes of main memory we had were flaky.

We shared the bytes, one per graduate student, so if you got a flaky one
you usually had to do odd jobs for the "Good Byters" until the feeder was
realigned, at least if you wanted your Lisp code to run (the advance to C
didn't come until somebody invented core memory to dump ten years later).
One month I had to crank Seymour's car engine every morning until he
finally gave me a bit or two..."

Yes, those were the days.  Thank God we now have a

		    G I R L   S C O U T   B E N E F I T

where students can hear stories like these from the teary eyes of giants.
Probably there will be some told today, at 5:30, in the 7th floor playroom.