RIT will permanently shut down the RIT Wiki (Confluence wiki) on February 2, 2024. Review the Wiki Shut Down Overview for information on alternative tools, exporting content from the wiki, and other FAQs.
Symbiotic Computing
The history of computers is a well-documented progression from enormous, expensive mainframes made for complex scientific and industrial use into tiny, cheap devices that are in our pockets, in our homes, and affect nearly every facet of our daily lives. However, the story of how computing evolved from the niche interest of scientists and mathematicians into ubiquitous, user-friendly machines involves a much deeper analysis of the events and influences that gave rise to computers existing in a symbiosis with humanity. The transition from room-sized mainframes programmed with punch cards into phones and tablets that are so intuitive toddlers can use them was neither fast nor easy, but a long process of triumphs and failures influenced greatly by the many brilliant people all over the country that came together to create something truly amazing. This underground technological revolution has forever changed the way we live, work, and communicate, and will continue to become more symbiotic with humanity as new technologies and ideas are developed. The purpose of this wiki is to demonstrate and analyze the processes, influences, and engines that drove these ideas into the modern age.
Project MAC
In the days when every computing resource was prohibitively expensive, batch processing was the dominant form of computing in businesses and universities everywhere. Yet as technology advanced and the limitations of batch processing became more and more apparent, people were looking for better ways to utilize computing. One solution was the then-radical idea of time-sharing, where multiple users could simultaneously use the same mainframe computer. While the new idea could not have been realized at the time with current machines, that did not stop one MIT lab from trying.
A view inside the Project MAC Laboratory
Formation
J.C.R. Lickliter, regarded by many as the visionary of interactive computing, was serving as the director of ARPA's Information Processing Techniques Office (IPTO) from 1962 to 1964. During this time, he was looking for a way to implement the then-radical idea of time-sharing, where multiple users could simultaneously use the same mainframe computer. He found a solution through his former colleague Robert Fano, a professor at MIT. Fano, along with Fernando J. Corbató, Robert Metcalfe, and others, proposed Project MAC (signifying both Multiple Access Computer and Machine Aided Cognition) to Lickliter, a laboratory focused on developing time-sharing and its applications and using that to research other applications of time-shared computers. Lickliter awarded the group with a $2 million grant from ARPA, with Fano serving as the director.
Research
Multics
Over the next few years, Project MAC would go on to become famous for its research on operating systems, artificial intelligence, and the theory of computation. Some of its most important developments were in time-sharing, one of the biggest reasons the lab was created. One of the first time-sharing systems, the Compatible Time-Sharing System (CTSS) was developed by Corbató and demonstrated at MIT before the formation of Project MAC, and was used at the lab during its operation and greately influenced the design of subsequent time-sharing systems. Most notably was Multics, the successor to CTSS. Developed at Project Mac, Multics would go on to be the basis of almost every other multiple-access system created. Furthermore, Multics would also inspire the development of Unix in 1969, a fundamental foundation of systems that continue to be used to this day.
Artificial Intelligence
An "AI Group" led by Marvin Minsky was a group of programmers and computer scientists integrated into Project MAC. They were interested in the problems of vision, mechanical motion and manipulation, and language, which they viewed as the keys to more intelligent machines. In addition, they had their own mainframe computer (a PDP-6, followed by a PDP-10) for which they developed their own time-sharing operating system, known as the Incompatible Time-Sharing System, or ITS, as a joke on the name of the CTSS. The AI group disagreed with the direction taken with Multics (particularly with the dicision to include powerful system security), so they developed ITS instead.
Separation of LCS and AI Lab
By the late 1960s, Minksy's AI group wanted more space to conduct their own research, and were unable to get satisfaction from the then project director Lickliter (who left ARPA for a brief stint at IBM before returning to MIT to become the Project MAC director). This, along with no small amount of university politics, led to a separate MIT AI Lab being formed in 1970. Minsky, along with many of his AI group colleagues, left Project MAC to join this new lab. Talented programmers, such as Richard Stallman (who would go on to write EMACS and launch the GNU project) flourished at the AI Lab during this time.
Most of the researchers who did not leave to join the AI Lab also left Project MAC to form the Laboratory for Computer Science and continued their research of operating systems, programming languages, distributed systems, and the theory of computation, and would continue to do so for the next thirty years.