Talk:Project MAC

Older Discussion
This page is pretty pathetic; needs serious upgrade. Noel 11:46, 17 Aug 2003 (UTC)


 * Withdraw the comment! Noel (talk) 03:46, 13 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Paragraph deleted
I deleted the following paragraph, per Bob Fano:


 * In the late 1960s, internecine warfare (of an academic sort) broke out between those in the project who desired operating systems that could continue to be customized and tinkered with, and those who desired a stable computing environment so that they could concentrate on their research in other fields of computer science. This culminated with the secession of Marvin Minsky's artificial intelligence group in 1970, leaving Project MAC to form the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.

This story is the official version told in, for example, the book by Garfinkel and Abelson mentioned in the references. According to Bob, however, the real reason for the split had more to do with Institute space allocation politics than tinkering with operating systems, so I'm updating the main article to reflect Bob's recollection of events and leaving this version here for future reference. User:18.24.0.120 01:41, 7 Feb 2004


 * Different people see things differently, so perhaps to some people, this was part of (if not the entire) reason? It was certainly the common explanation at the labs in the late 70's. Of course, if it really were true, then why were DM, MC and ML all running ITS? :-) So perhaps Fano is right after all. Of course, that was after Multics was too expensive for ordinary mortals to use, and DM/ML were acquired after AI (is my impression anyway), so perhaps ITS looked pretty good after the split. Noel (talk) 03:25, 13 Nov 2004 (UTC)

I think both stories are right (see the marvelous essay by Chious et al., "A Marriage of Convenience: The Founding of the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory"). The Multics and AI communities were based on very different, if not directly opposed, philosophies on just about everything, including how to organize university research, what university research is for, how operating systems ought to be designed, etc. And there was a certain amount of friction over these differences. By the time the actual split occurred, the two groups were pretty much separate communities (even though the shared the same computer center). But Minsky's demand for space is part of the story, too. Another dimension of the split is financial; the AI people felt that Multics was sucking off too much of the grant money. How can we fix the text in the article to capture this (succinctly)? Regards, Bryan 15:58, 21 November 2005 (UTC)

Merger
I have nominated MIT AI Lab and Project MAC to be merged into the CSAIL article and dropped the proposed merger into MIT School of Engineering pending the state of the newly merged article. Let's aim for a merge of the 3 lab articles by August 28 and then take up discussion of merging CSAIL into MIT SoE then. Madcoverboy 19:55, 16 August 2007 (UTC)