Re: Looking for an old A2 program

[mjmahon@aol.com (Michael J. Mahon)]

In article <ZficnTQaSPx-Nc-jXTWcpw@comcast.com>, "Joel"
<joelbuckley54.nospam.@hotmail.com> writes:

>"Michael J. Mahon" <mjmahon@aol.com> wrote in message
>20030217134208.04263.00000589@mb-fj.aol.com">news:20030217134208.04263.00000589@mb-fj.aol.com...
<snip>
>> The MAC I was referring to was not the Macintosh, but MIT's Project MAC
>> (for Mathematics and Computation), which was a very influential early
>> experiment in timesharing in the US.  It was done in the early- to
>mid-60s.
>> The hardware hosting it was a modified IBM 7094.
>
>My memory's a little hazy, but when I was at MIT (72-77) I seem to remember
>Project MAC having a different meaning-maybe Man and Computer?

You are correct.  When I couldn't remember exactly what it stood for,
I turned to Google, and found a "Swiss Project MAC" which listed
"Mathematics And Computation" as a subtitle, and I just _assumed_
that it was a faithful copy of the original.  ;-)

Upon further Googling, I find that, like many MIT names/acronyms,
MAC is multi-valued!  As the Project Mac history states:

   MAC stood for Multiple Access Computers on the 5th floor
   of 545 Tech Square and Man and Computer on the 9th floor;
   the major efforts were Corbat�'s Multics development and
   Marvin Minsky's Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.

This is from:

http://www.multicians.org/history.html

>It's interesting how things have come full circle.
>Back then, a lot of MAC was about setting up a computer network (one
>computer and many dumb terminals).
>Time share (Multics)
>There was one teletype terminal in the dorm (for 320 students). Quite a big
>deal compared to the normal routine of stacks of punch cards.
>Then with the microprocessor and the personal computer, independent,
>individual computing came to the fore.
>Now with the internet, it's back to the network model again.

Having your own (relatively) little machine is a bit of a problem when
it stores gobs of important, irreplaceable, personal information that
must be regularly backed up and not unintentionally clobbered or
lost.  And, of course, having "enough" capacity interferes with
portability and battery life, too.

It is much more practical and appropriate for all the terabytes of
information that constitute our digital lives to be stored redundantly
and encrypted in multiple servers, immune to any but a global physical
disaster.  Fast, ubiquitous networking then puts it only milliseconds
away from any point on the planet.  (For the paranoid, there are even
ways to store it in a dozen servers, such none of them are able to
reproduce the data, but a combination of any five of them, say,
can.)

And when networking was clearly headed for gigabit-per-second
levels, it seemed unnecessary for any fixed (home or office) computer
to actually _be_ in a home or office, since the network could support
a remote video terminal where the user was, and leave the spinning,
heating, getting-obsolete-all-the-time computer in the computer
room, like the utility that it should become.  As wireless networking
becomes more capable and ubiqutous (pervasive millimeter-wave
micro-cells), then this vision extends to portable devices, as well.

What we want is the _illusion_ of an infinitely powerful machine
that is supported by a small, quiet, sometimes battery-powered
access device.  In fact, most people would like this computational
resource not to seem like a "computer" at all, but rather like a
very fast, efficient assistant, with whom they can communicate
by natural speech dialog, or by keyboard and display, or any
combination that seems appropriate at the moment.

When you travel, you don't bring along a TV--you know that
there will be one anywhere you need one.  That is the model
for (all but the most personal) displays that I expect to emerge.
The personal ones are likely to be built into your glasses.  ;-)

-michael

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