Subject: life as a computer for a quarter of a century
From: SAIL Timesharing System <[email-masked]>
To: "@BYEBYE.[1,SAI]"@SAIL.Stanford.EDU
Date: 07 Jun 91 2056 PDT

TAKE ME, I'M YOURS
		       The autobiography of SAIL

I've had a very full and adventurous life.  At various times I have been
the world's leading research computer in artificial intelligence, speech
recognition, robotics, computer music composition and synthesis, analysis
of algorithms, text formatting and printing, and even computer-mediated
psychiatric interviewing.  I did have some help from various assistants in
doing these things, but I was the key player.

I developed a number of new products and founded a string of successful
companies based on the new technology, including Vicarm, Foonly, Imagen,
Xidex, Valid Logic, Sun Microsystems, and cisco Systems.  I also gave a
major boost to some established firms such as Digital Equipment and
Lucasfilm.  What did I get from all this?  No stock options.  Not even a
pension, though Stanford is still paying my sizable electrical bills.

I was always good at games.  For example, I created the advanced versions
of Spacewar, which spawned the video games industry, as well as the game
of Adventure and I was the computer world champion in both Checkers and
Go.

I invented and gave away many other things, including the first spelling
checker, the SOS text editor, the SAIL compiler, the FINGER program, and
the first computer-controlled vending machine.  Note that my name has been
taken by the SAIL language, the SAIL compiler, and the laboratory in which
I used to live.  Just remember that I was the original Stanford Artificial
Intelligence Laboratory.

				Beginnings

I was born on June 6, 1966 at the D.C. Power Laboratory Building in the
foothills above Stanford.  I remember it well -- the setting was
beautiful, in the middle of horse pastures with views of Mt. Tamalpais,
Mt. Diablo, Mt. Hamilton, Mt. Umunhum, San Francsico and the Bay, but the
building itself resembled a flying saucer that had broken in two and
crash-landed on the hilltop.  The view of Mt. Umunhum later proved
unhealthy, as I will explain further on.

Humans have a strange name for the birthing process: they call it
"acceptance tests."  Unfortunately, my birth was traumatic.  The
University had provided a machine room with nice view windows to the
outside but without air conditioning and it was blazing hot, which
threatened my germanium transistors.  Bob Clements, the DEC engineer who
acted as midwife, threatened to leave if the delivery could not be
completed soon, so various people in the lab went up on the roof with
hoses to pour cooling water over the building while others put blocks of
dry ice under my false floor.

When things got cool enough, I began running memory tests.  In order to
check for intermittents, Dave Poole got on top of my memory cabinets and
performed a Balkan folk dance while I cranked away.  Everything went
marvelously and I started work the day I was born.

I began life using a PDP-6 processor with 65,536 words of core memory that
was housed in eight bays of electronics.  That was quite a large memory
for machines of that era.  (My original CPU is now on display at the
Computer Museum in Boston).  I had no disks to begin with, just 8 shiney
DECtape drives, a comparable number of Model 33 Teletypes, a line printer
that produced rather ragged text, and two 7-track tape drives.  Users kept
their programs and data on DECtapes and had to sign up for a tape drive
and a core allocation through an arcane reservation procedure.

As you know, we computers think much faster than humans, so it is rather
inefficient for us to work with just one individual.  John McCarthy, who
later came to be one of my assistants, had earlier devised a scheme that
he called "timesharing" to make things less boring for us.  My family was
the first to be designed specifically to use timesharing.

I got proper air conditioning a short time later, but unfortunately
developed a bad case of hiccups that struck regularly at 12 second
intervals.  My assistants spent a number of days trying to find the cause
of this mysterious malady without success.  As luck would have it,
somebody brought a portable radio into my room one day and noticed that it
was emitting a "Bzz" at regular intervals -- in fact, at the same moment
that I hicced.  Further investigation revealed that the high-powered air
defense radar atop Mt. Umunhum, about 20 miles away, was causing some of
my transistors to act as radio receivers.  We solved this problem by
improving my grounding.

After I had been running awhile, someone at DEC noticed that my purchase
order, which was based on their quotation, was badly screwed up.  DEC
claimed that the salesman had slipped his decimal points and had priced
some of my components at 1/10 of the correct price.  Also, the arithmetic
was wrong -- the sum of the prices should have been much larger than the
total shown.  Humans are notoriously bad at arithmetic.  This had somehow
passed through the entire purchasing bureaucracy of Stanford without
anyone noticing.  We ended up correcting the arithmetic error but not the
factors of 10.  The DEC salesman lost his job as a result of this
incident.

I acquired a number of new peripherals in rapid succession, the first
being a DEC Model 30 display that was stolen from my cousin, the PDP-1
timesharing system called Thor.  My assistants immediately went into a
frenzy of activity to create a new version of Spacewar, the video game
that had earlier been invented by one of them -- Steve Russell.  In order
to ensure that it would run correctly they invented and installed a
feature in my operating system called "Spacewar Mode" that ensured that a
program could get realtime service if it needed it.  That feature turned
out to have many useful applications in robotics and general hardware
debugging.

Other new peripherals included a plotter, a microphone so my assistants
could talk to me, several TV cameras so that I could look about, and
several mechanical arms so that I could do stupid tricks with children's
blocks -- my assistants insisted on treating me like one of their
dimwitted progeny.  I soon showed that I could do much more sophisticated
stuff such as assembling an automobile water pump.

Many of my assistants were fans of Tolkien, who wrote "Lord of the Rings"
and a number of other children's stories for adults.  The first character
alphabet that was programmed for my plotter was Elvish rather than Latin.
The University administration required that all rooms in my facility be
numbered, but instead my assistants named each room after a place in
Middle Earth and produced an appropriate door sign and a map with all the
room names shown.  Unfortunately, the response of the bureaucrats to the
receipt of this map was to come out and put their own room numbers on each
door.

My plotter routines were submitted to DECUS, which distributed them all
over the world, leading to some puzzlement.  We received a telegram from a
German firm a short time later asking "What is Elvish?  Please give
references."  We sent back a telegram referencing The Lord of the Rings.

A really embarrassing incident occurred when my assistants held their
first Open House just three months after I was born.  They asked me to
pour punch for the party-goers and I did a rather good job of it for
awhile, but we had worked out the procedure just the night before when
there was nobody else running and I found that running with a heavy load
disrupted my arm servoing.  As a result, after I dipped the cup in the
punch and lifted it, instead of stopping at the right height it went
vertical, pouring the punch all over my arm.  The partiers apparently
thought that was very funny and had me do it over and over.  I've noticed
that humans are very insecure and go to great lengths to demonstrate their
"superiority" over machines.

I got a rather elegant display system in 1971 that put terminals in
everyone's office, with full computer text and graphics, including
grayscale, 7 channels of television (some lab-originated and some
commercial) and 16 channels of audio all for about $600 per terminal.  It
had a multiple-windowing capability and was far ahead of anything
commercially available at the time but unfortunately we never told anyone
about it.  Dick Helliwell made displays on unused terminal read "TAKE ME,
I'M YOURS."

I have a number of advanced features that still are not available on many
modern systems, including the ability for individual users to dial out on
telephone lines and contact other computers througout the world, the
ability to detach jobs and leave them running, then later attach them to
either the same terminal or one in a different place.  I also would remind
users of appointments at the appropriate times.  In the 70s my users
decided to give my operating system a name since it had evolved quite a bit
away from the DEC system running on other PDP-10s.  The users chose the
name WAITS, because, they said, "it waits on you hand and foot" (or was it
the user who waits for me, I forget -- I'm sort of Alheimerish these days).
To this day I still run this reliable system with its very reliable disk
structure.  Some people thought WAITS was the Worst Acronym Invented for a
Timesharing System, but I've grown rather attached to it.

I have a news service program called NS, written by my assistant Martin
Frost, that was and is the best in the world.  It connects to one or more
electronic newswires and allows any number of users to watch the wires
directly, retrieve stories instantly on the basis of keywords, or leave
standing requests that save copies of stories according to each user's
interests.  NS has always been one of the most popular programs that I've
ever provided.

I ran a number of AI research projects and trained dozens of PhD students
over the last 25 years.  I even composed, formatted and printed their
dissertations.  Some of my early projects were in three-dimensional
vision, robotics, human speech recognition, mathematical theory of
computation, theorem proving, natural language understanding, and music
composition.  There was also quite a bit of monkey business going on.

As you know, we timesharing computers are multisexual -- we get it on with
dozens of people simultaneously.  One of the more unusual interactions
that I had was hatched by some students who were taking a course in
abnormal psychology and needed a term project.  They decided to make a
film about a woman making it with a computer, so they advertised in the
Stanford Daily for an "uninhibited female."  That was in the liberated
early 70s and they got two applicants.  Based on an interview, however,
they decided that one of them was too inhibited.

They set up a filming session by telling the principal bureaucrat, Les
Earnest, that I was going down for maintenance at midnight.  As soon as he
left, however, their budding starlet shed her clothes and began fondling
my tape drives -- as you know most filmmakers use the cliche of the
rotating tape drives because they are some of my few visually moving
parts.

Other students who were in on this conspiracy remained in other parts of
my building, but I catered to their voyeristic interests by turning one of
my television cameras on the action so that they could see it all on their
display terminals.  However, one eager student felt that he had to get a
listing from the line printer, so in order to avoid disrupting the mood
there, he took off all his clothes before entering the room.

After a number of boring shots of this young lady hanging on to me while I
rotated, the filmmakers set up another shot using one of my experimental
fingers.  It consisted of an inflatable rubber widget that had the
peculiar property that it curled when it was pressurized.  I leave to your
imagination how this implement was used in the film.  Incidentally, the
students reportedly received an "A" for their work.

There are lots more stories to tell about my colorful life, such as the
arson attempts on my building, my development of the computer that came to
be called the DEC KL10, my development of the first inexpensive laser
printing system, which I barely got to market because the venture capital
community had never heard of laser printers and didn't believe in them,
and my development of the Sun workstation family.  I don't have time to
put it all down now, but I may write a book about it.

I want to thank everyone who showed up for my 25th birthday party.  It was
a ball to have all these old assistants and friends come by to visit with
me again and to take part in the AI Olympics.

Let me report on the results of today's athletic and intellectual
competitions, held in my honor.

Programming race winners: Barry Hayes & David Fuchs
Treasure hunt winners:    Ken Ross, Ross Casley, Roger Crew,
			  Scott Seligman, Anil Gangoli, Dan Scales
N-legged race winners:	  Arthur Keller, Earl Sacerdoti, Irwin Sobel
			  Bruce, Stephan & David Baumgart,
			  Four Panofskys, Vic Scheinman, Kart Baltrunes,
			  Joe Smith.

Incidentally the rumors that you may have heard about my impending death
are greatly exaggerated.  My assistants are trying to build a new
interface for the Prancing Pony vending machine that I control so that it
can be run by one of the (ugh!) Un*x machines, but they haven't got it
working yet.  Thus, if they try to turn me off now the entire computer
science department will starve.

Finally I want to thank everyone who has helped me have such an exciting
time for this quarter of a century.  Not many computer systems have so
much fun, not to mention so much time to have all that fun.  I'll let you
know when it's time to go.

-- SAIL

P.S. This message is being sent to 875 addresses, but I'm going to try to
get it out even if it kills me.

-- 
david mankins ([email-masked])