MIT Laboratory for Computer Science

But not so in the age of punch cards, batch processing and computers that cost as much as airplanes.

"The rule of thumb was that the computers cost as much as commercial airliners," said Fernando Corbat, professor emeritus at MIT. Known as "Corby "to his colleagues, it was his research on time-sharing that formed the foundation of the project that would later become MIT's LCS.

Before time-sharing, computers could work with only one user at a time. "Computing used to be built along the line that people would write programs on paper and put them on punch cards. Out of that would come a printout, if the program worked," said Robert Fano, founding director of the LCS, now a professor emeritus at MIT.

Researchers at MIT had been working on time-sharing since 1957, but it was Corbat and others in 1961 who developed a prototype of the Compatible Time-Sharing System (CTSS), which in the beginning supported around 20 users at a time.

Then, in 1962, J.C.R. Licklider joined the U.S. Department of Defense's Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) as the founding director of its Information Processing Techniques Office. Licklider spearheaded the agency's efforts to fund massive research projects on interactive computing or, as he called it, "man-computer symbiosis." A former faculty member at MIT, the Cambridge, Mass., university topped his list of potential research facilities to house such a project.

After a meeting with Licklider, Fano drafted a proposal, which read in part, "The broad, long-term objective of the program is the evolutionary development of a computer system easily and independently accessible to a large number of people and truly flexible and responsive to individual needs."

Project MAC was born in 1963 with a $2.2 million grant from the government. MAC stood for two things: machine-aided cognition and multiple-access computer.

Even though Fano essentially started a new research lab at MIT, he dubbed it a "project" to solve a problem of local politics. "It would have been treason" to ask faculty members to leave their chosen departments at MIT, but they would willingly join a project that did not require them to resign their academic posts, said Fano.

Predecessor to today's servers, Project MAC ran Corbat's CTSS on a central computer, a modified IBM 7094, with access terminals spread across the campus. Users were allotted storage space that they could access via password and could share their files with other users. Gone was the need for punch cards, as users interfaced with the system via teletype machines.

Many of today's technological issues were first explored in Project MAC. For the first time, a computer project required an editorial review board to determine which information would become part of the system's public library. Security, privacy and online anonymity issues developed as well. "In the past, you knew who had access by virtue of their presence in the computer room," said Corbat. "It was the beginning of the anonymity problem that exists with a vengeance today on the World Wide Web. It came with remote access."

Elements of today's computing environment were born with Project MAC. The system is an ancestor of the local area network, but it also had the first E-mail, chat rooms and even a primitive word-processing program. It also spawned the operating system that would become Unix.

Project MAC, in collaboration with Bell Telephone Laboratories in New Jersey, developed the Multiplexed Information and Computing Service (MULTICS), the operating system that followed CTSS. It was the first OS to feature a tree-structured filing system.

"MIT was trying to really understand how to develop the system, but Bell wanted a system their lab could use,a workhorse," said Fano. The project took longer than expected and, after several years of development, Bell Labs pulled out early in 1969 because its users were complaining that the system was not ready, he said.

But two of the Bell researchers, Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie, continued to develop a system on their own. They used MULTICS as a foundation and continued to add functionality to it, said Corbat. "Whenever they had a choice, if the solution was already worked out in MULTICS, they used it," he said. The Bell researchers named their OS UNICS, a pun that meant castrated MULTICS, and eventually changed the name to Unix.

MIT's MULTICS was implemented for general use in October 1969, two months after the development of UNICS. By the end of 1971, the system served more than 500 users.

After the completion of MULTICS, the lab's focus began to shift to other projects. In 1974, Michael Dertouzos became the fourth director of Project MAC. He soon changed the name to the MIT Laboratory for Computer Science "because Project MAC sounded like a hamburger," said Dertouzos, who is still the director of the lab.

In the time since Project MAC, the LCS has grown to an organization with more than $30 million in funding. Today, it houses 550 researchers and about 70 research projects, said Dertouzos. Researchers there have had a hand in advances in distributed computing, Ethernet, the NuBus bus system adopted by Apple Computer Inc. in its Macintosh computers, the TCP/IP network protocol, X Windows and RSA encryption, among countless others.

More than 65 companies and consortia have been launched by LCS members or as spin-offs from LCS research, including 3Com Corp., Lotus Development Corp. and RSA Data Security Inc. It also is the home of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) under the direction of Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the Internet.

The lab's current project, Oxygen, represents the computing model of the future, said Dertouzos. The project includes an integrated collection of new technologies, including handheld devices, wall computers, speech understanding, knowledge access and others to form a global network.

Imagine the potential: A worker in Paris needs to track down her boss in New York. Her handheld device finds the local cellular network and calls the New York office. A wall computer in her boss' office answers the phone and forwards the call to Boston, where her boss is working that day. Her image appears on the wall in the Boston office. After speaking with her, the boss needs to pull three other co-workers in on the project, which he can do just by speaking out loud to the Oxygen system. Oxygen locates the co-workers. All five people can then collaborate on the project, and with another voice command, the system will print and send copies of all involved documents to each of the employees.

"We're trying to make it a lot easier to use computers," said Dertouzos.