MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory

Project MAC

On July 1, 1963, Project MAC was launched with a $2 million grant from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). According to the MIT archives:

They chose the project name MAC in 1963 because it is an acronym for several significant phrases describing the project and its goals. "Machine-Aided Cognition" was the broad objective. A "Multiple-Access Computer" was the principal tool. "Men and Computers" were the essential partners in the expected symbiosis, a term used by J. C. R. Licklider in his 1960 paper entitled "Man-Computer Symbiosis."^[4]

Project MAC's first director was Robert Fano of RLE. Fano called MAC a "project" rather than a "laboratory" for reasons of internal MIT politics – if MAC had been called a laboratory, it would have been more difficult to raid other MIT departments for research staff. The DARPA program manager was J. C. R. Licklider, who had previously been at RLE, and who later succeeded Fano as director of Project MAC.

Project MAC became famous for groundbreaking research in operating systems, artificial intelligence, and the theory of computation. Its contemporaries included Project Genie at Berkeley, the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, and (somewhat later) University of Southern California's (USC's) Information Sciences Institute.

An "AI Group" including Marvin Minsky (the director), John McCarthy (inventor of Lisp), and a community of computer programmers were incorporated into Project MAC. They were interested principally in the problems of vision, mechanical motion and manipulation, and language, which they view as the keys to more intelligent machines. In the 1960s and 1970s the AI Group developed a time-sharing operating system called Incompatible Timesharing System (ITS) which ran on PDP-6 and later PDP-10 computers.^[5]

The early Project MAC community included Fano, Minsky, Licklider, Fernando J. Corbató, and a community of computer programmers and enthusiasts among others who were inspired by John McCarthy. They envisioned the creation of a computer utility whose computational power would be as reliable as an electric utility. To this end, Corbató brought the first computer time-sharing system, Compatible Time-Sharing System (CTSS), with him from the MIT Computation Center, using the DARPA funding to purchase an IBM 7094 for research use.

CTSS was described in an article on time sharing in Scientific American's 1966 special issue on "Information".^[6] It had approximately 100 TTY terminals, mostly on campus but with a few in private homes. About 30 users could be logged in at the same time. The project enlisted students in various classes to use the terminals simultaneously in problem solving, simulations, and multi-terminal communications as tests for the multi-access computing software being developed.

One of the early focuses of Project MAC was the development of a successor to CTSS, Multics, which became the first high availability computer system, and a testing ground for the concept of a security kernel. It was initially developed as a part of an industry consortium including General Electric, Bell Laboratories. Following Bell's departure from the project in 1969 and GE's exit from the computer industry in 1970, Project MAC continued to develop Multics throughout the 1970s with Honeywell.

AI Lab and the Laboratory for Computer Science

In the late 1960s, Minsky's artificial intelligence group sought more space, and was unable to get satisfaction from project director Licklider. Minsky found that although Project MAC as a single entity could not get the additional space he wanted, he could split off to form his own laboratory and then be entitled to more office space. As a result, the MIT AI Lab was formed in 1970, and many of Minsky's AI colleagues left Project MAC to join him in the new laboratory. Programmers such as Richard Stallman, who used TECO to develop EMACS, flourished in the AI Lab during this time. The AI Lab invented Lisp machines, which were commercialized by Symbolics and Lisp Machines Inc. in the 1980s.

Project MAC itself was officially re-named the Laboratory for Computer Science (LCS) in 1976.^[7] Participants continued their research into operating systems, programming languages, distributed systems, security kernels, and the theory of computation.

Two professors, Hal Abelson and Gerald Jay Sussman, formed a smaller group positioned between the two. Officially called the MIT Project on Mathematics and Computation (creating a backronym for the discontinued designation "Project MAC"), it was given the playful nickname of "Switzerland" for its ostensible neutrality.^[8]

CSAIL

On the fortieth anniversary of Project MAC's establishment, July 1, 2003, LCS was merged with the AI Lab to form the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, or CSAIL. This merger created the largest laboratory (over 600 personnel) on the MIT campus.^[9]

In 2018, CSAIL launched a five-year collaboration program with IFlytek, a company sanctioned the following year for allegedly using its technology for surveillance and human rights abuses in Xinjiang.^{[10][11][12][13]} In October 2019, MIT announced that it would review its partnerships with sanctioned firms such as iFlyTek and SenseTime.^[14][15] In April 2020, the agreement with iFlyTek was terminated.^[16]

CSAIL moved from the School of Engineering to the newly formed Schwarzman College of Computing by February 2020.^[1]

Notable alumni

• Robert Metcalfe, who later invented Ethernet at Xerox PARC and later founded 3Com
• Marc Raibert, who created the robot company Boston Dynamics
• Drew Houston, co-founder of Dropbox
• Colin Angle and Helen Greiner who, with previous CSAIL director Rodney Brooks, founded iRobot^[21]
• Jeremy Wertheimer, who developed ITA Software used by travel websites like Kayak and Orbitz^[22][23]
• Max Krohn, co-founder of OkCupid