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SAIL Away
ByLes Earnest <les@cs.stanford.edu>
Some other publications by the author
Originallypublished in The Analytical Engine, May 1995, under the silly title HELLO,SAILOR! chosen by the editor. Many moreSAIL spinoffs have come to light since this was written, so I probably shouldupdate it before long.
TheStanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (SAIL) grew out of the StanfordArtificial Intelligence Project, which was started by Prof. John McCarthy whenhe came from MIT in 1962. He and Prof. MarvinMinskyhad co-founded the MIT AI Project in the late 1950s, and McCarthy had developedthe LISP programming language there.
McCarthyhad perceived the need for interactive computing in that era when most largecomputers were used exclusively as batch processors. In 1959 he wrote a memothat proposed general purpose timesharing. Part of the inspiration for thisidea was a special-purpose timesharing system called SAGE, the air defensecontrol system that was then being developed at MIT Lincoln Lab (by a bunch ofpeople, including me) using hardware manufactured by IBM.
Workingwith EdFredkin at BBN, McCarthy developed an earlytimesharing system using a DEC PDP-1 computer. FernandoCorbatoconcurrently developed another one at MIT. Shortly thereafter, Project MAC wasinitiated at MIT to develop this idea further. McCarthy was invited to headthat project, but chose instead to remain focused on artificial intelligence.He moved to Stanford a short time later.
In1963 at Stanford, McCarthy began developing the first display-oriented generalpurpose timesharing system, also based on a DEC PDP-1, which came to be calledZeus. Among its many innovationswere the firstdisplay-oriented interactive text editor. Because the PDP-1 was not apowerful processor, however, this system was interfaced to a disk on the ComputationCenter's nearby IBM 7090 so that jobs requiring a lot of crunching could bepassed through the disk buffer, run in the batch system there, and returned tothe timesharing system for interactive examination of the results.
Ijoined McCarthy at Stanford in late 1965 and we subsequently put together theStanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (SAIL) in an abandoned, partiallyconstructed laboratory building in the foothills above the Stanford campus,near Felt Lake. The first computer there was a DEC PDP-6, installed in June1966. After a false start with a contractor who couldn't deliver, a 6-console displaysystem that drew text and vectors with a random-access electron beam was addedin 1967. The computer system eventually evolved into a dual-processor DEC-10and continued to provide display-based timesharing services to the Stanfordcommunity until 1992. It used a home-grown timesharing system called WAITS thatwas similar to TOPS-10 in outline but considerably different in detail.
Somepeople have claimed that "windows" were invented at Xerox PARC orSRI, but their immediate precursors were the "pieces-of-glass" thatwere part of the SAIL display system
from the beginning.The main difference between pieces-of-glass and windows was that the formerwere transparent (i.e. you could see the lower layers) whereas"windows" were opaque.
Afancier display system, installed at SAIL in 1971, put a terminal using atelevision monitor on everyone's desk. SAIL was apparently the first system inthe world that put terminals in offices -- before that, the few computerdisplays that existed were kept in "display rooms." This displaysystem also included an advanced keyboard that introduced the "Meta"key and other features to facilitate touch-typing.Thatkeyboard design was picked up promptly by MIT and Carnegie-Mellon Universityand later by Apple, whose Command key is a direct descendent of the Meta key onthe SAIL keyboard.
By1972 the display system included a digital video switch that allowed users toselect rapidly from a variety of computer-generated images or other videosources, including commercial television. There was also a speaker on each workstation and a novel audio switch that used digital components to allowselection from several audio sources.
Theoriginal PDP-6 system had just 64k words of storage (which occupied eight largecabinets) and usedmicrotapes for secondary storage.A fixed-head disc file built byLibrascope, added in1968, was supposed to function both as a swapping store and a permanent filestore, but it turned out to be so temperature-sensitive that it was useless forfile storage. The six remarkably large discs in this system, which were each 4 feetin diameter, were eventually sold as coffee tables I have one in my livingroom. Despite its large physical size, this disc system had a capacity of onlyabout 100 megabytes. More reliable disks made by IBM,Ampexand DEC were added in later years.
Anumber of people joined SAIL in the late 1960s, including Don Knuth, who laterwent off on his own but continued to use the SAIL computer as his main"home" because of its many advanced features.RajReddy, who had just finished his Ph. D. at Stanford, continued his pioneeringwork in speech recognition and eventually moved it to Carnegie-MellonUniversity.
Anotherrecent Ph. D. named JohnChowning developed his ideason computer synthesis of music at SAIL, leading to a patented synthesizer thatwas licensed to Yamaha and that made millions of dollars for him and forStanford.Chowning later formed a computer musicresearch group called CCRMA (Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics)that is now in the Music Department at Stanford.
ArtSamuel had joined the Lab in 1967 after retiring from IBM. He continued to develop his checkers program,which was the computer world champion at that time. One of his studentsdeveloped the most advanced Go program of that era.
Dr.Kenneth Colby joined the Lab in 1968 and his group developed a number ofexperimental natural-language-understanding programs, including Parry, which answeredquestions in a manner that simulated the responses of a paranoid person.
Amongthe user-friendly features of SAIL was an advanced version ofSpacewar, a rockets-and-torpedoes game created principallyby Steve (Slug) Russell, who had developed the first version while he was atMIT. That idea was further developed by a couple of our staff members into acommercial version using a PDP-11 computer. It became quite popular at a localbowling alley and at the Stanford coffee shop, but the developers knew nothingabout how to run a business and their small enterprise went nowhere.
Meanwhile,a guy named Nolan Bushnell picked up the same idea and formed a small companycalled Atari that developedSpacewar as their firstproduct. Deciding that it was too complicated to be a marketing success, theysold it to another company, and went on to develop a simpler game that turnedout to be quite popular; it was called Pong....
Agrad student named Don Woods later took a game idea from another person anddeveloped Adventure, which spread over the ARPAnet (predecessor of the Internet)and later evolved in various directions. Today, Adventure is considered theancestor of almost all text-based computer games.
Moreserious work on computer gaming included McCarthy's chess program that he hadbegun at MIT and that was used in a match with one in the Soviet Union. (Welost, but it caused our Russian counterparts a lot of grief when the KGBdiscovered that we were exchanging telegrams containing what looked like codedmessages.)
ADEC consultant named Richard P.Gruen, who used tohang out at SAIL, developed a system for controlling complex program compilationsthat he called RPG, which officially stood for "Rapid ProgramGeneration," but also happened to be his initials. This idea was laterincorporated intoUnix as the "make"command.
Thecomputer was used for text editing right from the beginning. BillWeiher and others developed a simple text editor that cameto be called SOS and spread throughout the DEC-6/10/20 community. Later apage-oriented editor called E became the primary editor in the Lab. Manyfeatures originating with E were incorporated into theemacseditor that was developed later at MIT.
Idecided early on that I needed a spelling checker in order to cope with mydeficiencies in that area. Fortunately, I happened to have a dictionary of the10,000 most common English words that I had punched into paper tape when I wasat MIT; and during 1960-62, I had developed a spelling checker as a subroutinein a pen-based system for recognizing cursive writing. (This system, which Ihad also developed, worked at least as well as the handwriting recognizers thatare now appearing on the market.) As I later learned, this 1961 system wasevidently the first computer spelling checker developed anywhere.
In1966 I gave the dictionary to one of our grad students at Stanford, and hewrote a new spelling checker in LISP that clanked a bit but did the job. A fewyears later, another grad student named RalphGorindid a faster one in machine language that included spelling correction. Thatbecame quite popular in the lab.
SAILwas connected to ARPAnet around that time, and programs and data begancirculating between theresearch sites through a mixtureof donation and benign thievery. Our spelling checker spread to DECsystem-10and -20 computers all over the net and aUnix versionwas subsequently developed. Such programs were included later in the personalcomputers that began appearing in the mid-1970s.
Anotherprogram called FINGER, which I developed to help keep track of theunpredictable migrations of our staff at all hours of the day and night, waspicked up by several other DEC-10 and DEC-20 computer facilities. We latermodified it to work through the ARPAnet and track the denizens of remotecomputers. It too was rewritten forUnix, but theauthor of the Unix version was not careful about security, and a loophole in itwas exploited much later by the infamous Internet Worm.
Anotherarea enriched by cooperation and innocent larceny was the development of rastergraphics printing, initially based on the Xerox XGP and later on laser printersdeveloped by Xerox, Canon and others. LarryTeslerand I had developed an early text formatting program called PUB thatfacilitated printing on line printers, teletypes, and microfilm, which waslater modified by a Carnegie-Mellon student to print on the XGP. People atvarious sites, principally Carnegie-Mellon, Stanford, and MIT, developed fontdesign software and developed a robust collection of typefaces that migratedall over the network.
Inspiredby the deficiencies of PUB, a grad student at Carnegie-Mellon named Brian Reiddeveloped another text formatting program called Scribe. Don Knuth also put onetogether calledTeX, which became a pre-eminentstandard for scientific and technical page description, and later developed afancy font design program calledMetafont.
Iwas a member of the ARPA committee that reviewed the initial technicalproposals for ARPAnet, and SAIL became part of the original network when itstarted in 1969, though we had to defer regular network operation until we gotenough memory to hold the rather large amount of communications software that wasrequired.
Naturally,development work at this level created a need for food at all hours of the dayand night, accessible with minimal distraction. Around 1972 we developedSAIL's response to thisneed, acomputer controlled vending machine which sold on credit. Called the PrancingPony after an inn inTolkien'sLord of the Rings, it still operates in the Computer Science Departmentat Stanford, though both hardware and software have been updated.
InSAIL's enjoyable work environment, researchers did pioneeringwork on computer vision, robotics, and automated assembly as well asmathematical theory of computation, theorem proving, and common sensereasoning. HansMoravec's system that guided a robotvehicle, using stereoscopic images from a video camera, did pioneering work onnavigation and obstacle avoidance.
Severalpeople moved from SAIL to Xerox PARC when it was formed in the early 1970s,including Alan Kay and LarryTesler, and took theSAIL culture with them. Others later moved toLucasfilmto develop the computer technologies supporting "Star Wars" and otherelaborate flicks.
Someof our students developed the first interactive CAD system for computer design,called SUDS for "Stanford University Drawing System," and used it todesign the Super Foonly, which heavily influenced the DEC KL-10 computer. DEClater used SUDS as their primary design tool for over a decade. They also donateda KL-10 to the Lab.
SUDSwas also a key resource in the formation of both Foonly Inc., a small company(now defunct) that made computers that were DEC-10 compatible, and Valid Logic,a pioneering CAD company.SUDS was also used by AndyBechtolscheim, a co-founder of Sun Microsystems, to designthe first SUN workstation (SUN stood for Stanford University Network). Andycontinued to use SUDS to design successive Sun workstations, using the 1967-vintageSAIL displays through 1987.
Othercommercial spin-offs from SAIL include:
Vicarm, one of the earliestrobotics companies, which made high-performance electric arms and was laterpurchased by General Electric.
Xidex, which developed andmarketed a portable compiler calledMainSail.
Imagen, which I co-founded,and which developed and marketed the earliest desktop publishing systems usinglaser printers.The company didn't get funding, because the venture capitalists had never heardof laser printers and were not convinced that there was a market for them, butit bootstrapped to annual sales of around $12 million before being purchased byQMS.
Lucid, which developed andmarketed LISP compilers and related software.
Cisco Systems, which appropriatedStanford-developed digital communications technology, and eventually got alicense from Stanford after being threatened with legal action.
In1979 SAIL rejoined the computer science department in a new building on themain Stanford campus, but effectively lost its organizational identity in theprocess. The DEC-10 computer called SAIL continued to operate for another dozenyears, providing a comfortable home for those who had come to appreciate itsfeatures. A party was held on June 7, 1991 to celebrateSAIL's25th birthday. It was by that time the oldest living timesharing system inthe world.
However,SAIL was no longer maintained, and began exhibiting the computer equivalent ofsenile dementia. The computer was powered down for the last time and dismantledon October 4, 1991, but is still fondly remembered by many who used it for workand play over the decades. It was replaced by a small DEC workstation runningUnix, also called SAIL, which has much more memory and happens to be muchfaster than the old SAIL computer; but it has much less character.
Some other publications by the author
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