S A I L D A R T

SAIL was the lab. DART was the backup program that wrote a final set of 229 reels of magnetic tape. SAILDART is a digital archive promulgating records from SAIL. The time span recorded on the DART backup tapes is 1972 to 1990. The year 1974 is the earliest with enough records to run SAIL software now as it was then.

In 1974 computer disks were huge, but capacity was tiny.

1. When – Once upon a time, around 1974.

The term Artificial Intelligence was coined by John McCarthy for a 1956 summer workshop at Dartmouth. In 1962, McCarthy left MIT and became a full professor at Stanford. The Stanford Artificial Intelligence Project – Project, not yet a Laboratory – started 15 June 1963, in Polya Hall, on the north edge of the Stanford Campus. The Project was first equipped with an 18-bit PDP-1 computer. Three years later, in 1966, the A.I. Project moved from Polya Hall, off campus to the D.C. Power building at 1600 Arastradero Road. Thirteen years further on, in 1979, SAIL was absorbed back into the Stanford Computer Science Department. In 1998, professor John McCarthy and a few SAIL veterans, started the Saildart Archive to preserve and propagate the content of the DART tapes.

Perhaps the building itself caused the name to morph from Project to Laboratory. With support from ARPA, the Advanced Research Project Administration, of the US Department of Defense, SAIL advanced from the 18-bit PDP-1 to a 36-bit, PDP-6 computer. PDP stood for Programmed Digital Processor. The PDP computers, were manufactured by DEC, the Digital Equipment Corporation, Maynard Massachusetts. Computers now are commonly based on 64-bit wide designs. Recapping as shown in the timeline box, one can see that the middle of this story is 1974. 

  1963 The Stanford AI project was started by Professor John McCarthy.
  1966 The Stanford AI project moved off campus and
       the PDP-6 computer was installed.
  1968 The PDP-10 KA computer was installed.
  1972 A spacewar competition at SAIL was reported
       in the Rolling Stone magazine
       and the first DART tape was written.
  1974 Software re-enactment for typical day at SAIL, 26 July 1974.
  1976 The PDP-10 KL computer goes online.
  1979 SAIL moved to Margaret Jacks Hall.
       SAIL is merged into the Stanford Computer Science Department  
  1986 The DC Power building is demolished.  
  1990 The final DART tapes are written.  
  1991 The final E-mail message from the SAIL Timesharing System is sent.
  1998 Beginning of the Saildart archive.

A second incarnation of the Stanford A. I. Lab was founded in 2004 by Sebastian Thurn. Here the bare acronym, SAIL, refers to the first SAIL lab, unless context dictates SAIL the Programming Language, or SAIL the hostname for a dual PDP-10 server within the Stanford.EDU domain. The SAIL host server out lived its laboratory by a decade, by hiding in a basement corner of the Stanford Computer Science Department building, earning its keep as an email server and snack vending machine transaction processor. The final major task performed by the SAIL computer – with help from Marty Frost, as directed by John McCarthy – was to copy the DART tapes from low density to high density. The software life of the SAIL-WAITS Time Sharing Ssytem started several years before, and lasted a year after, the 18 year DART tape recording window.

Numerologically auspicious the SAIL PDP-6 computer passed its acceptance test on the date 6 June 1966. According to Lester Earnnest, the 36-bit time sharing era for SAIL software ran for exactly 25 years, from Monday 6 June 1966, to Friday 7 June 1991. On Friday 7 June 1991, at a couple of minutes before 9 pm, Pacific Daylight Time, many of us Stanford people received a first person, biographical email signed as “From: SAIL Timesharing System”. The following long quotation is adapted from that E-mail message, which introduces what can be found in the DART backup records. The claim that there was a ghostwriter, is reviewed after the autobiography.

The autobiography of SAIL

    Date: 07 Jun 1991 20:56 Pacific Daylight Time
    From: SAIL Timesharing System < SAI@SAIL.Stanford.EDU >
    Subject: life as a computer for a quarter of a century

TAKE ME, I’M YOURS.

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 Lucas film. 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 Francisco 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 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. The original CPU has gone missing, its serial number was sweet sixteen. A PDP-6 console panel is said to exist at the Computer History Museum. There were eight DEC tape drives; I had no disks to begin with; just those eight DEC tape drives, also eight Model 33 Teletypes, a line printer that produced rather ragged text, and two 7-track tape drives. Users kept their programs and data on the DEC tapes. Users had to sign up for a DEC tape drive, and a core allocation, through an arcane reservation procedure with virtual currency in units of BAMs and WHAMs.

Sharing

As you know, we computers think much faster than humans, so it is 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 time sharing to make things less boring for us. My family was the first to be designed specifically to use timesharing.

Mount Umunhum

I got proper air conditioning a short time later, unfortunately I developed a bad case of hiccups that struck regularly at 12 second intervals. My assistants spent 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 buzzing zzzit sound 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 Deck noticed that my purchase order, which was based on their quotation, was badly screwed up. Deck 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 Deck salesman lost his job as a result of this incident.

Growing Up

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 real time service if it needed it. That feature turned out to have many useful applications in robotics and 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 dim witted 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.

Student Days

I got a rather elegant display system in 1971 that put terminals in everyone’s office, with full computer text and graphics, including gray-scale, 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 terminals to 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 throughout 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 1970s 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 Alzheimerish 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.

Sex

As you know, we timesharing computers are multi sexual—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 1970s 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, Lester Earnest, that I was going down for maintenance at midnight. As soon as he left the building, their budding starlet shed her clothes, and began fondling my tape drives, as you know most filmmakers use the cliché of the rotating tape drives, because they are one of the few visually moving parts to be seen on my generation of computers. Other students, who were in on this conspiracy, remained in other parts of my building, but I catered to their voyeuristic interests by turning my television cameras on the action, so that they could see it all on their display terminals. However, one eager student had to get a listing from the line printer in the computer room, 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. The anonymous talented young lady, some say her stage name was Zowie, must now be over sixty years old. Do lookup, Eadweard Muybridge, to learn more about the history of cutting edge research, on imaging technology of nudes at Stanford. Incidentally, the students reportedly received an ’A’ for their work.

Career

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.

Retirement Party

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, that were held in my honor. The Programming race winners: Barry Hayes & David Fuchs The Treasure hunt winners: Ken Ross, Ross Casley, Roger Crew, Scott Seligman, Anil Gangoli, Dan Scales The 14-legged race winners: Arthur Keller, Earl Sacerdoti, Irwin Sobel; Bruce, Stephen & David Baumgart; Four Pan off skees; 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!) Unix machines, but they haven’t got it working yet. (they never did.) 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. 

    Forever yours. Truly,
    SAIL.Stanford.EDU

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

Some folks say SAIL’s ghostwriter was Lester Earnest. Lester Earnest claims he authored the SAIL Autobiography, and he has noticed the lack of attribution over the years. The dispute is resolved by noticing that SAIL’s ghost transmigrated into Les Earnest on that final day in 1991. SAIL’s ghost has been exorcised (and then metastasized) into more durable platforms, as will be described in chapter-17, the re-enactment.

1972 Rolling Stone and DART reel #1

The end of the pre-DART period is marked at 8pm on Wednesday 18 October 1972, when the Spacewar competition was held that was reported in the Rolling Stone magazine in the 7 December 1972 issue by Stewart Brand and with photographs by Annie Liebowitz.


Figure: Picture of Stewart Brand and Annie Liebowitz, digitized at 00:19 on Thursday 19 October 1972, by KRD – Randall Davis, who was demonstrating the future when digital imaging replaces analog film.

In the following month, November 1972, the first full file system backup onto the permanent DART tapes was done. Backup is an oft neglected chore. Nevertheless, the anarchists at SAIL in those years succeeded at long term record keeping, in contrast to NASA personnel who lost the primary video tape of the first moon landing.

1974 time portal

For entry into the archival past, I am setting my Time Machine portal date to one minute past midnight on the morning of Friday 26 July 1974, which is a convenient starting point for me to re-enact the software that existed at SAIL. Ralph Gorin, REG, who now lives in Seattle, is working on museum PDP-10 hardware and wrote to me recently (May 2013) that he prefers to resurrect the SAIL system as it was in 1990. I sent him a USB stick with everything he asked for and I am looking forward to hearing from him again soon. The metaphorical snake swallowing the porcupine must chose to start either from the head or from the tail. The rationale for my chosen date is as follows... The file named SYSTEM.DMP[S,SYS]31 is timestamped Thursday 25 July 1974. It is the best copy of the SAIL Operating System PDP-10 binary code for me to present on the Saildart web site because it has a complete set of its source files isolated in the directory [J17,SYS] and its supporting software and documentation have been relatively easy to find. The J17 was deployed a month prior to my graduation in August 1974, after which time my continuous participation at the AI had ended. This version of the system happily includes XGP fonts, robotics, television cameras, on-line file system, backup tapes, vector displays, video displays, and best of all it lacks the later complexity of the PDP-11 console computer, peripheral processors (examples PDP-11/45, the FFT box, the Samson box, and so on) and it omits the memory address mapping box, that arrived at SAIL after I had left. The ARPA network software and the interface to the IMP exist in this version of the SYSTEM due to the brilliant coding efforts of James Anderson Moorer. However, networking is not a subject that I was familiar with at the time and I do not intend to resurrect it now. Isaac Newton wrote in Latin, his calculus notation is not that which is used today. Albert Einstein wrote in German, his tensor notation is not that which we use today. The ARPA network of 1974 is not the TCP/IP internet we use today. The SAIL system network software is not for the faint hearted programmer, I advise network historians to start closer to the present and work backwards towards 1974, if there is any reason to restore that mechanism. For running the SAIL SYSTEM functionality, I have set aside (patched out) matters I have found to be difficult or irrelevant. The old software that runs now is better characterized as a Look-n-Feel re-enactment, rather than as a cycle-by-cycle simulation. I define the word emulation as being closer to the physical hardware than a simulation. Discussing the exact differences, between the PDP-6 and the PDP-10 KA, is an evening amusement on the front porch at the old AI hippie hacker retirement home, over a glass of Ridge Zin. Such arcane knowledge is not needed to run the 1974 software.

1979 End of AI funding and the move to Campus.

End of year 1979 was the end of the ARPA funding for the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Project. The date 1981-03-08 is the exact midpoint in the quantity of material in the Saildart when at 03:07 in the morning the 60672 word file named OPMHDR.PRE[1,FJM] was created. That tinked the percentage from 49.9994 over the midpoint to 50.0003 percent.

1990 Final DART reel is written.

From November 1979 skip forward almost 11 years (TeX, Music, Sun, Cisco, Bulletin Boards and everything else inside the Saildart Archive that will be introduced in Part-II on Content), brings us to 5 pm on Friday 17 August 1990 when the final dart tape was written and so the Saildart Archive falls silent.

1991 SAIL.Stanford.EDU is decommissioned.

Almost a year later the SAIL PDP-10 was powered down, minutes after its June 1991 farewell email message was sent. On the web there are blog notes by MRC, Mark Crispin (deceased 2013), concerning what happened to that particular heap of PDP-10 computer hardware. There was a fire, it was broken into scrap, it sat in someone’s garage, some parts were sold at flea markets, I think it has essentially disappeared. I would like to hear from anyone who may know about what happened to the final collection of SAIL hardware. There were two computers at the end, the KA and the KL. Some parts are on display in glass cases on the first level in the lobby of the Stanford Computer Science Department Wm. Gates building. I am amused when I visit Stanford CSD that the Gates of Computer Science is only a short walk away from the Rodin Garden Gates of Hell. Concluding chapter one with another chronology including more recent events,

 Recap SAIL Time Periods

Stanford A.I. Lab Directors

      Figure: A.I. Lab Directors
      1966-1980  John McCarthy
      1980-2004  A. I. Winter
      2004-2011  Sebastian Thrun
      2011-2014  Andrew Ng
      2014-2018+ Fei Fei Li

World Time Context

There were five U. S. Presidents during this period: Johnson 1963, Nixon 1969, Ford 1974, Carter 1977 and Reagan 1981 until 1989. Six moon landings occurred, the first Apollo#11 on 20 July 1969, and the last Apollo#17 on 11 Dec 1972. The U. S. Vietnam War went from 1965 to 1975. Walter Cronkite and the first Star Trek Series were on analog television. Stanley Kubrick’s movie titled 2001 was released in April 1968. The counter culture Woodstock Festival was held in August 1969, coda to 1967, which was the hippie summer of love.

About Time

Notice how often the word Time occurs. There is Time Sharing, Real Time and Simulated Time. Then too details about SAIL-WAITS date-time stamps, Day Light Savings Time, scheduling algorithms, clock routines, jiffies, ticks, the Petit electronic calendar clock, synchronous, asynchronous and priority interrupt events. The software re-enactment will introduce the speed-of-time and apply the Ground Hog Day trope to Friday, 26 July 1974, which date is to be re-enacted again and again.

Exercises

Unlike a text book, exercises here are for the authors, not for the readers. Readers may contribute, if they wish, but then they would become authors.

  1. Implement a SAIL time-line microscope as a dynamic display of the Sail accounting data zooming from years to minutes
  2. Write a screen play with story boards of a day in the life at SAIL in the 1970s.
  3. Display the time line fabric of people and projects.