3. Who we were.
People and Programmer ID Codes.
Visiting People in Situ 1972
From Stanford University, after your classes for that day, drive west on Page Mill Road. Go under the freeway I-280 interchange and a quarter mile further turn right onto Arastradero Road. Continue to 1600 Arastradero, at that large Portolla Pastures sign, rewind your back-to-the-future calendar to the year 1972. The large sign now reads "Stanford something something and Aero Space D.C. Power Laboratory". Go up the driveway, past the yellow diamond "Caution Robot Vehicle" sign, to the parking lot. There will be many empty parking spaces, but no obvious robot vehicles in sight, except maybe for that derelict military colored trailer with a dish antenna in the lower parker lot. Nearby is a Colossal Cave Adventure semi circular laboratory building. Walk up the wide steps, enter the front door, glance at the You-Are-Here maps, wave at Queenette QIB who sitting at her desk near the front door. However you turn left and walk down the hallway, when passing the first office door, nod at Art Samuels, who is staring at a checker board; when passing the second office door, glance at Les Earnest, who is mumbling to himself; and at the third office door greet professor John McCarthy, who will be looking that day like a Russian Icon Saint. Snap a poloroid picture JMC for the rogues gallery bulletin board that is in the computer room, Mordor. Continue back to Lester Earnest, snap a poloroid of LES. Continue back to Arthur Samuel, snap a poloroid of ALS and the checker board. Go down the main central hall, which is called the spine and which is curving slightly leftward so that at first you do not see the cork board at the end. At the second door on your look in to see the DWP, RFS and PMP sitting at their desks. At the third door JAM and TAG happen to be in. The fourth door is the Prancing Pony, stop here to mix instant coffee with hot water in a styrafoam cup it is still 1972; or a wait a year or two for the Expresso Machine to be installed with Peets Coffee available. Take your turn to run down to Menlo Park to pick up the coffee.
PRG Codes
For the eighteen years of SAIL that are visible on the DART tapes, user login access to the computer system required a three letter programmer ID code. These programmer codes were assigned to one human for a period of time. Some thirty codes were used for non-human system accounts. Contrary to the rules, some programmers shared there ID code with relatives, friends and academic assistants; so significant documents can be attributed to authors other than the one named by the programmer ID code. For example, Music Professor, Leland Smith's son Clem Smith, always used his father's login code when using the GEOMED modeling program I wrote for my PhD work. So I see all these GEOMED files under Smith which I know were written by Clem, and not Leland. Some humans acquired over time, two or more different ID codes. For example, Carl Hewitt started as CAR then became CDR, because C.A.R.Hoare just had to have the ID code "CAR". "Sir Charles Antony Richard Hoare FRS FREng, commonly known as Tony Hoare or C. A. R. Hoare, is a British computer scientist. He developed the sorting algorithm quicksort in 1959/1960. Some ID codes were re-used for different humans in different time periods. Also there were spelling errors in the accounting records. From the SAIL accounting files the full names, programmer codes, project codes, and date spans can be extracted into database CSV, Comma String Value, tables.
Significant people at SAIL when I was there are:
figure Pictures/JMC-0.png
JMC
John McCarthy
Significant SAIL people circa 1974.
The A.I. Lab Principals
figure Pictures/JMC-0.png figure Pictures/JMC_chess_IBM7094.jpg
JMC
John McCarthy
figure Pictures/LES-0.png figure Pictures/ALS-0.png figure Pictures/ALS_checkers_IBM7094.jpg
LES ALS
Les Earnest Arthur L. Samuels
In 1972, at the front of building,
the inner corner office #208 belonged to SAIL founder,
Professor John McCarthy, JMC,
was the Principle Investigator on the ARPA research contract and director of the lab.
The next office #206 belonged to the executive director, Les Earnest[290]↓, LES.
And in the first front office #202 to your left as you walked in the front door
sat Professor Emeritus and A.I. pioneer, Arthur L. Samuels[291]↓, ALS.
Above is what they looked like in situ in 1972, when I took Polaroid snapshots.
Computer Science over Achievers: Diffie, Kay, DEK
figure Pictures/Whit_Diffie.jpg figure Pictures/Alan_Kay.jpg figure Pictures/knuth.png
WD KAY DEK
Whit Diffie Alan Kay Don Knuth
WD, KAY and DEK were all associated with SAIL in the early 1970s but each achieved their world fame outside SAIL’s intellectual bubble. WD is now known
for inventing public key encryption, Alan Kay is known for OO programming (smalltalk) and bit raster GUI Dynabook. DEK is known for writing the
canonical set of fundamental computer science text books as well as the technical publication TeX. WD has noted that he fell short of John McCarthy’s
expectations with respect to helping out on LISP and proof of correctness. Les Earnest notes that Alan Kay had a bad year at SAIL before re-ignition at
Xerox PARC. Don Knuth avoided direct support from ARPA in those years because of the Vietnam war. Knuth got funding from NSF.
System Wizards: Gorin, Harvey, Frost, Wright
figure Pictures/REG.png figure Pictures/Frost.jpg figure Pictures/Brian_Harvey.jpg figure Pictures/Fred_Wright.jpg
REG ME BH FW
Ralph Gorin Marty Frost Brian Harvey Fred Wright
Foonly founders:
figure Pictures/Dave_Poole.png figure Pictures/Jack_Holloway.png figure Pictures/PMP.png
DWP H PMP
Dave Poole Jack Holloway Phil Petit
The Foonly other people include myself (7% of the stock for a brief period in 1979), Dave Dyer, Fred Wright, Tom Gafford[292]↓, Tovar[293]↓, name1, name2 and
names 3, 4 & 5.
Dave Poole was difficult to work with, at the memorial service there were several widows (um 3 or 4 female companions) and scared sailor stories (well
I myself was the whole crew on Dave’s sailboat at the tiller and holding the sheet (a rope — no that is a line — there are no ropes on a sailboat, that
is connected to a boom that controls the sail, a large piece of fabric — unless you are crewing for Oracle, those sails are metallic) one early morning
around 3am on SF bay heading westward towards the Golden Gate Bridge with some moon light. So Dave is up forward, inside the boat some place repairing
something, and I am looking at a huge chunk of iron heading straight at me with huge lettering reading Esso Maru something, I could see at once that
Esso Maru had the right of way by the laws of physics and that I was going to be very lucky if I could get rightwards toward Angel Island without any
help from Dave. Many years later Dave and his larger boat, the Bird, were lost at sea in November 1999, somewhere in Glacier Bay, Alaska. Jim Gray was
also lost at Sea. So “Stick close to your desk and never go to sea” especially if you are a computer engineer.
The top two Roboticists: VDS and HPM.
figure Pictures/VIC_and_hydraulic_arm.jpg figure Pictures/HPM_1977.png
VDS HPM
Vic Scheinman Hans Moravec
There were others at SAIL working on robotics: Earnest[294]↓, Baumgart, Schmidt, Paul, Sword, Binford and more.
Musicians: Chowning, Smith, Moorer
figure Pictures/John_Chowning.png figure Pictures/Leland_Smith.png figure Pictures/JAM.png figure Pictures/JMG.png
JC LCS JAM JMG
John Chowning Leland Smith Andy Moorer John Grey
Martians: QED, MJH, RBT, BO.
figure Pictures/QED.png figure Pictures/Marsha_Jo_Hanna.png figure Pictures/RBT.png figure Pictures/Bo_Erros.png
QED MJH RBT BO
Lynn Quam Marsha Jo Hanna Bob Tucker Bo Eross
In association with JPL, considerable image processing for the first Mars orbital mission was done at Stanford. The Mariner 9 achieved orbit around
Mars on 14 November 1971.
SAIL programming language: Swinehart, Sprowl
figure Pictures/Swinehart.jpg figure Pictures/Sproul.jpg
DCS RFS
Dan Swinehart Bob Sproul
Technical Staff: TED, TAG, JOE, ADD
figure Pictures/Ted_Panofsky.jpg figure Pictures/TAG.png figure Pictures/JOE.png figure Pictures/ADD_outside.png
TED TAG JOE ADD
Ted Panofsky Tom Gafford Joe Zingheim Al Dulan
They who just walked in: TVR, REM and BP.
figure Pictures/TVR-1984.jpg figure Pictures/REM.png figure Pictures/Bill_Pitts_with_one_checker.png
TVR REM BP
Tovar Robert Moss Bill Pitts
3.2 PRG code related tables
Top 100 programmers by having the most bytes in SailDart.
Don Knuth[295]↓ and Marty Frost[296]↓ are the top humans based on their number of bytes in the SailDart. The Knuth quantity is assured by his TeX work, and the Frost quantity arises from his work with News Service files, DART archive database tables and huge message files that were used as Blogs and Bulletin Boards. Both Knuth and Frost were at SAIL for a long time period and they were each in their own way very privileged users whose files were often exempted from the file purge utility.
PRG information from SailDart data
This story comes from reading SAIL text files, finding the LOGIN source, reading the disk utility software, and the computer usage accounting software; and on writing ’C’ programs to do bulk conversion of old PDP-10 binary DAT files into CSV text in order to be able to use current 2014 database tools. DART, the magnetic tape backup program, the eponymous disk system utility named RALPH and the accounting program ACCT (which was there as a job named “*SPY*”) were all written by Ralph Gorin. Les Earnest wrote much of the report generating software including FINGER. Marty Frost made changes everywhere across this material for nearly twenty years, as well as writing the NS News Service.
Linking PRG codes to USER, names and dates.
This is a story of extracting information from SAIL file data. Elsewhere I have explained how to convert the DART tapes into modern file systems, and database tables, and web site pages. Assume that conversion has been done, then we can process the old SAIL files such as FACT.TXT[SPL,SYS]. The FACT.TXT file appears in eighty versions, from November 1972 to August 1980, with text lines in the format {PRG code} <tab> {NAME string} <newline> with only two format defects in the total of 17990 lines. So with a few GNU/Linux shell commands and a few lines of database SQL we can reformat the original text into database rows listing a date span, PRG code and user name. Then a human digital archivist, myself, manually provides a table of preferred user name spellings and fixes the two defects, which make this interpretation the cleanest large example I have found. Pay attention: file authorship does not correspond to user accounts since there was promiscuous file sharing and very few password protected areas in the early days. Multiple persons would use a single account code as groups of students, friends, or relatives struggled to use and share the expensive computer resource. The user name associated with a SailDart file does not indicate ownership or copyright. Many files can be seen that have been copied from one account to another. Further notes: There is a single non-human user code SYS1972 to unite the non-human PRG codes 1, 2, 3, SYS, SAI, LSP, ACT and so on into one user. There are about two hundred PRG codes with two or three user names and two codes ’JL’ and ’JEF’ that have four user names each. Multi person PRG codes are postfixed with a four digit year to form the USER code. For example the prg code DEK was assigned first to is owned by Donald Ervin Knuth whose files span 1973-10-02 through 1990-08-16 and the user code DEK1973 code is for owner Daryl E Knoblock a Stanford student who took the LISP course CSD 206 and so held the DEK login code from April to June 1973 leaving exactly ten small files in the area [206,DEK]. Professor Donald Ervin Knuth, DEK1974 all the other DEK areas with exactly 10900 files. As a graduate student, I was not familiar with the implementation details of the SAIL time sharing accounting and the login codes. Only as an archivist, did I find the FACT.TXT[SPL,SYS] files by vanity searching for keywords BGB and BAUMGART. There are several other compilations of PRG codes with human names and project assignments including the Ralph Gorin LOGIN software, the *SPY* accounting software, and Les Earnest software for FINGER, computer usage, disk allocation, facility management (office space, telephone lines, computer terminals, data lines and so on) and the software and database records for the Prancing Pony computerized vending machine. However all this software underwent improvement over the years and so will take longer to explain than the simple and complete FACT.TXT[SPL,SYS] file set which provided the name to print on the header page for the line printer and Xerox Graphic Printer spooling system.
People at the November 2009 SAIL reunion.
This was a two day event, Saturday 21 and Sunday 22 November 2009. Les Earnest had wanted to present his Y3K paper and so contacted Raj Reddy; together they called for a reunion of people who had participated in projects at the 1st SAIL in the 1966 to 1980 period together with representatives of the Second SAIL. figure Pictures/people/SAIL-walkabout-2.png Figure 3.1 Walkabout 2009 There are 45 faces in the Walkabout picture. Look for the big white hat on Marty Frost in the middle of the picture as the origin, Quadrant III from left to right is 1 BGB Baumgart, 2, 3, 4 OK Khatib, 5 TAG Gafford, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 CDR Carl Hewitt; Quadrant II left to right 1, 2, 3, 4 BP Pitts, 5, 6, 7 DEK Knuth, 8 LES Earnest, 9 Sandy Auerbach, 10 VDS Scheinman, 11; Quadrant I from left to right 1, 2 FW Wright, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 TVR Tovar, 8 HJS, 9 PDQ Quam, 10, 11 DBA Bruce Anderson, 12 QIB Queenette Baur (red shirt), 13 Janet Smith (blue coat), 14, 15 PAM Paul Martin; and Quadrant IV left to right 1, 2 DAV Smith, 3 RBT Bob Tucker, 4 DCS Swinehart, 5, 6, 7, 8. On Saturday there was a three mile Walkabout starting from the Arastradero Open Space Visitors Center looping up the park trails past Arastradero Lake and down again to the site of the D.C.Power Building where we held a champagne toast and took the group picture before gathering at the Alpine Inn for a beer garden lunch. On Sunday 22 November from 1:30 to 5 pm, six gold medals were awarded to 2nd SAIL people; and fourteen gold medals, engraved “John McCarthy Award for Research Excellence”, were awarded to the 1st SAIL people. Top row: Chowning, Earnest, Diffie, Gorin, Hearn in front of Swinehart, Quam, Tesler, Russell. Middle row: Baumgart, Chowning, Earnest, Diffie, Gorin, Swinehart, Hearn, Quam in front of Tesler, Frost, Russell. Bottom row: Baumgart, Buchanan, McCarthy, Scheinman, Feigenbaum, Petit, Tesler, Frost, Russell, Quam. figure Pictures/SAIL-reunion-pictures/14_gold_medalist_collage.jpg Figure 3.2 collage of McCarthy and Feigenbaum with fourteen gold medalists Bruce Baumgart for creating the SailDart computer archive. Bruce Buchanan for pioneering contributions to knowledge based systems. John Chowning for creating the computer music synthesis system Whitfield Diffie for initiating the public key cryptography development Les Earnest for helping to start the ARPANET and creating the social networking program Ralph Gorin for creating the first spelling corrector Anthony Hearn for creating the Standard Lisp System Victor Scheinman for developing high performance robot arms Dan Swinehart for contributions to the SAIL programming language Larry Tesler for creating the PUB document compiler Martin Frost for creating the first network news service Phil Petit for initiating the first interactive electronic design system, SUDS Steve Russell for creating SPACEWAR, the first video-game Lynn Quam for creating an image retrieval system for planetary exploration Eight of these medalist talks lasted more than the alloted five minutes, which crowded the Les Earnest Y3K presentation up against the scheduled Reception and Faculty Club dinner which were delayed and ran until the catering staff kicked us out of the building after 9pm. The invitation had specified “Regarding dinner apparel, anything from jeans with tee shirts to dress-up is fine or, if you don’t mind being a bit conspicuous, you can wear a tuxedo or nothing at all”.
I did not see a tuxedo that evening; other writers have already commented on the first SAIL sauna, nudity and circumcision; so I won’t go there.
People at the 25 March 2012 JMC Celebration.
John McCarthy died on 24 October 2011, a Celebration of his Life was held on 25 March 2012 which included funeral orations spanning his whole career. The web page I did for this event is at URL: http://www.saildart.org/jmc2012.html And the table of attendees has 314 lines some of which are for couples.
Dead People, Gone and HEAVEN.
Prior to 2016, I have not tracked SAIL survivors with sufficient diligence. The deceased I have become aware of and mention are marked as (deceased). The Les Earnest database tables use the token “GONE”. The early HEAVEN.DAT[PER,CSD] file was simply for people who had left the lab and whose accounts were closed. We assume they were alive when they last logged off from SAIL and they may flourish to this day. For the many euphemisms, equivalent to dead, review the Monty Python Dead Parrot sketch. 3.8 more digital images figure Pictures/REG+MTT.jpg Figure 3.3 Mao, Gorin, Grey and Sarah McCarthy 3.9 SAIL Book of the Dead. Going forth by day. The Egyptian Book of the Dead contains hundreds of verses.
Exercises
- Finish writing the section on the 2009 reunion. Re-do the video segments for each speaker and provide the transcripts and a top HTML page as good as the 2012 top page.
- Finish writing the section on the 2012 celebration for John McCarthy.
- Elaborate on the two thousand PRG code names and links. Coordinate contacting people with Les Earnest, the Stanford Alumni database and the search engines.
- Maintain current survival status, de mortua nil nisi bonum. Avoid getting listed as “GONE” for as long as possible. Write your own NYT obit and send it to John Markoff (as well as cc: to bgbaumgart at mac.com).