15. Social Participation.

Participation in the SailDart Archive work is nearly zero, but not insignificant. The individual authors of the original files number fewer than 2000. The major institutions involved in creating SAIL files include Stanford University, DARPA née ARPA, NSF, NASA and so number fewer than ten. Except for those named below all the former SAIL people and their institutions are not involved with the SailDart Archive. The work of setting up the SailDart Archive and running it for twenty years, 1998 — 2018, has taken me I would first guess at least one mythical man year, 2000 hours, of part time effort. But that guess counts time I have spent as a user of the SailDart, rather than as its maintainer.

Form of Organization: Karass.

In the science fiction book "Cats Cradle", Kurt Vonnegut defined the terms karass and granfalloon. I see now that SailDart is like a karass, a few individuals who occasionally coordinate to do something significant. Other more formally organized entities such as Stanford University, the Computer History Museum, the Internet Archive and IBM Research are more like granfalloons.

Participation Role: Digital Curator.

It is inexpensive to make a compressed copy of the original fifty gigabytes, so that anyone, who I knew from my days at SAIL, and who I trust enough to follow John McCarthy’s verbal security directions, may gets complete copy of the original with tar ball snapshots of my undart software for recent years. Most would be SailDart archive assistants want BGB to do chores X, Y and Z and to whack the data into their Museum, Library, Book, Web site or entertainment event. And for several SailDart related events in recent years, I have ended up doing the video editing, Youtube uploads and getting some transcripts into HTML5.

For me (as a computer science degree holder and garage based hacker) an archive, like a library, has users as well as archivists. The exact distinction between a time capsule, record repository, archive, library, museum and a web server is resolved by looking at information transfer transactions. The usage policy (de facto and de jure) the nature of the agents to information transfer transactions. For this simplification, a Time Capsule is a Write-Once-Read-Once message in an attempt to communicate over a period of time that exceeds the transmitters lifetime. The crash recorder on an airplane would be a time capsule. The classic analog answer is that Museums focus on objects, Libraries handle books and Archives deal with records. In the digital world objects, books and records are all construed as information. On the digital frontier, "The strong do what they can, the weak suffer what they must" — Thucydides.

 SailDart Institute Job Descriptions

At the Fantasy SailDart Institute, there are many hats to wear and candidates for the various positions. As enumerated here a staff of thirty people would suffice, with stipends of say $120K per annum, times three, this would be a $10 Megabuck per year operation.

     
Title: Lead (de facto B.G.Baumgart recruited by John McCarthy, encouraged by Don Knuth,
        tolerated by Frost, Gorin, Earnest and Reddy.)
Duties: Preserve the data from the DART tapes.
        Meet (that is find) users, members, customers, clients and patrons for the project.
     1. Define tasks, goals and subgoals in writing.
     2. Set priority for the goals, suggest a schedule of what to work on next.
     3. Assign resources to work towards each goal (time, equipment, personnel).
     4. Review progress towards goals, then check success or failure per time period and budget.
Title: co-Lead (de facto Les Earnest;
        perhaps Frost, Selker, Gorin could be recruited as co-leaders;
        unfortunately the default responsibility might fall on my legal heirs and successors.)
Duties: 1. Review project with lead; and
        2. Become (or find) new leader, when the need arises.
Title: GNU/Linux systems administrator (de facto BGB and for all roles down this list).
Title: Computer operations engineer
Title: Work station and laptop wrangler
Duties: purchase, integrate, install and maintain multi screen work stations.
        Provide staff with adequate compute power, I/O devices for storage, printing and scanning.
Title: Computer security expert (candidates: Whit Diffie, Ron Rivest and Bruce Schneier)
Title: Computer security operations monitor
Title: JavaScript programmer
Title: Python programmer
Title: ’C’ programmers with PDP-10 experience also consider ’D’ and ’C++’ skilled candidates.
Title: LISP programmers (candidates: Allen, McJones, Hearn, Masinter, Dave Smith, Costello)
Title: Curator
Title: Censor
Title: Technical writer (candidate: DEK)
Title: Technical writers for each specialty area (hardware, LISP, OS, Robotics, CG, CV, MTC)
Title: Proofreaders
Title: Editors
Title: Publication tool operators
Title: Database administrators
Title: Web site creative design
Title: Web site content (HTML5, CSS3, PNG, SVG, OOG) open source tool experts
Title: Web server administrators (for Apache2 at the moment, consider adding Lighttp and Nginx)
Title: Web analysis (for both internal logs and external links)
Title: Legal expert for handling copyright issues (Creative Commons, Lawrence Lessig).
Title: Comedy writers (candidates: Susan McCarthy and Tom Costello).
Title: Catering for workshops and meetings.
Title: Gourmet Chef
Title: Sommelier and Oenologist (a Diffie/Earnest time share perhaps).

 People I wish to contact

When the cookbook recipes for the chapters titled Exegesis and Static WWW are ready to be tested, contact Paul McJones, Dan Hartwig then Marty Frost all of whom have expressed interest in expanding a SailDart time capsule into a file system and static web site to access records they will chose to integrate with the existing historical material at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, the Stanford CSD, and the Stanford University Green Library.

When SYSTEM.DMP[J17,SYS] is running past LOGIN on the ’C’ and ’D’ emulators, get the implementation visible on Github and contact Ralph Gorin and Brian Harvey. Tovar would be useful on Music, and possibly Foonly, Fonts and PDP-10 assembly code. I trust Tovar might be able to verify my implementation of the Dave Poole KA10 XCT AC≠0 opcode, since he wrote the firmware for it on the latter day Foonly models. Bill Gosper was perhaps the first SailDart user to find a lost theorem. Bill Pitts concerning Space War, Art Samuels and the board game checkers; Bill Pitts again for early cyberculture fable of lock picking and hacking to get into the lab at night, where in he found the front door was wide open. Ted Panofsky concerning hardware. Tom Gafford concerning SUDS and Foonly as well as the 1975 home computer “Maytag” PDP-11 disk channels. Steve Russell concerning Spacewar and the pre-DART PDP-6 Lab, and even the Pre-Earnest AI Days. When I have time to resume working on details of specific privacy issues, contact Family McCarthy (ELF,SMC,) with respect to curating, releasing for public display, the JMC files on SailDart. Whit Diffie and Mary Fischer(deceased 2017). When the PUB emulator is working, first contact Larry Tesler and then all the others who have requested this or that PUB document as a PDF. When ancient versions of TeX are working, Art Keller and Les Lamport may be interested. When SUDS is working, the Seattle Museum Group would be interested. They claim to have a ’C’ version of SUDS but are lacking some supporting material and verification. Current LISP people might include Tom Costello, Tony Hearn, Larry Masinter, John Allen and Paul McJones. The early LISP 1.6 maintainers were Steve Russell, Whit Diffie, Lynn Quam as well as myself briefly. Les Earnest has often requested to see a running PARRY reincarnated. One recent PARRY correspondent who is attempting to find in the SailDart a set of PARRY source code as well as the project code HMF (Higher Mental Functions) related papers and notes. The SPACEWAR thread is oversubscribed. The game Adventure, Collosal Cave, Zork. The transmorgification conjunction of literature, Fortran, game role playing, crypto and commercialization at a non-classified, government funded, academic laboratory. Midget stands on the shoulders of a giant: Don Kunth has aced the history white-paper slots for not only "Adventure", but also "Literate Programming" and "Digital Typography". The MIX to MMIX story of finding an abstract canonical "machine architecture" I believe Knuth lost to the LVM specification crowd. Honorable mention for dominating the field of computer hardware systems textbooks, during my career, goes to Gordon-Bell as well as to Hennessy-and-Patterson. The real machine architecture specifications that dominate the second decade of the 21st century, I believe are the Intel x86, the Arm a64, and the open-source Berkeley RISC-5. Some digital music related files do exist on SailDart with respect to John Chowning(MUS), Leland Smith (LCS), Andy Moorer(JAM), Jim Gray. Many Music students did the Stanford 206 Course work using the SAIL computer system. However, the largest audio files were kept “offline” on user disk packs, or even written to analog magnetic tape for performance, and so are not in the DART data of the SailDart Archive. The SAIL programming language, Dan Swinehart and Bob Sproul. S1: Sun and Cisco: DEC related people: Supnik, Lampson, Bell, perhaps Joel and Wendy Bartlett.

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