Re: A revolution in Internet point-of-view - Was Re: Internet analyses (Was Re: IPv8...)

Jack Haverty via Internet-history <[email protected]> Thu, 30 Apr 2026 10:59:02 -0700
Newsgroups	gmane.culture.internet.history
Message-ID	<[email protected]>
On 4/29/26 23:00, Lars Brinkhoff wrote:
> Jack Haverty wrote:
>> - Lick's vision was of pervasive computers somehow all communicating
>> with each other to assist humans; he funded MIT to create Project Mac;
>> MAC stood for either "Man and Computer" or "Machine Aided Cognition"
> Many sources claim "Multiple Access Computer/Computing" and "Machine
> Aided Cognition".  The former was the Multics part of Project MAC, and
> the latter was the AI group.  I have also seen "Mathematics and
> Computation" for the Mathlab and Macsyma part.

Lick's vision was a symbiosis of computers and humans, so expansions of 
MAC into "Man And Computer" or "Machine Aided Cognition" captured that 
vision.  "Multiple Access Computer" did not, but reflected the 
development of time-sharing to replace batch processing, and modems to 
enable access to computers far away from the human using it.   I heard 
all of these terms as explanations for "MAC" while I was at MIT back in 
the late 60s and early 70s.

The Waldrop book notes that the "MAC" name was generated in an urgent 
meeting when Lick (at ARPA) was trying to fund the MIT work, which until 
then had been known as "Fano's Folly", reflecting the involvement of 
Professor Fano.  That name was not suitable for a contract, and the 
meeting settled on MAC.

Lots more detail is in Waldrop's book.

Lick's vision was explained in the memos he wrote in 1960 and the letter 
to his PIs when he was at ARPA in 1963.  When I got to MIT as an 
undergraduate in 1966, the "computer utility" was an IBM 7094 that we 
used with punch cards and printouts.   That was augmented, and later 
replaced, by CTSS, which was a time-shared utility that you accessed 
with terminals.   I had a few student jobs involving using CTSS, and my 
BS thesis involved Multics which was almost but not quite at the 
"utility" stage by 1969.  By 1970 I encountered Lick and the PDP-10 ITS 
world.

CTSS expanded to "Compatible Time Sharing System".  As a utility, CTSS 
focussed on availability, which made it unsuitable for research in 
computer areas.  Researchers like to try new ideas; operators don't like 
change that often causes problems.   Multics was envisioned to replace 
CTSS as the campus computing utility.

ITS was created as a way to get a computer (the AI PDP-10) that could be 
readily changed as needed for computer research.  The acronym ITS had a 
similar plethora of expansions which I heard at MIT.  Some said it was 
just from questions that everyone had when they arrived in the Lab - "Is 
it up?"  If the PDP-10 system was running, someone would just say "ITS up!".

Another explanation of ITS was "Incompatible Timesharing System", to 
contrast it to CTSS.   Both explanations of ITS were common.

The experience at MIT was my first exposure to the conflict between 
researchers and operators.  Much later in the Internet era, that 
experience triggered the creation of the concept of "Autonomous 
Systems", as a temporary technique to enable research activities to 
continue on the Internet but also protect operational users of the "core 
gateways".  Eric Rosen and I did that and Eric wrote an RFC about EGP as 
a rudimentary "firewall" protocol to keep the different research and 
operational communities from interfering with each other while 
maintaining connectivity of the whole Internet.

/Jack Haverty

-- 
Internet-history mailing list
[email protected]
https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history
-
Unsubscribe: https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/9b6ef0621638436ab0a9b23cb0668b0b?The%20list%20to%20be%20unsubscribed%20from=Internet-history
OpenPGP_signature.asc (application/pgp-signature, 665 B)