Guide to the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory Records
Daniel Hartwig
Stanford University Libraries
Department of Special Collections and University Archives
April 2011
Copyright © 2011 The Board of Trustees of Stanford University. All rights reserved.
Overview
Call Number: SC1041
Creator:
Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.
Title: Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory records
Dates: 1963-2009
Physical Description:
180 gigabytes
Summary: The materials consist of SAIL Dump And Restore Technique (DART) backup files, 1972-1990; digital copies of 16 mm films created
from 1963-1980; handbooks; log books; manuals; and photographs and videos from the 35th SAIL reunion held in 2009.
Language(s): The materials are in English.
Repository:
Department of Special Collections and University Archives
Stanford University Libraries
557 Escondido Mall
Stanford, CA 94305-6064
Email: speccollref@stanford.edu
Phone: (650) 725-1022
URL: http://www-sul.stanford.edu/depts/spc/spc.html
Administrative Information
Provenance
The materials were transferred from the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, 2011.
Information about Access
The materials are partially restricted. Users may access the public corpus of the SAIL DART files from the SAILDART website:
http://saildart.com/.
Cite As
Stanford Artifical Intelligence Laboratory Records (SC1041). Dept. of Special Collections and University Archives, Stanford
University Libraries, Stanford, Calif.
Biographical/Historical note
The Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (also known as Stanford AI Lab or SAIL) is the artificial intelligence (AI)
research laboratory of Stanford University. It was started in 1963 by John McCarthy, after he moved from Massachusetts Institute
of Technology to Stanford. From 1965 to 1980, it was housed in the D.C. Power building, in the foothills of the Santa Cruz
Mountains overlooking Stanford. During this period it was one of the leading centers for AI research. In 1980, its activities
were merged into the university's Computer Science Department and it moved into Margaret Jacks Hall in the main Stanford campus.
SAIL was reopened in 2004, with Sebastian Thrun becoming its new director. SAIL's 21st century mission is to "change the way
we understand the world"; its researchers contribute to fields such as bioinformatics, cognition, computational geometry,
computer vision, decision theory, distributed systems, game theory, general game playing, image processing, information retrieval,
knowledge systems, logic, machine learning, multi-agent systems, natural language, neural networks, planning, probabilistic
inference, sensor networks, and robotics.
Scope and Contents note
The materials consist of SAIL Dump And Restore Technique (DART) backup files, 1972-1990; digital copies of 16 mm films created
from 1963-1980; handbooks; log books; manuals; and photographs and videos from the 35th SAIL reunion held in 2009.
Access Terms
Artificial intelligence.
Collection Contents
Box 1-19
Series 1
Dump And Restore Technique (DART) backup tapes
1972-1990
Physical Description:
229 computer tapes
Scope and Content Note
These tapes were created from 3228 original backup tapes.
DART was a program that saved disk files on magnetic tape and restored files from tape to disk. DART was used to make periodic
backups of the file disk, approximately once a week for the permanent backups.
Access Information
The materials are restricted. Users may access the public corpus of the files from the SAILDART website:
http://saildart.com/.
Backup files
Physical Description:
52.6 gigabytes
(41,594 computer files)
Use copy
2011
Additional Guides
The public corpus of the SAIL DART files can be accessed at
http://saildart.com/.
Technical Details
From the DART tapes the content of 137,000 files were converted into current 2011 web formats. The exact bits are available
as an octal listing of the original PDP-10 36-bit words of file content. Since larger documents and the system files were
published while smaller personal files remained out of sight, the 12.3 GB of published data comprises only 14% of the file
names but contains 36% of the total 33.7 GB corpus.
Series 2
Audiovisual material
1963-1980
Scope and Content Note
The materials are open for research.
Ant
1972
Physical Description:
1 computer file (MPEG-2)
Scope and Content Note
D.I. Okhotsimsky & A.K. Plantonov, "Display Simulations of 6-Legged Robot Walking", Institute of Applied Mathematics -- USSR
Academy of Science. Titles translated by Stanford AI Lab and edited by Suzanne Kandra. black and white, silent, 10 minutes.
A display simulation of a 6-legged ant-like walker getting over various obstacles. The research is aimed at a planetary rover
that would get around by walking. First presented at the Second CISM-IFToMM International Symposium on Theory and Practice
of Robots and Manipulators, Warsaw, Poland, Sept. 1976.
Assembly
1973
Physical Description:
1 computer file (MPEG-2)
Scope and Content Note
Richard Paul, Karl Pingle, and Bob Bolles, "Automated Pump Assembly", color, sound, 5 minutes.
Shows the hand-eye system assembling a simple automobile water pump using vision to locate the pump body and to check for
errors. The parts are assembled and screws inserted, using some special tools designed for the arm. Some titles are included
to help explain the film.
Avoid
1969
Physical Description:
1 computer file (MPEG-2)
Scope and Content Note
Gary Feldman and Donald Peiper, "Avoid", color, silent, 5 minutes.
An illustration of Peiper's Ph.D. thesis. The problem is to move the computer controlled mechanical arm through a space filled
with one or more known obstacles. The film shows the arm as it moving through various cluttered environments with fairly good
success.
Butterfinger
1968
Physical Description:
1 computer file (MPEG-2)
Scope and Content Note
Gary Feldman, Karl Pingle, Jeff Singer, Bill Weiher, "Butterfinger", color, sound, 8 minutes.
Describes the state of the hand-eye system in the fall of 1967. The PDP-6 computer getting visual information from a television
camera and controlling an electrical-mechanical arm solves simple tasks involving stacking blocks. The techniques of recognizing
the blocks and their positions as well as controlling the arm are briefly presented. Gary Feldman supervised filming, Karl
Pingle programmed the visual processing, Jeff Singer programmed arm control, Bill Weiher dealt with systems issues and this
project was initiated by Les Earnest.
Cart2
1963
Physical Description:
1 computer file (MPEG-2)
Scope and Content Note
Paul W. Braisted, "Prototype Moon Rover," B&W, silent, fast motion, 9 minutes.
Mechanical Engineering graduate student Paul W. Braisted devised a scheme to improve the controllability from Earth of a Moon
rover taking into account the 2.6 second round trip communication delay. It had an analog computer that functioned as a predictor
that took into account preceding steering commands and put a bright dot on the television screen at the predicted location
of the cart when a current steering command would begin to take effect. With this feature the vehicle could be controlled
at 5 mph (8 kph). These experiments were conducted on the playing fields of Stanford and the speed of the cart was chosen
to match the sustainable jogging speed of a graduate student. For more on the Stanford Cart see
http://www.stanford.edu/~learnest/cart.htm.
Cart4
1979
Physical Description:
1 computer file (MOV)
Scope and Content Note
Hans Moravec, "Stanford Cart", color, silent, 1.5 minutes.
The Stanford Cart was an experimental mobile vehicle whose television camera could move from side to side, allowing multiple
views to be obtained without moving the wheels. Images were sent to a DEC KL10 computer, which interpreted the three-dimensional
information and directed the cart to navigate around obstacles. The cart moved in one meter spurts punctuated by ten to fifteen
minute pauses for image processing and route planning. In 1979, the cart successfully crossed a chair-filled room without
human intervention in about five hours, as shown here.
Ellis
1967
Physical Description:
1 computer file (MPEG-2)
Scope and Content Note
Art Eisenson and Gary Feldman, "Ellis D. Kroptechev and Zeus, his Marvelous Time-sharing System", B&W, sound, 15 minutes.
The advantages of time-sharing over batch processing are revealed through the good offices of the Zeus time-sharing system
on a PDP-1 computer. Our hero, Ellis, is saved from a fate worse than death.
Hands
Physical Description:
1 computer file (MPEG-2)
Hanoi
1972
Physical Description:
1 computer file (MPEG-2)
Scope and Content Note
Richard Paul, "Tower of Hanoi," Color, silent, 2 minutes.
The robot hand solves the Tower of Hanoi puzzle using only four blocks instead of disks. The pauses between hand motions are
due to the trajectory planning for the next move, including dynamics and control parameters, which is performed before the
hand moves. Notice that the hand turns and re-grasps the block it just placed to ensure that each stack remains centered.
Hear! Here!
1969
Physical Description:
1 computer file (MPEG-2)
Scope and Content Note
Raj Reddy, Dave Espar and Art Eisenson, "Hear! Here!", color with sound, 15 minutes.
Describes the state of the speech recognition project as of Spring, 1969. A discussion of the problems of speech recognition
is followed by two real time demonstrations of the current system. The first shows the computer learning to recognize phrases
and second shows how the hand-eye system may be controlled by voice commands. Commands as complicated as "Pick up the small
block in the lower left-hand corner", are recognized and the tasks are carried out by the computer controlled arm.
Produced by the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab; Principal Investigator: John McCarthy. Written by Raj Reddy and David
Espar; photographed, directed & edited by David Espar assisted by Sheri Espar; programming by Pierre Vicens, Raj Reddy, Jeff
Singer, Karl Pingle; music by Leland Smith and the PDP-6. Additional filming by Art Eisenson assisted by Mel Paul; technical
advisor Gary Feldman. Sponsored in part by the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) of the U.S. Department of Defense.
Instant Insanity
1971
Physical Description:
1 computer file (MPEG-2)
Scope and Content Note
Richard Paul, Karl Pingle, Jerome Feldman, & Alan Kay, "Instant Insanity" color, silent, 6 minutes.
Shown at the Second International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI) in London.
A computer vision system and robotic arm solve the Instant Insanity puzzle, which has been around for more than a century
under various aliases. It consists of a set of four cubes with one of four colors on each of their six faces. The goal is
to arrange the four cubes in a row so that all four colors appear on each of the row's four long sides. The order of the cubes
doesn't matter, but that simplicity is deceptive. There are 41,472 different ways of arranging the four cubes in a row, so
this is not a trivial task.
The computer vision system first finds each of the four cubes by matching the visual edges to a prototype cube. In the case
of a cube with only two faces visible, the arm turns the cube 45º so that three faces will be visible. The colors of the faces
are then determined by reading in the scene again under three different color filters. The cubes are then turned over so that
the three hidden back faces are visible to the camera and the process repeated. Once a solution is found the computer directs
the arm to stack the blocks in the required order.
Mars
1972
Physical Description:
1 computer file (MPG)
Scope and Content Note
Lynn Quam, Robert Tucker, Bo Eross, Larry Ward, "Computer Interactive Picture Processing" (MARS Project), color, sound, 8
min.
Describes an automated picture differencing technique for analyzing the variable surface features on Mars using data returned
by the Mariner 9 spacecraft. The system used the DEC-10 timesharing computer of the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab (SAIL)
and was used by Carl Sagan and his astronomical colleagues to detect and analyze variable features on the surface of Mars
(i.e. things that changed with time).
Motion
1972
Physical Description:
1 computer file (MPEG-2)
Scope and Content Note
Suzanne Kandra, "Motion and Vision", color, sound, 22 minutes.
Presentation of three research projects completed in 1972: advanced arm control by R. P. Paul, visual feedback control by
A. Gill and representation and description of curved objects by G. Agin.
Pump
1974
Physical Description:
1 computer file (MPEG-2)
Scope and Content Note
Karl Pingle, Lou Paul, and Bob Bolles, "Programmable Assembly, Three Short Examples", color, sound, 8 minutes.
The task is to mount a bearing and seal on a crankshaft. The first segment demonstrates the arm's ability to dynamically adjust
for position and orientation changes. Next, the arm is shown changing tools and recovering from a run-time error. Finally,
a cinematic first: two arms cooperating to assemble a hinge.
Programming by Robert Bolles & Richard Paul, Hardware by Vic Scheinman, Filming by Karl Pingle, Sound by Kenneth Zander, Narration
by Robert Bolles, Project Direction by Jerome Feldman.
Skyhook
Physical Description:
1 computer file (MPEG-2)
Series 3
Handbooks, log books, and manuals
Scope and Content Note
The materials are open for research.
Digital Equipment Corporation, PDP-6 brochure
Physical Description:
1 computer file (PDF)
Digital Equipment Corporation, PDP-6 Handbook
Physical Description:
1 computer file (PDF)
Digital Equipment Corporation, PDP-6 Handbook
Physical Description:
1 computer file (PDF)
Digital Equipment Corporation, PDP-6 handbook
Physical Description:
1 computer file (PDF)
Steve Russell, John Sauter, Phil Petit, Dave Poole, Raj Reddy, Bill Wieher, et al., SAIL Hardware Log Book
Physical Description:
1 computer file (PDF)
Use copy
1967 Apr 7 - Sep 25
Steve Russel, John Sauter, et al., SAIL Hardware Log Book
Physical Description:
1 computer file (PDF)
Use copy
1967 Sep 26 - 1968 Jan 8
Phil Petit, Steve Russell, John Sauter, Dave Poole, et al., SAIL Hardware Log Book
Physical Description:
1 computer file (PDF)
Use copy
1968 Jan 8 - Mar 20
William Weiher, Description of the Triple-I Display Processor
Physical Description:
1 computer file (PDF)
Digital Equipment Corporation, PDP-10 System Refence Manual
Physical Description:
1 computer file (PDF)
Brian Harvey, Monitor Command Manual
Physical Description:
1 computer file (PDF)
Martin Frost, UUO Manual
Physical Description:
1 computer file (PDF)
Les Earnest, Find a Font
Physical Description:
1 computer file (PDF)
Bruce Baumgart, Geometric Modeling for Computer Vision
Physical Description:
1 computer file (PDF)
Digital Equipment Corporation, PDP-6 Price List
Physical Description:
2 computer files (JPEG)
Series 4
35th Reunion
2009 Nov 22
Scope and Content Note
The materials are open for research.
Photographs
Physical Description:
40 computer files (JPG)
Entire program
Physical Description:
4 computer files (MPG)
Note
Contact Public Services (e-mail: speccollref@stanford.edu) for information on accessing these digital objects.
Individual presentations
Scope and Content Note
Recipients of the John McCarthy award for excellence in research and research environments
Sebastian Thrun, Welcome to the SAIL reunion.
Physical Description:
1 computer file (M4V)
Physical Description: 28:39 min:sec
Sebastian Thrun, presents awards to the New-SAIL gold medalists.
Physical Description:
1 computer file (M4V)
Physical Description: 02:53 min:sec
Mike Montemerlo, talk, gold medal for DARPA Grand Challenge technical leadership.
Physical Description:
1 computer file (M4V)
Physical Description: 05:12 min:sec
Scope and Content Note
Mike Montemerlo was recognized for leadership and technical contributions that led to the DARPA Grand Challenge victory. Michael
Montemerlo is being recognized for his leadership in Stanford Autonomous Driving Team, which led to the victory in the DARPA
Grand Challenge. Mike was the chief software architect of the system, and his work influenced all aspects of Stanley's software,
from hardware interfaces, perception, mapping, path planning, and control. Mike was the technical leader for the entire team,
and his vision and technical strength guided all other team members in this successful project. The DARPA Grand Challenge
was widely considered a milestone event for robotics. For the first time, robotic cars proved their ability to navigate extensive
desert trails completely autonomously.
David Stavens, talk, gold medal for DARPA Grand Challenge vision algorithms.
Physical Description:
1 computer file (M4V)
Physical Description: 03:49 min:sec
Scope and Content Note
Honored for computer algorithms that led to the DARPA Grand Challenge victory. For his groundbreaking contributions to the
winning DARPA Grand Challenge vehicle, and in particular his algorithms for adaptive speed control. His adaptive speed control
algOlithm selected the best speed autonomously with machine learning, considering features such as road roughness, slope,
and width. The algorithm could be trained to closely match a human driver's speed choices. This allowed Stanford to avoid
massive human-tweaking of the race route, known as "pre-planning," that characterized some other teams. The algorithm includes
a band-pass filter, designed by Gabe Hoffmann, to isolate the vehicle's suspension. David made contributions to several other
aspects of the robot, including the watchdog program for software health monitoring and the adaptive vision system. In addition,
David was on the launch team responsible for the vehicle on the morning of the race and, as TA for the Grand Challenge class,
oversaw the very first end-to-end development of Stanley. He was also the principal safety driver for in-the-desert road tests.
His other responsibilities included team coordination and media and investor relations. Using data from the event, David later
published a self-taught learning algorithm that used haptic feedback from the IMU to enhance the laser perception beyond race
performance.
Hendrik Dahlkamp, talk, gold medal for DARPA Grand Challenge "self-supervised learning".
Physical Description:
1 computer file (M4V)
Physical Description: 03:58 min:sec
Scope and Content Note
For computer vision that led to the DARPA Grand Challenge victory. For his contributions to Stanford's autonomous vehicle
Stanley, and specifically its computer vision system for long-range road detection. Called Stanford's "secret weapon" by a
PBS documentary on the DARPA Grand Challenge, this system enabled Stanley to perceive and classify desert terrain in the distance
as drivable or undrivable, and determine a safe traversal speed. The algorithm was a crucial contribution in two ways: First,
it allowed Stanley to extend its sensing range from a classical laser-based perception range of 20 meters to a camera-based
range of 40 meters, which led to a 40% increase in top speed and a win in the race. Second, it advanced a new paradigm in
ru1ificial intelligence called "self-supervised learning", where the output of one sensor modality, the laser range finder,
is used to generate online training data for a second sensor modality, the camera. This allowed Stanley to constantly adjust
its road model to the environment, taking time-of-day, surface material, texture, shadows etc into account. Together with
Intel Computer Vision Researcher Adrian Kaehler, Hendrik implemented a perception system that was able to react even to obstacles
such as tank traps that it had never encountered before.
Pieter Abbeel, talk, gold medal for autonomous helicopter.
Physical Description:
1 computer file (M4V)
Physical Description: 07:29 min:sec
Scope and Content Note
Pieter Abbeel for acrobatic flight maneuvers of the Stanford autonomous helicopter. Autonomous helicopter flight is widely
regarded to be a highly challenging control problem. It is particularly difficult to design controllers for non-stationary
maneuvers in which the helicopter goes through various flight regimes, extensively exposing the great complexity of helicopter
dynamics. Despite these challenges, human experts can reliably fly helicopters through a wide range of maneuvers, including
aerobatic maneuvers at the edge of the helicopter's capabilities.
Pieter Abbeel and Adam Coates developed apprenticeship learning algorithms that leverage expert demonstrations to efficiently
learn good controllers for the tasks being demonstrated by an expert. These apprenticeship learning algorithms have enabled
their helicopters to significantly extend the state of the art in autonomous helicopter flight and aerobatics. Their experimental
results included the first autonomous execution of a wide range of maneuvers, including flips, rolls, loops, auto-rotation
landings, chaos and tictocs, which only exceptional human pilots can perform. Their results also included complete air shows,
which required autonomous transitions between many of these maneuvers. Their system performs as well, and often even better,
than an expert human pilot.
Adam Coates, talk, gold medal for autonomous helicopter.
Physical Description:
1 computer file (M4V)
Physical Description: 06:25 min:sec
Scope and Content Note
Adam Coates for acrobatic flight maneuvers of the Stanford autonomous helicopter. Autonomous helicopter flight is widely regarded
to be a highly challenging control problem. It is particularly difficult to design controllers for non-stationary maneuvers
in which the helicopter goes through various flight regimes, extensively exposing the great complexity of helicopter dynamics.
Despite these challenges, human experts can reliably fly helicopters through a wide range of maneuvers, including aerobatic
maneuvers at the edge of the helicopter's capabilities.
Pieter Abbeel and Adam Coates developed apprenticeship learning algorithms that leverage expert demonstrations to efficiently
learn good controllers for the tasks being demonstrated by an expert. These apprenticeship learning algorithms have enabled
their helicopters to significantly extend the state of the art in autonomous helicopter flight and aerobatics. Their experimental
results included the first autonomous execution of a wide range of maneuvers, including flips, rolls, loops, auto-rotation
landings, chaos and tictocs, which only exceptional human pilots can perform. Their results also included complete air shows,
which required autonomous transitions between many of these maneuvers. Their system performs as well, and often even better,
than an expert human pilot.
Ken Salisbury, talk, gold medal for robotic hand.
Physical Description:
1 computer file (M4V)
Physical Description: 07:40 min:sec
Scope and Content Note
Ken Salisbury for the design and build-up of the Salisbury robotic hand. Ken Salisbury designed the "Salisbury Hand" (originally
known as the Stanford/JPL hand) while he was a graduate student at Stanford as an advisee of Prof. Bernie Roth in Mechanical
Engineering. In collaboration with Carl Ruoff at NASA/Jet Propulsion Labs and Prof. Roth, the hand was designed to be a platform
for investigation of robotic grasping and dexterous manipulation. Commercialized through Ken's "Salisbury Robotics" company
in the early 80's this hand became a popular research platform for many years and continues to be an icon symbolic of robotic
dexterity. In the years since, Ken's labs have spawned an number of well-known robotic and haptic devices, including the MIT-W
AM arm (now known as the Barrett Arm from Barrett Technology), the PHANToM Haptic Interface from Sensable Technology, telesurgical
devices commercialized by Intuitive Surgical, and most recently the first version of the Personal Robot that is now being
commercialized by Willow Garage.
Dan Klein, talk, gold medal for unsupervised probabilistic language parsing.
Physical Description:
1 computer file (M4V)
Physical Description: 09:55 min:sec
Scope and Content Note
Dan Klein for revolutionary contributions to unsupervised probabilistic language parsing. Dan Klein wins this award for his
pioneering contributions to the unsupervised learning of natural language structure. Klein's thesis work demonstrated the
first computer system capable of acquiring high-quality grammars from raw text alone, answering a long-standing open question
about the empiricallearnability of human languages. Along with his group at UC Berkeley, he has since continued to advance
the state of the art in natural language processing using unsupervised and latent-variable methods. In addition to constructing
fast and accurate syntactic analysis systems, his recent research has successfully tackled a variety of other language tasks.
In the area of machine translation, for example, his work OIL syntactic correspondence has produced the best systems for learning
latent translation alignments. In the area of reference resolution, his research has led to a fully unsupervised system that
outperforms its supervised competitors. Recent results on historical reconstruction have demonstrated the most accurate system
for the automatic inference of ancestral words from modern forms. Klein is the recipient of multiple academic honors, most
recently including the ACM Grace Murray Hopper award, a Microsoft New Faculty Fellowship, a Sloan Fellowship, and multiple
best paper awards.
Raj Reddy, presents awards to the Old-SAIL gold medalists.
Physical Description:
1 computer file (M4V)
Physical Description: 10:16 min:sec
John McCarthy, reminisces on the founding of SAIL and comments on three of the medalist talks.
Physical Description:
1 computer file (M4V)
Physical Description: 13:52 min:sec
Bruce Baumgart, talk, gold medal for creating the SAILDART archive.
Physical Description:
1 computer file (M4V)
Physical Description: 07:36 min:sec
Scope and Content Note
Bruce Baumgart for creating the SAILDART computer archive. Preserving digital records and making them accessible for the long
term is a difficult task both because digital recordings, especially those on magnetic media, don't last long and because
write/read technologies keep changing as do file formats. Bruce Baumgart, with help from Martin Frost and others, has been
able to preserve most of the records of the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab from the 1970s and '80s and has made the
public files from that period publicly accessible on
http://www.saildart.com. Private files are accessible there to their owners via logins. He did this with a great deal of personal
effort and at his own expense. The problem of preserving such records for the very long term, as we believe they should be,
is not yet solved but this effort constitutes a big step in the right direction.
Bruce Buchanan, talk, gold medal for expert systems.
Physical Description:
1 computer file (M4V)
Physical Description: 07:55 min:sec
Scope and Content Note
Bruce Buchanan for pioneering contributions to knowledge based systems. As a Research Associate for the DENDRAL Project, Bruce
Buchanan used the SAIL time-sharing system in his pioneering work on knowledge acquisition from experts, and knowledge representation
for the DENDRAL experiments. That and subsequent contributions in knowledge-based systems, and in machine learning, led to
his Research Professorship at Stanford; his University Professorship at the University of Pittsburgh; his election to the
National Academy's Institute of Medicine; and the Presidency of the AAAI.
John Chowning, talk, gold medal for computer music systems.
Physical Description:
1 computer file (M4V)
Physical Description: 11:01 min:sec
Scope and Content Note
John Chowning for creating the computer music synthesis system John Chowning initiated the computer music project at SAIL,
with the indispensable help of undergrad student David Poole, that became the internationally recognized Center for Computer
Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA). Along the way he discovered a frequency modulation scheme that could closely emulated
the sounds of known musical instruments and many that are unknown. Software was not patentable at that time so he recruited
grad student Andy Moorer to translate it into a hardware design that was patented through Stanford and licensed to Yamaha,
which eventually incorporated it into a wide range of digital synthesis devices, from organs to cell phones, including the
most widely sold synthesizer ever, the DX 7. The proceeds from that licensing agreement helped CCRMA get through a critical
phase of its development-including the acquisition of the Foonly F2, built by David Poole-and eventually endow the ongoing
programs at CCRMA.
Whit Diffie, talk, gold medal for public key cryptography.
Physical Description:
1 computer file (M4V)
Physical Description: 11:10 min:sec
Scope and Content Note
Whitfield Diffie for initiating the public key cryptography development. Whitfield Diffie originated the important idea of
public key cryptography, which he then turned into a PhD dissertation and inspired others, such as SAIL alumnus Ron Rivest
to further develop this idea. The creation of practical public key encryption systems has had a big effect on protecting personal
privacy and moving away from the idea that only governmental agencies have the right to encrypt and protect their records.
Les Earnest, talk, gold medal for FINGER, an early social networking program.
Physical Description:
1 computer file (M4V)
Physical Description: 03:03 min:sec
Scope and Content Note
Les Earnest for helping to start ARPAnet and creating the social networking program FINGER. During 1967-68 Les Earnest was
a member of the ten person startup committee for the first packet switching network, which came to be called ARPAnet and later
turned into the Internet. Their initial performance specifications were not too foresighted in that only two functions were
specified: file transfer and remote computing, which came to be called Telnet. However the file transfer capability was adequate
to support email when it came into use a short time later and the tight round trip communication requirement needed for Telnet
made possible the much later interactive web services.
In the 1970s Les created the FINGER program, which could show who was currently logged in and, if not, when they last logged
out. This was to help keep track of SAIL people who worked at all hours of the day and night. Given that nearly all SAIL software
was made publicly accessible, a number of other laboratories with similar computer systems took copies of FINGER for their
own use and soon requested that a network versioij be developed that could check on people at other sites, which Mark Crispin
developed. FINGER also allowed each person to create a Plan file, tied to their email address, to describe such things as
their planned work schedule or vacation plans. However in short order FINGER became a de facto social networking system, given
that it facilitated finding which of one's friends were online and allowed people to post what amounted to personal blogs
some 30 years before the term "blog" came into use. For more see
http://asia.cnet.com/reviews/pcperipherals/0,39051168,61998604,00.htm. A Unix version was created by a UC Berkeley group that
unfortunately had a security loophole that was exploited by the first Internet Worm, resulting in FINGER being suppressed
on security grounds. Google is now developing a modem version called WEBFINGER.
Ralph Gorin, talk, gold medal for spell checker.
Physical Description:
1 computer file (M4V)
Physical Description: 04:04 min:sec
Scope and Content Note
Ralph Gorin for creating the first spelling corrector. The first spelling checker was created at MIT in 1961 by Les Earnest
as part of the first cursive handwriting recognizer and used a list of the 10,000 most common English words. In 1967 Earnest
recruited a SAIL graduate student to make a spelling checker for text files, which was written in LISP, used a suffix stripping
scheme to effectively increase the vocabulary of the word list, and rather slowly produced a list of unrecognized words and
their locations in the file. In 1971 Eamest recruited Ralph Gorin to make an interactive spelling checker. Gorin wrote SPELL
in machine language, for faster action and made the first spelling corrector by searching the word list for plausible correct
spellings that differ by a single letter or adjacent letter transpositions. The program became more useful by allowing each
user to extend the dictionary interactively and use those extensions in the future. He made SPELL publicly accessible and
it soon spread around the world via the new ARPAnet, about ten years before personal computers came into general use.
Anthony Hearn, talk, gold medal for the Standard LISP System.
Physical Description:
1 computer file (M4V)
Physical Description: 05:06 min:sec
Scope and Content Note
Anthony Hearn for creating the Standard Lisp System. After the Lisp programming language was created by John McCarthy and
his colleagues at MIT during the late 1950s, it became the most widely used language in artificial intelligence research because
of its versatility and extensibility. However its extensibility became a problem as many different versions began to appear
which were incompatible with each other. After Tony Hearn began developing a symbolic computation system called REDUCE, he
addressed this problem by creating and documenting Standard Lisp in an attempt to bring the diverging branches back together.
This idea was later picked up by others to create Common Lisp.
Victor Scheinman, talk, gold medal for robotic arms.
Physical Description:
1 computer file (M4V)
Physical Description: 16:19 min:sec
Scope and Content Note
Victor Scheinman for developing high performance robot arms. A computer should be able to do physical work. A big computer
should be able to work fast. As a Mechanical Engineering grad student, Vic was engaged to design and build a series of robot
arms and other gadgets for the PDP computers to play with. With Bernie Roth, Larry Leifer, Don Pieper, Mike Kahn, Lou Paul,
Bruce Shimano and others we learned from his pneumatic snake like digital arm (the ORM-1966), and a powerful and fast hydraulic
arm (1967) which ran in "spacewar mode" and shook the building that the design of the robot needed to be compatible with the
brain and it's environment. His electric "Stanford Arm" (1969) became the Hand-Eye group standard research robot manipulator
for many years. He built several of these arms for other research groups including General Motors, National Bureau of Standards
(now NIST), and AT&T. He also had a strong hand in the development of Hans Moravec 's cart. The MIT AI Lab wanted their own
robot so in 1973 he designed the "MIT Arm" which he commercialized as the PUMA robot (Vicarm, Unimation, Westinghouse, Staubli).
The first, delivered to General Motors, is now in the Smithsonian collection. Fortune called him the "Father of the Modern
Robot" (1980). More recently (2009), the IET (UK) named him "Godfather of Robotics".
Dan Swinehart, talk, gold medal for SAIL programming language.
Physical Description:
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Physical Description: 06:24 min:sec
Scope and Content Note
Dan Swinehart for contributions to the SAIL programming language. The SAIL programming language and system was developed in
the late 1960's by Bob Sproull and Dan Swinehart, with later contributions by Jim Low, Hanan Samet, Russ Taylor, Kurt van
Lehn and others too numerous to mention. Derived from a class project, called Gogol, the language began with something resembling
Algol-60 and then layered on contributions from many emerging language trends, including associative processing (based on
Feldman's LEAP), records (typed compound data structures), references (typed pointers to same), support for multiple threads,
and variable-length strings with automatic storage management, the latter inspired by a Bill McKeeman PUI-like project on
campus. The system was coded entirely in Phil Petit's FAIL assembly language to support hard-core systems applications for
which LISP and other available languages were arguably inappropriate. Among others, notable well-known applications developed
in SAIL include Larry Tesler's PUB and early versions of Don Knuth's even more ambitious TEX document composition systems.
Larry Tesler, talk, gold medal for PUB document compiler.
Physical Description:
1 computer file (M4V)
Physical Description: 08:00 min:sec
Scope and Content Note
Larry Tesler for creating the PUB document compiler. In 1971, Les Earnest recruited Larry Tesler to create a document compiler
that would go well beyond RUNOFF by supporting advanced publishing features. The software Larry built during the ensuing six
months featured automatic numbering, headings, multiple columns, figures, footnotes, front and back matter generation, and
cross-references. Its power was unprecedented. It also was evidently the first document compiler that provided for embedded
spreadsheets. Today, we would call it a "scriptable markup language". The scripting language was a subset of SAIL. In that
pre-SGML era, the markup syntax was non-uniform but it did allow arbitrary text to be bracketed by tags.
Because it was written in SAIL and because its syntax required use of the entire SAIL character set, the audience for PUB
was limited. Nevertheless, at ARPANET-connected universities with PDP-lOs, many a thesis was formatted using PUB. Because
the code was open-source, Russ Taylor added FR-80 microfilm output and Rich Johnsson of Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) added
font capabilities.
As with other markup languages, the output was often difficult to predict. At least two PUB users reacted to these shortcomings
by developing better languages. Brian Reid, then at CMU, developed Scribe for nontechnical users. He implemented the first
version entirely in PUB. Don Knuth developed TeX for authors of mathematical texts. Meanwhile, SGML and C took over as the
basis for most future markup and scripting languages, and PUB became a forgotten milestone in digital publishing history.
Martin Frost, talk, gold medal for first computer network news service.
Physical Description:
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Physical Description: 11:25 min:sec
Scope and Content Note
Martin Frost for creating the first network news service. Martin Frost, with input from John McCarthy and Les Earnest, created
two successive news services that each was the first of its kind. Beginning in 1972, APE could be used either to connect to
the Associated Press newswire or to search recent stories based on combinations of pre-selected keywords. Beginning in 1974
NS (for News Service) indexed and stored stories from both the Associated Press and New York Times news wires and allowed
users to either search for recent stories using any combination or words or leave a standing request to be notified whenever
a story appears that contains the specified words. NS was widely used by people on ARPAnet for general news information.
During the Three Mile Island nuclear incident in 1979 the emergency response team at Lawrence Livermore Lab found that they
needed up-to-the-minute information on developments at the site but couldn't get it until they were provided with access to
NS. During the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989, Chinese students in the U.S. wanted to pass information to friends in China
but there were no Internet connections there then. NS was then set up to locate news about China and forward it to a student
distribution list so that they could print the stories and fax them home. Commercial news services were developed later that
now provide similar functionality to anyone who wants it and is willing to pay a subscription fee.
Phil Petit, talk, gold medal for SUDS, electronic design system.
Physical Description:
1 computer file (M4V)
Physical Description: 03:39 min:sec
Scope and Content Note
Phil Petit for initiating the first interactive electronic design system, SUDS. Phil Petit initiated the development of the
Stanford University Drawing System (SUDS), which was the first graphical computer aided design system used for the design
of a real computer. It allowed designers to do both logic drawings and physical layouts on printed circuit cards and cross-check
them for consistency. When the design was complete it produced artwork for printed circuit cards and backpanel wiring instructions
that would control an automatic wiring machine. Dick Helliwell subsequently took over further development and maintenance
of SUDS and went with it to the Digital Equipment Corporation, where it was used as their primary design tool for at least
a decade. It was also used by Information International Incorporated (III), Foonly Inc., Valid Logic, and Cisco Systems. SAIL
user Andy Bechtolsheim used it to design both the original SUN (Stanford University Network) workstations and all of those
manufactured by Sun Microsystems for a number of years.
Steve Russell, talk, gold medal for SPACEWAR, the first videogame.
Physical Description:
1 computer file (M4V)
Physical Description: 02:25 min:sec
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Steve Russell for creating SPACEWAR, the first videogame. There were several early board games that ran on digital computers,
such as Tic Tack Toe, and "Tennis for Two" ran on an analog computer. However the first dynamic videogame was Spacewar!, as
reviewed at
http://www.computer.org/cms/Computer.org/ComputingNow/computingthen/2009/03/CT-Lowood.pdf. It was originally developed for
the DEC PDP-I computer at MIT by Steve Russell and his colleagues in the Tech Model Railroad Club. Spacewar! spread through
PDP-I installations, and many others who had different computer and a display wrote versions for the equipment at hand. Steve
then brought it to Stanford when he moved here to join John McCarthy and he and others then improved it. Meanwhile a company
called Atari was formed to convert Spacewar into a commercial videogame called "Computer Space" using TTL electronics and
no programmable computer. However Bill Pitts of SAIL beat them to it using a PDP-II computer to create "Galaxy Game" and put
it into the Stanford coffee shop and a local bowling alley. While the Galaxy Game was quite popular, Atari observed that their
version of Spacewar was expensive to reproduce and somewhat hard for people to learn, so they instead introduced the game
of Pong which was cheap to make, easy to understand, and a great commercial success. This allowed Atari to thrive for a time.
Lynn Quam, talk, gold medal for Mars image processing.
Physical Description:
1 computer file (M4V)
Physical Description: 03:36 min:sec
Scope and Content Note
Lynn Quam for creating an image retrieval system for planetary exploration. Lynn Quam and his colleagues developed an image
indexing scheme for planetary exploration and picture differencing techniques to facilitate identification of things that
changed over time. This was used by Carl Sagan and other astronomers who visited SAIL every few weeks to evaluate satellite
photographs of Mars. Quam successfully solved the problem of detecting small changes in the planet surface in the presence
of several extraneous factors. His system was subsequently applied to pictures of Mars taken by the Mariner 9 spacecraft while
the mission was in progress.
Les Earnest, Call for Sustainable Archiving of SAIL unto the year Y3K and beyond.
Physical Description:
1 computer file (M4V)
Physical Description: 11:01 min:sec
