ARPA funds Project MAC

J. C. R. Licklider arrived at the Advanced Research Projects Agency in 1962 with a conviction that computers should be partners in thought, and a budget to prove it. In July 1963 ARPA gave MIT $2.2 million to start Project MAC, for Machine-Aided Cognition or Multiple Access Computer depending on who was asked, and a large share went to Marvin Minsky's artificial intelligence group. Similar grants followed for Stanford, Carnegie Tech and SRI.

The money came with almost no conditions. Licklider funded people rather than proposals, and for the next decade the AI laboratories spent as they saw fit, on time-sharing systems, robot arms, vision, chess and natural language. The hacker culture that produced Lisp machines and later the free software movement grew in the same rooms.

Unconditional funding is a loan against results, and by 1969 Congress wanted to see them. The Mansfield Amendment required military money to fund work with military relevance; the 1973 Lighthill report in Britain and DARPA's own review in 1974 concluded the results were thin. The first winter was, in part, the bill for Project MAC coming due.