[ih] Yasha Levine's Surveillance Valley: The Secret Military History of the Internet -- Some Questions

[Jack Haverty]

Dave - you're right.  The DataComputer was at CCA, not IBM.  We did have
some interaction with IBM, IIRC as part of Lick's focus on Office
Automation.  No software, since PDP-10s and IBM had radically different
technical views of the world, but documents and reports were easier to
share.  Lick knew everybody.

I don't recall any specific events, but it wouldn't surprise me if there
was some terminal over at some IBM site which had access to the ARPANET
somehow, or if IBM people came by some MIT lab to visit and 'kick the
tires'. Especially around the ICCC '72 exhibition, there was a lot of
interest in promoting the ARPANET by demonstrating what you could do
with it.  MACSYMA was especially popular when it got online (MACSYMA was
a symbolic manipulation "desk calculator" which could be used to solve
algebraic equations).

Being "connected to the ARPANET" didn't necessarily mean having a
machine which was wired to an IMP port.  It sometimes just meant that
you had some means of accessing (or making available) interesting stuff
by somehow using the ARPANET.

Another of Lick's projects that I did was to create a server on the
ARPANET on our PDP-10 which enabled a user to submit "card decks" and
receive "printouts" from an IBM 360.   We never would have come up with
such an idea on our own, but it was important to Lick so I got
volunteered to do it.  I had used the 360s with punch cards at the MIT
Data Center and Draper Labs so I sort of knew what to do.  Tedious and
painful to get there but it worked.

The idea was that you could submit a card deck by emailing it to my
server.  The server would submit ithe card deck as a "job" to the 360 at
UCLA by the RJE (Remote Job Entry) facility via the ARPANET, and then
poll the RJE machine to eventually retrieve the printout that resulted
from the job run for emailing back to whoever submitted the card deck.
Presumably that card deck could have somehow invoked IBM networking to
access remote datasets or services in the IBM world as it ran on the
360.  Imagine a gateway handling punched card images instead of packets!

I built the RJE server but I don't know if anybody ever used it
afterwards or took the software away to run somewhere else.  I had had
enough experience with card decks by then so I never felt the desire to
play around in the bowels of the IBM world.  It sure would have been
handy to have a few years earlier when I was working at Draper and
occasionally had to carry decks of cards and listings across the MIT Campus.

By using that RJE interface, one might make any "interesting dataset" on
some IBM machine, not wired to an IMP, "accessible from the ARPANET".  I
can imagine my "RJE server" being promoted as a solution to that problem.

That email system was the same one I built that also interfaced with the
DataComputer at CCA.  So card decks and printouts might have been stored
in the DataComputer as part of Lick's larger vision of shared networked
resources cooperating in an Office Automation (or C3I?) context.  Might
explain why I associated IBM with the DataComputer - all just details of
the "Military Industrial Complex" in the 60s/70s which we student-types
had strong feelings about.

An interesting dataset might be processed by submitting a card deck of
Fortran, with the resulting printout placed in the DataComputer for
archival and access by interested parties via the ARPANET.  One could
easily view this as a part of some "surveillance" facility.  Did it
happen?  Don't know.   Did people think that was what the ARPANET was
all about?  Maybe some did...

The Elephant looks different depending on your perspective.

/Jack


On 04/14/2018 04:15 AM, Dave Walden wrote:
> Jack,
> 
> My memory is that CCA (Computer Corporation of America -- Tom Merrill's 
> company) did the DataComputer.  They might also have been at 545 Tech 
> Square at the time but I am unsure of that.  IBM (the "Cambridge 
> Scientific" lab?) was also there (as you note) and did other important 
> things (my memory is vague, so I am uncertain of the following things 
> ... the beginning of CP/CMS operating system, Script text processing 
> system, creation of GML, I think they may also have had the other CTSS 
> system, etc.) but I don't remember this group being connected to the 
> ARPANET (IBM was pushing SNA -- proprietary networking).
> 
> Dave
> 
> On 4/14/2018 3:36 AM, Jack Haverty wrote:
>> Lick's group was part of Project MAC, aka LCS (Laboratory for Computer
>> Science),  It occupied part of 545 Technology Square, along with the MIT
>> AI Lab.  LCS had many subgroups.  In addition, the building complex
>> housed an IBM research group (that did the DataComputer, which was
>> attached to the ARPANET), and even a stealth office of the CIA (really -
>> but that's another story), which I accidentally "outed" one day while
>> trying to run computer cables up to the roof through the elevator shaft.
>>   Oops.
>>
> 
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