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

[John Day]

Just for the record, we (Illinois) were heavy users of CCN RJE. It was at least the physics guys but I don’t remember who all else there was, possibly the economists.

> On Apr 14, 2018, at 14:40, Jack Haverty <jack at 3kitty.org> wrote:
> 
> 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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