[ih] Internet at Sea

[Jack Haverty]

On 10/3/25 20:59, Barbara Denny via Internet-history wrote:
> It may have also been an early use of AI (or whatever was thought of as AI in those days).

In those early days of AI, there was lots of activity in specific 
applications, e.g., getting a computer to manipulate physical blocks 
(like children's toys) or understand the content  of images.  Other 
projects explored "Expert Systems", in which the idea was to find an 
expert in some particular field, figure out how the expert does whatever 
s/he does, and write software that would mimic the behavior of the expert.

AALPS may have been one of those "expert system" projects.  I was 
involved in one at MIT in Lickliders' group involving creating a PDP-10 
system that could decode, understand, and even participate in radio 
conversations involving Morse Code.

Since I had done such "work" as a ham radio operator in high school on 
"traffic nets" (think email over ham radio but with humans as the 
computers), I ended up being the "expert" that we tried to replicate in 
software.  I was actually pretty proficient in Morse at the time, but it 
took some thinking to figure out exactly how I managed that.   We never 
got the PDP-10 to run fast enough to be a participant in an actual radio 
network with human operators though; with today's computers it would 
likely be easy.

There's a good summary containing the history of some of ARPA's projects 
in that era in:

https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/tr/pdf/ADA239925.pdf

That report was published in 1990, so doesn't include anything later.   
The parts I read covered work that occurred in the 1970s and 1980s.  
Section E contains computer-oriented projects that the Information 
Processing Techniques Office (IPTO) part of ARPA managed.  It's Chapters 
18-23 of the report, and includes ARPANET's history, a section on AI, 
plus one on the Morse Code project.

I haven't found any similar reports from the years since 1990, but they 
may be out there....somewhere.

/Jack Haverty

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