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When we visited some of the 1970s 'heros' of the MIT AI Lab, we were told the informal story behind SHRDLU, the AI living in a PDP-10 3D world. How this graphical AI triggered the first AI Summer --

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ZGQcJVdjj8

-- and as it fell short of first impressions, perhaps the first winter too?

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Fun times, gettin' in early on the "tech scene" and watching it progress so quickly (yet at the same time so slowly in many ways compared to how it could have gone had greed and ignorance not held it back by decades). :)

I was born too late (not a bad thing necessarily) to have experienced that founding era. But I think that for later generations, there's a lot to learn still from what evolved in the earliest years. We've gained a lot since then, but we also lost a lot. Mean and lean programming, closeness to the hardware, inventiveness. And the liberating absence of 'software stacks'...

It's fascinating how on such a tiny computer, something like a comfortable interactive Lisp just emerged. Relatively comfortable.

Which is yet another reason to folks open their minds to what is actually possible on their super computers, instead of thinking only C and similar languages will deliver.

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