[COFF] [TUHS] Fwd: How did Bell Labs start to work on Project MAC?

[Noel Chiappa]

    > From: Dan Cross

    > From Acceptable Name <metta.crawler at gmail.com>:

Gmail has decided this machine is a source of spam, and is rejecting all email
from it, and I have yet to sort out what's going on, so someone might want to
forward anything I turn up to this person.

    >> Did Bell Labs approach MIT or was it the other way around?

I looked around the Multics site, but all I could find is this: "Bell
Laboratories (BTL) joined the Multics software development effort in November
of 1964"

  https://multicians.org/history.html

I did look through IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, vol. 14, no. 2,
listed there, but it's mostly about the roots of CTSS. It does have a footnote
referring to Doug, about the timing, but no detail of how Bell Labs got
involved.

I have yet to look at the oral history things from Corby, etc which may answer
this in passing.

I'll ask Jerry Saltzer if he remembers; he's about the only person left from
MIT who was around at that point.

     >> Did participating in Project MAC come from researchers requesting
     >> management at Bell Labs/MIT

At MIT, the 'managers' and the researchers were the same people, pretty much.
If you read the panel transcript in V14N2, Fano was the closest thing to a
manager (although he was really a professor) there was at MIT, and he talks
about not wanting to be involved in managing the thing!

      Noel