“Get in here. Now.”
I assumed I had broken something and was about to be fired. On the drive in, I rehearsed my mea culpa and planned how quickly I could restore the original code.
When I walked in, my first words were ready.
“I’ll put the old code back,” I said. “Don’t worry.”
The response came instantly.
“No. No! Just tell us what you did.”
Not long after that I received an offer to work at Harvard’s Aiken Computation Laboratory. The pay was modest, but the job came with a wonderful benefit: I could audit Harvard courses for free.
A few months later another call came, this time from MIT—with a real salary and MIT classes thrown in.
They were building a new operating system called Multics, part of Project MAC, a collaboration involving MIT, Honeywell, Bell Labs, and the Defense Department’s Advanced Research Projects Agency.
Project MAC lived inside 545 Technology Square in Cambridge, then a fairly new building.
On the ninth floor was the Artificial Intelligence Lab where researchers like Marvin Minsky and Seymour Papert explored early ideas about machine intelligence. Around the building people joked that with their robot arm they were the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost.
Several floors below were the engineers building Multics—people like Tom Van Vleck, Dave Clark, John Donovan, and Fernando Corbató, whose earlier work helped invent modern time-sharing.
The whole environment was guided by ARPA’s Dr. J. C. R. Licklider. Around the lab he was simply called “Lick.”
On a couple of occasions the young and somewhat irreverent hacker that I was got called into his office after wandering off to explore some idea that seemed more interesting than whatever assignment I had been given.
I expected a reprimand.
Instead, he leaned back, listened for a moment, and said something I’ve never forgotten.
“Good work, son. That’s exactly what I would have done.”
It was an extraordinary place to learn.
Some of us who stayed all night eventually wandered out at dawn for dinner at the Fox and Tishmann Diner in Kendall Square.