Writings on AI from 17 years ago....

[Chris Zach]

I was looking through some old journal entries and found this:

AI is lonely...

She has been sitting quietly in my house for the past 8 years. She runs, 
but is old now and tired. Most of the time she sits in her room and 
waits patiently. Waits for the users who ran jobs in the middle of the 
night. Waits for PFTMG to run the daily feed. Waits for someone to Alt-U 
in and begin to hack...

Waits for the TU77 MASSBUS interfact to be repaired
Waits for RP07 drives that will never be repaired
Waits to once again run the ITS tapes that sit quietly nearby.

She's lonely. And although I have been looking after her for a long 
time, she needs help.

Is anyone still interested? No, she will not be trashed. But perhaps the 
knight that guards her is getting old and needs someone else to share 
the load. Someone who won't just sell her on Ebay or break her apart or 
dump her off a loading dock.

I worked too hard to save her from that. Twice. I owe her a lot; she 
rescued me way back when, yaknow. In a way she contributed greatly in 
making me the hacker I am today.

But in the day and age where one can run a full ITS on a palm pilot is 
there any room for MIT-AI?

And so the knight returns to quietly guard the last remaining ITS...

CZ

The funny part is someone replied "Donate it to a museum" and I wrote:

"*nod* Unfortunately, after the Boston Computer Museum debacle, I'm a 
bit wary of museums. Other problem is it would just get stuck in a back 
room and eventually tossed like it almost did at Digex."

Sometimes I wonder if I did fail. Anyone know if the LCM will be open 
this summer? I'm going to be in Seattle for a day in August, wouldn't 
mind stopping by and seeing how it was doing....

CZ