https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33356932
I deeply appreciate and am greatly privileged to benefit from the MIT AI Lab's "Tourist Policy" and general openness, generosity, and encouragement of education, which allowed me to use the lab's PDP-10s over the ARPANET as a high school student.
I could connect remotely over the ARPANET by dialing up a local ARPANET TIP and connect to any computer without a password, then apply for a free account on each of the MIT-AI Lab's PDP-10s, by saying that I wanted to learn Lisp or MDL or Macsyma, and use the computers read email (mine and other people -- there was no file security and snooping was encouraged) and play games (like Zork, Adventure, Guess The Animal, and Doctor) after business hours.
As a high school student living in Maryland, I'd occasionally go on a pilgrimage to MIT and visit the MIT-AI Lab at 545 Tech Square, the Media Lab, and other places on campus, including exploring the steam tunnels (like the ones depicted in Real Genius).
They welcomed me to the lab, and I could easily get into the machine room and offices at the AI Lab simply by knocking on the door in the elevator lobby, and somebody using a Lisp Machine would press [Terminal]-D to automatically buzz open the door without getting up from their seat or looking who it was, just to make the knocking stop. (You could also press [Terminal]-E on a Lisp Machine to summon an elevator to your floor.) Then I could walk around the lab, and find a free Lisp Machine, Knight TV, or Ann Arbor Ambassador terminal to log in with, and even sleep on a bean bag chair or couch in an office, if it wasn't already occupied by RMS or some other random tourist or grad student.
Members of the MIT-AI Lab would take the time to help and tutor me with Emacs and Lisp, invite me to go out and eat pot stickers and Suan La Chow Show at Mary Chung's and get ice cream at Toscanini's, encourage me to pick up free papers from the publications department, use the Dover laser printer and Velu Binder to print out and bind my own copies of the online ITS manuals and other documents (long before the consumer laser printers were available), and they'd even let me use the gigantic cappuccino machine (I heard one MIT grad student claim "I had offers from Harvard and Stanford, but I came here because of LCS's cappuccino machine!").
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I've written about how the MIT machines were a nerd magnet for kids who had access to the ARPANET, and how I logged in over the ARPANET to play Zork:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15080221
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23114927
How ITS's open approach to security through obscurity encouraged hacking but discouraged vandalism because it really wasn't much of a challenge to break in or crash the machines:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22840639
In my exploration of other people's home directories, I ran across an inexplicable (even to the author) TECO implementation of a Universal Turing Machine in Marvin Minsky's home directory "AI:MINSKY;":
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13519471
Once my friend and I were hanging out in Norman Margolus's office with the lights out playing with his CAM-6 cellular automata machine, when his wife opened the door, turned on the light, and was surprised to see us there instead of her husband. She asked if we'd seen Norman, and we answered no, then she politely turned the lights back off and closed the door, leaving us to our fun.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14469113
Keith F. Lynch wrote up some interesting history of the net and the MIT-AI Lab from his perspective:
http://keithlynch.net/history.net.html
How Jerry Pournelle got kicked off the ARPANET and MIT-AI Lab's computers for being an obnoxious antisocial unappreciative entitled drunken right-wing jackass, taking his unique precious privileges for granted while making impotent threats and accusing the same generous lab members who had welcomed, supported, and mentored him of being "communists":
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17686261
>"One thing that is known about ARPA: you can be heaved off it for supporting the policies of the Department of Defense. Of course that was intended to anger me. If you have an ARPA account, please tell CSTACY that he was successful; now let us see if my Pentagon friends can upset him. Or perhaps some reporter friends. Or both., Or even the House Armed Services Committee." -POURNE (Jerry Pournelle)
>"The man has learned nothing from his presence on MC and sets a bad example of what people might potentially accomplish there. I'd rather recycle his account for some bright 12-yr-old...)" -KMP (Kent Pitman)
At the other end of the politeness spectrum, Rob Griffith's memories of touring the MIT-AI Lab and encountering Zork as a 15-year-old kid:
https://archive.org/details/getlamp-rgriffiths
>"I believe on one trip we were touring the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab, and we saw some people gathered around this terminal. And we inquired what they were doing, and out of that came this game Zork, and my friend, since he was at MIT, had us get an account, and we were able to log in and figure out what to me looked like an extremely arcane set of commands to actually get this game running. From then on we were pretty much hooked from the first time we actually saw it. I believe we saw it when we were walking through the MIT AI Lab. I was a guest. Even back then there was some pretty amazing stuff in there. To see all these students and professors huddled around this terminal. What are the doing? They had all these incredibly cool Lisp Machines with big gorgeous displays, and a bunch of people were huddled around a machine that's got text. And we were sort of intrigued. I believe that was the first time I actually saw the game, so to speak. You know, I never got names, so I don't know. I was a petrified little 15-year-old kid walking around the MIT lab, so it was a bit of a feeling of "Am I supposed to be here?", and if I am supposed to be here, I'm pretty sure I'm not supposed to talk, so perhaps I'll just be quiet and observe." -ROBG (Rob Griffith)
https://archive.org/details/getlamp-rgriffiths
MIT AI Lab Tourist Policy:
https://donhopkins.medium.com/mit-ai-lab-tourist-policy-f73b...
>MIT-MC PDP-10 at the MIT AI Lab:
https://donhopkins.com/home/catalog/images/mc-console.jpg
>Context
>Excerpt from Free as in Freedom, Richard Stallman’s Crusade for Free Software, by Sam Williams, March 2002, Chapter 7:
https://www.oreilly.com/openbook/freedom/ch07.html
>>Cadging passwords and deliberately crashing the system in order to glean evidence from the resulting wreckage, Stallman successfully foiled the system administrators’ attempt to assert control. After one foiled “coup d’etat,” Stallman issued an alert to the entire AI staff.
>>“There has been another attempt to seize power,” Stallman wrote. “So far, the aristocratic forces have been defeated.” To protect his identity, Stallman signed the message “Radio Free OZ.”
>>The disguise was a thin one at best. By 1982, Stallman’s aversion to passwords and secrecy had become so well known that users outside the AI Laboratory were using his account as a stepping stone to the ARPAnet, the research-funded computer network that would serve as a foundation for today’s Internet. One such “tourist” during the early 1980s was Don Hopkins, a California [Maryland at the time, actually] programmer who learned through the hacking grapevine that all an outsider needed to do to gain access to MIT’s vaunted ITS system was to log in under the initials RMS and enter the same three-letter monogram when the system requested a password.
>>“I’m eternally grateful that MIT let me and many other people use their computers for free,” says Hopkins. “It meant a lot to many people.”
>RMS Wondering Why You Wrap a Gerbil in Duct Tape
https://donhopkins.com/home/catalog/images/jsol-rms-gerbil-l...
>>This so-called “tourist” policy, which had been openly tolerated by MIT management during the ITS years, fell by the wayside when Oz became the lab’s primary link to the ARPAnet. At first, Stallman continued his policy of repeating his login ID as a password so outside users could follow in his footsteps. Over time, however, the Oz’s fragility prompted administrators to bar outsiders who, through sheer accident or malicious intent, might bring down the system. When those same administrators eventually demanded that Stallman stop publishing his password, Stallman, citing personal ethics, refused to do so and ceased using the Oz system altogether.
>TOURIST POLICY AND RULES FOR TOURIST USE OF ITS MACHINES
>It has been a long standing tradition at both the Laboratory for Computer Science and the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at MIT to allow non-laboratory people to use the laboratories’ computers during off hours. During the early days of the laboratories’ existence a non-laboratory person (such people have come to be called tourists) could gain access to one of the computers by direct personal contact with a laboratory member. Furthermore, tourist access was controlled because access to the laboratories’ computers was de facto achieved through on site terminals. A tourist sponsored by a laboratory member would generally receive some guidance and tutelage concerning acceptable behavior, proper design techniques for hardware and software, proper programming techniques, etc. The expectation on the laboratories’ part was that a large percentage would become educated in the use of the advanced computing techniques developed and used in our laboratories and thereby greatly facilitate the technology transfer process. A second expectation was that some percentage would become interested and expert enough to contribute significantly to our research efforts. Tourists in this latter group would at some point in time graduate out of the tourist class and become laboratory members. In actual fact a number of former and present staff members and faculty earned their computational wings in just this fashion.
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