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notes for proposal
Mike:
	Here is the draft I wrote in September.  Les Earnest, who
will play the role I had originally planned for Dick Gabriel,
has costed the proposal, and it comes to about twice the money
I had imagined.  Some cuts, my time and his, can be made without
really reducing the level of activity, but bringing it anywhere
near the $100K per year we discussed will do that.  It is reasonable
to begin with just a student, Ross Casley, and a little of Les's
and my time, and this would probably bring it well within range.

	I have dithered about sending it for insufficient reason.

John

ebos[f84,jmc]		Editor based operating system proposal

	Stanford proposes to develop technology for editor based
operating systems for the IBM ROMP microprocessor.  A particular
such operating system will be the concrete result of the work, but
our proposal includes technical reports and scientific publications
on the technology in general.  The work will cost $115,000 per
year for personnel, and we propose a 4 year project.  In addition to the 
personnel cost, we will need three ROMP microprocessor systems,
each with 4 megabytes of memory (not necessarily immediately),
and ethernet interface.  Unless a substantial disk for file storage
is included, there will be (not large) costs for use of Stanford University
Computer Science Department computer facilities.
The part of the project that involves experimenting with keyboards
will require the ability to order additional keyboards beyond
the number of processors.  Since most of these will have to be
ordered specially, we anticipate subcontracting $15,000 worth
of keyboards unless IBM is in a position to provide them.

Goals of the project:

	The main premiss of the project is that the proper environment
for the interactive user of a computer is a display editor.  This provides
the ability to re-edit both previous input and new output in
order to generate new input and also to file the output as desired.
Various other improvements in editors and operating systems are planned.
Thus the goals of the project include the following.

	1. The ROMP executive and interactive programs will be
normally operated out of a new advanced display editor.  Programs
for which this is not suitable will be able to control the interaction
themselves.

	2. We have studied the CPR operating system and find it
suitable as a base for building our editor and interactive system.
Thus our programs will use its system calls.  We don't presently
anticipate having to change it in important ways, but very likely
something will turn up.

	3. The editor and our other programs will be written in
Common Lisp.  The full facilities of Common Lisp will be available
for macros (execs in certain IBM dialects) for controlling the editor
itself, the operating system and user programs.  Our experience
at Stanford has shown us that if the editor provides good enough
interactive facilities, then many user programs can rely on them
thus allowing simpler programming of interactive programs.

	4. The editor and the operating system will be kept fully
programmable.  Thus anything a person can do interactively, he will
be able to write programs to do.  This means that all output seeable
by a user must also be readable by programs.  Interactive programs
that use the display in a non-standard way will be able to violate
this condition.

	System status information will be maintained in editable
files.

	5. The editor and file system will accomodate arbitrary
character sets.  This advance is easy to make in the editor itself
and in bit map (IBMese APA) displays and modern printers, but keyboards
present a problem for which we intend to provide and explore a variety
of solutions.

	6. Our planned solution to the arbitrary character set problem
will allow both for standard keyboards and for keyboards adapted
to special tasks, e.g. the use of mathematics, APL or foreign
languages.  Thus a special character can appear on the screen
either because the user has pressed a key on a special keyboard
or because he has pressed a suitable sequence of keys on an
ordinary keyboard.  The same sequence of bytes will inhabit the
file in either case.

	The pace of the project will depend on how soon we can
interest students in the project after it gets started.  We should
have something working within a year of the time we get people,
computers, budget and Common Lisp.

Personnel:

John McCarthy, 15 percent
Executive officer and project manager, Lester Earnest, 15 percent
Research associate, Carolyn Talcott, 10 percent.
2 graduate research assistants, half time academic year, full time summer.
Stanford computer facilities  $10K per year
This includes both computer time, disk storage and help with installation.
Research Programmer, Martin Frost 30 percent.