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\F0\CSTANFORD ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE LABORATORY
\CDEPARTMENT OF COMPUTER SCIENCE
\CSTANFORD UNIVERSITY
\CSTANFORD, CALIFORNIA 94305


\F1				
							December 18, 1973


Mr. Wes Gallagher
President and General Manager 
The Associated Press
50 Rockefeller Center
New York, New York 10020

Dear Mr. Gallagher:

\J	This concerns our request for a grant.  My interest is in further
developing services that may lead to home terminals.  Among the services
we would like to experiment with are news services.  I had thought that
before home services became cost-effective, some services to businesses
might be worth experimenting with, but since this makes problems for you,
we will drop the idea for now.

	I entirely agree that a program running on the PDP-10 cannot serve
the purposes you have in mind directly.  The program would have to be
rewritten for a smaller computer.  Moreover, this is not something we
are in a position to undertake, because it would be a diversion from the
main direction of our research, and because we are not in the programming
business.

	On the other hand, the research we propose to carry out will develop
ideas that will help someone write the kind of program you have in mind and
can also be used to demonstrate the ideas to your member newspapers.

	I hope there is sufficient mutual interest in this.\.

							Sincerely yours,


							John McCarthy
							Professor of Computer Science
							Director, Artificial Intelligence Laboratory



\JP.S. I shall write separately about the access question when I get a bit
more information.  I apologize for not identifying the institutions connected
to the ARPA net better; enclosed is a list of them.\.