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                         STANFORD UNIVERSITY
                     COMPUTER SCIENCE DEPARTMENT

                            March 1, 1973





Professor William Miller
Provost's Office
Stanford University


Dear Bill:

	You will remember that when we met in August, I said  that  I
thought  the  Computer  Science  Department ought to have a system of
display terminals that would give its faculty and  graduate  students
access  to  whatever  computers  they  wanted to use.

	While I was at M.I.T. in the fall I undertook to plan such  a
facility for Project MAC and their Artificial Intelligence Laboratory
eventually concluding that a system devised by Peter Wiener  of  Yale
was  the  best  bet.    The Computer Science Department here has just
concluded that a system meeting the specifications  in  the  enclosed
plan  is  needed,  and I was asked to explore with you getting such a
system financed.  Your secretary has made an appointment  for  me  to
discuss it with you on March 14.

	There are still some technical issues to be resolved, because
some of the  electrical  engineers  favor  a  system  based  on  CATV
technology  with frame grabbers, but no concrete proposal along those
lines has been developed and  costed.    Also  its  capabilities  for
interaction  have  not  been  worked  out  as  compared with the Yale
scheme.  I expect that we shall have settled  these  matters  by  the
time  we  meet, but I doubt that the prospective costs or performance
will change much.

	Based on our experience with having display terminals in all
the  offices  at  the  AI  Lab, I think such a system will make a big
improvement in the teaching and  research  of  the  Computer  Science
Department and will eventually be needed for the whole of Stanford.


					Best Regards,



					John McCarthy

P.S. How do you like the Xerox line printer?  They say the blotches will
go away soon.