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00400	C00002 00002	Dear Bill:
00500	C00005 ENDMK
00600	C⊗;
     

00100	                         STANFORD UNIVERSITY
00200	                     COMPUTER SCIENCE DEPARTMENT
00300	
00400	                            March 1, 1973

00500	
00600	
00700	
00800	
00900	Professor William Miller
01000	Provost's Office
01100	Stanford University
01200	
01300	
01400	Dear Bill:
01500	
01600		You will remember that when we met in August, I said  that  I
01700	thought  the  Computer  Science  Department ought to have a system of
01800	display terminals that would give its faculty and  graduate  students
01900	access  to  whatever  computers  they  wanted to use.
02000	
02100		While I was at M.I.T. in the fall I undertook to plan such  a
02200	facility for Project MAC and their Artificial Intelligence Laboratory
02300	eventually concluding that a system devised by Peter Wiener  of  Yale
02400	was  the  best  bet.    The Computer Science Department here has just
02500	concluded that a system meeting the specifications  in  the  enclosed
02600	plan  is  needed,  and I was asked to explore with you getting such a
02700	system financed.  Your secretary has made an appointment  for  me  to
02800	discuss it with you on March 14.
02900	
03000		There are still some technical issues to be resolved, because
03100	some of the  electrical  engineers  favor  a  system  based  on  CATV
03200	technology  with frame grabbers, but no concrete proposal along those
03300	lines has been developed and  costed.    Also  its  capabilities  for
03400	interaction  have  not  been  worked  out  as  compared with the Yale
03500	scheme.  I expect that we shall have settled  these  matters  by  the
03600	time  we  meet, but I doubt that the prospective costs or performance
03700	will change much.
03800	
03900		Based on our experience with having display terminals in all
04000	the  offices  at  the  AI  Lab, I think such a system will make a big
04100	improvement in the teaching and  research  of  the  Computer  Science
04200	Department and will eventually be needed for the whole of Stanford.
04300	
04400	
04500						Best Regards,
04600	
04700	
04800	
04900						John McCarthy
05000	
05100	P.S. How do you like the Xerox line printer?  They say the blotches will
05200	go away soon.