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C00002 00002	Dear Ken:
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Dear Ken:

	This is  a request  for a  donation from  D.E.C. to  Stanford
University.   As you may  know,  Stanford  is in the middle  of a big
campaign to raise $300,000,000, part of which we hope will  come from
our  friends  in industry.    Besides  that,   the  Computer  Science
Department has  decided that the next big thing it needs is a display
system that will allow  all its faculty and graduate  students access
to whatever  computers are available  to them on  campus and throught
the ARPA net.

	Enclosed is a  technical document that  explains how we  hope
to achieve this  goal and what it will  cost.  I worked on  a similar
plan when  I was at M.I.T.   this fall,  and  Gordon Bell is familiar
with the  concepts and  the  reasoning behind  them being  the  least
expensive current way of getting a system of high quality displays.

	Is  it  possible  for  D.E.C.   to  consider  a  donation  of
$200,000 to  Stanford aimed at achieving this goal?  There is no part
of the  government that can  be asked  for this  sort of thing  these
days.  I would  be  glad to  come and  discuss  it with  you  at your
convenience.

	This   request   has   the    approval   of   the    Stanford
administration.

	 Sincerely yours,



	 John McCarthy
	 Professor of Computer Science

P.S. Two  pieces of news.   First, as  you probably know  ARPA, after
much  delay,   decided not  to support Foonly.   I  think this  was a
mistake, because Foonly would have  been a good computer and we  need
the expanded  capacity,   and secondly because  much would  have been
learned  about using  computers to  debug computers.   Unfortunately,
the long delay on top of the other long delays  reduced morale in the
group  to the point  where it  was not reasonable  to look  for other
support for the project.   We hope ARPA will buy  us a KL-10 when  it
becomes available,  because we  need the  capacity,   have a  special
interest  in the KL-10,  and can't get  significant speed improvement
from  a KI-10,    because  our  slow  memory  requires  a  cache  for
efficiency.

	The other  piece of  news is that  the Committee  on computer
needs for  research and instruction has concluded that Stanford needs
a computer dedicated to general interactive computing.   Some kind of
PDP-10 is  the leading candidate from the  Committee's point of view,
but it will  be a  long battle to  convince the  Stanford Center  for
Information Processing that  anything not provided by IBM  really has
any reason to exist.

	 J. McCarthy