Did Bell Labs approach MIT or was it the other way around? Did participating in Project MAC come from researchers requesting management at Bell Labs/MIT or did management make the decision due to dealing with other managers in each of the two organizations? Did it grow out of an informal arrangement into a formal one?
Some background:
In 1962 Robert M. Fano at MIT wrote the Project MAC proposal to J.C.R. Licklider at ARPA. The proposal was accepted and that was the start of Project MAC. Corby said it officially started January 1, 1963.
In 1964, before joining the Computer System Research department at Bell Labs, Denis Ritchie was a graduate student at Harvard. That year, he worked part-time at MIT on Project MAC then. Also in November of 1964 members of the Computer System Research department at Bell Labs were working on Project. DMR joined BTL in 1967.
Edward E. David, Jr., a manager at Bell Labs, was considered by Corbato to be the leader of the pro-Multics faction there. David co-authored Some Thoughts About the Social Implications Of Accessible Computing with Fano in 1964 (published in 1965). This suggest he was involved early on with Bell Labs working on Project MAC.
Sam Morgan said in an interview that Alexander ("Sandy") G. Fraser was the principal person who promoted Multics and who advertised it.
Peter G. Neumann wrote that the first real get-together of the Multics team (MIT, Bell Labs, and GE-[later]-Honeywell) took place at an AT&T training center in Hopewell, NJ, the week of Memorial Day 1965.
Sources:
- The Unix System; the beginning: oral history, Michael S. Mahoney, 1989
- Interview with Dennis Ritchie Interview from Michael S. Mahoney's book.
- Dennis Ritchie Thesis
- My Life, Joel Moses
- Oral history interview with Fernando J. Corbató
- Some Thoughts About the Social Implications of Accessible Computing
- An Interview with Peter G. Neumann
- Interview with Sam Morgan from Michael S. Mahoney's book.
- Multics Dates
