Did My Brother Invent E-Mail With Tom Van Vleck? (Part One)

Errol Morris

Errol Morris on photography.

This is part one of a five-part series.

1.

A SHORT COMMENT

…the computer is here, and no doubt it is going to develop.
Everybody, or almost everybody, seems a little uneasy about
this, and why not? This is man’s first encounter outside himself
with something that is exactly like some inside part of himself.

— E. E. Morison, from “Computers and the World of the Future” (based on a conference in 1961 to commemorate the 100th anniversary of MIT)

Steve Webber, Charlie Clingen (the boss), Barry Wolman, and Noel Morris, about 1974. Courtesy of Tom Van VleckSteve Webber, Charlie Clingen (the boss), Barry Wolman and Noel Morris, about 1974.

It was a short comment on my recent essay in The Times, “The Ashtray.”

#82: Tom Van Vleck
Ocean City, NJ
March 11th, 2011
9:44pm

…I had email today from another middle school student asking about Noel Morris’s place in history as (a) creator of electronic mail.

Noel Morris’s place in history? Noel Morris was my older brother, who had dropped out of MIT and spent most of his waking hours holed up in an apartment working at a computer terminal. This was in the ‘60s, long before there was anything close to a home computer. The name Tom Van Vleck was not unfamiliar. He was a friend of my brother’s who worked with him at MIT in those days.

I called him.

TOM VAN VLECK: Hello?

ERROL MORRIS: I’m trying to find Tom Van Vleck.

TOM VAN VLECK: Speaking.

ERROL MORRIS: It’s Errol Morris.

TOM VAN VLECK: Oh, hello, Errol. How are you?

ERROL MORRIS: I’m fine. I remember you from years and years and years ago.

TOM VAN VLECK: Well, that’s good. I remember meeting you the one time when Noel introduced us. And that’s all I remember.

ERROL MORRIS: Yes. And when would that have been?

TOM VAN VLECK: It would have been in the ‘70s sometime. It was in Cambridge, pretty sure. Noel and I were probably working together at Honeywell.

ERROL MORRIS: I came up here to live about 20 years ago, but it was after Noel had died. I somehow saw myself as taking his place in Cambridge. Not far from two places where he used to live. I don’t know if you remember his apartments.

TOM VAN VLECK: Yes, I do.

ERROL MORRIS: Because I spent a summer with my brother in 1969.

TOM VAN VLECK: Okay, well maybe that was when I met you.

ERROL MORRIS: And he had a terminal in his apartment. I remember the terminal very well. I also remember how often he would work through the night. He would be up for hours on end.

TOM VAN VLECK: Yep, we used to razz him about that. We would say, “Noel, you can’t stay up all night and then be awake at the daytime.”

ERROL MORRIS: But he did anyway?

TOM VAN VLECK: Oh, he would try. But he would be not so sharp.

ERROL MORRIS: No, I was just surprised to see that comment in The New York Times. And I had –

TOM VAN VLECK: It was sort of bait, you know? I was wondering if you would respond.

ERROL MORRIS: I’ve meant to write something about Noel, and also about my mother as well. It’s long overdue. I didn’t have the heart to go back into our house after my mother died. And a lot of stuff got thrown out. I still have bits and pieces. I was going to try to collect some stuff about Noel. The one thing I would really like to find is the eulogy that my mother read at the funeral home, which was very, very moving. My mother was very eloquent. I hope I can find it somewhere, I don’t know.

Courtesy of the author

I am very curious. If part of the bait was talking about my brother inventing e-mail, that of course, interested me. Why wouldn’t it? I was hooked.

TOM VAN VLECK: Well, that story is online on my Web page. [1]

Van Vleck’s Web page provides a great deal of information. Including a history of the Van Vlecks. The mathematics building at the University of Wisconsin, where my wife and I went to school, is named “Van Vleck Hall.” I went to lectures there. My wife asked me, “Find out if he’s related to that Van Vleck.” He is. Edward Burr Van Vleck, a cousin, a beloved professor of mathematics at the University of Wisconsin, and an obsessive collector of Japanese woodblock prints. And then there’s John H. Van Vleck, Edward’s son, a professor of physics at Harvard, a Nobel laureate and one of the fathers of the atomic bomb. [2] There is even a Van Vleck crater on the moon, named after yet another mathematician cousin, John M. Van Vleck. [3]

With permission of the Lunar and Planetary Institute

TOM VAN VLECK: In 1965, at the beginning of the year, there was a bunch of stuff going on with the time-sharing system that Noel and I were users of. We were working for the political science department. And the system programmers wrote a programming staff note memo that proposed the creation of a mail command. But people proposed things in programming staff notes that never got implemented. And well, we thought the idea of electronic mail was a great idea. We said, “Where’s electronic mail? That would be so cool.” And they said, “Oh, there’s no time to write that. It’s not important.” And we said, “Well, can we write it?” And we did. And then it became part of the system.

Programming Staff Note 39Courtesy of Tom Van Vleck Programming Staff Note 39

ERROL MORRIS: The original request for mail, did you keep it?

TOM VAN VLECK: Yes. It’s posted on the Web page. There’s a link to it. [4] [5]

Interactive Interactive Feature

75 ThumbnailTry writing some code and then send an e-mail from 1965.

ERROL MORRIS: That’s fantastic. It’s fortunate that we have the documents, and also that I am able to ask you about what they mean. So many documents have been lost. You probably know that our father died when I was only two years old. Noel was six years older than I was. He would have been 8. And our father died of a massive heart attack. It’s so sad and strange. Noel, for a high school project, built a model of the human heart showing the circulation of the blood. It was constructed with painted plexiglass and plywood. And the lights were rigged so that you could turn a crank and see how the blood circulated through the arteries and veins.

TOM VAN VLECK: Gosh.

ERROL MORRIS: And he won a prize for it, I know that. But I keep thinking about his model of the heart and what happened to him and to my father. My father dead at 43, and Noel dead at 40. I know that it destroyed our mother because it meant that she was going through the same thing that she had gone through some 30 years earlier.

TOM VAN VLECK: Right, right.

ERROL MORRIS: I watched it turn her into an old woman. It was truly horrible. And so completely unexpected.

*******

I remember the day. We were living in this nightmare apartment building on Seventh Avenue and 54th Street. Over the Stage Deli. Julia, my wife, had called my mother to get her recipe for potato pancakes. I had gone to my office on Broadway, about a block away. Julia called me and told me my brother had died. I immediately took the train to my mother’s house and stayed with her for the next 10 days.

It was all a blur. I had never seen my mother like that. She was one of the strongest people I have ever known. But she was inconsolable. And I was angry, but I didn’t know at whom.

The funeral was in Brookline, Mass., at the Levine Chapel. I knew that my brother had friends, but he worked unendingly, and I was worried that nobody would be there for the funeral. There was my mother, my step-father, and my two step-brothers and step-sister. And, literally, hundreds of people. It was absolutely filled. People were standing in the back. I had the picture of my brother as isolated. Julia asked me, “How did they all find out?” And I said, “They communicate with each other using computers.”

*******

ERROL MORRIS: So, is this really true? Did Noel invent e-mail?

TOM VAN VLECK: He and I, together, invented e-mail. That’s right. Someone else said, “Let’s have an e-mail,” but he and I were the people who took that wish and wrote code that did it. Now, I don’t say we were the first or the only inventors, because I’m not interested in that. But I know that Noel and I invented it, and furthermore, I know that the e-mail that we invented was the ancestor of the e-mail for the next operating system, Multics, that we worked together on for many years. And that mail command was the ancestor of the mail command for many other systems, Unix, in particular. And so, it influenced all subsequent mail systems. So Noel has a legacy. [6]

ERROL MORRIS: It was the beginning of e-mail.

TOM VAN VLECK: Back in the ‘60s, there was one time-sharing system at MIT. It was called CTSS.

ERROL MORRIS: What did that stand for?

TOM VAN VLECK: Compatible Time-Sharing System. If Noel and I wanted to communicate, especially if he was up late and I was keeping more normal hours, we could leave disk files. I could leave a file called “Noel, read me.” And then he would leave a note on another file saying “For Tom,” or something like that. And so we would read these back and forth. It enabled us to do what postal mail did, but much faster, and it enabled us not to have to call each other and wake each other up if we were sleeping or whatever. And so the mail system replaced that with something very similar to what mail is like nowadays. You log in, you say, do I have any mail, and it shows it to you, and you can say, “Well, I want to send a note to this person.”

ERROL MORRIS: Do you have any of those early e-mails?

TOM VAN VLECK: No. No. Foolishly, I junked all that stuff at some point when I moved on from somewhere to somewhere. And people often ask, “What was the first e-mail message that you sent?”

ERROL MORRIS: Of course, it’s like Alexander Graham Bell. [7]

TOM VAN VLECK: I truly can’t remember. I used to send scraps of poetry and stuff like that. [8] You just needed some string of text to test things out, for instance. And I would send whatever was running around in my head at the time.

********

Since my brother was six years older than me, he was very much my big brother. He had endless gadgets. Electronic devices and, in particular, the Morrismatic Door, the door to his bedroom, which could be opened from his bed with a complicated system of ropes and pulleys. It was the quintessential Rube Goldberg device. And his hi-fi sets. Our family were friends with friends of Joseph Grado, who made hi-tech turntables, wooden tone-arms and phono cartridges. My brother was given a set of them as a present. And endless records – which I wasn’t allowed to go near. My mother had graduated from Juilliard in piano, I was a cellist and Noel played the clarinet. But he had a passion for organ music, particularly Bach. That and Mahler. My mother, who was as devoted to music as anyone I have ever met, told Noel that it made her nervous in the mornings to hear the opening chords of Mahler’s 1st or the B minor Prelude and Fugue at deafening volumes.

From the author

When I was five or six, I was home with our beloved housekeeper, Mary Jane Hardman (“Hardy”), and I took out an LP and put it on a small portable phonograph, but it was set on 45 r.p.m. rather than 33, and so I was listening to Mozart 36 percent faster and higher than normal. I was ecstatic. It seemed like the most beautiful thing I had ever heard. And I was playing it. Or at least I was playing the record. When they returned I told them about what I had done and realized my mistake almost immediately. I often (or at least I felt this way) ended up looking stupid in front of my brother. Years later, he and a friend (who later became an astrophysicist) were in our backyard with a telescope looking at the moons of Jupiter. Jupiter was near the horizon line, and I suggested moving the telescope over to the other side of the yard. They laughed. Of course, it wouldn’t have made any difference. Again, I realized my mistake almost immediately. But too late.

********

ERROL MORRIS: I was having trouble graduating from the University of Wisconsin because I had gone climbing in Yosemite during my senior year, and I had to finish my math requirements. That meant another calculus course. That’s why I was in Cambridge in 1969, because Noel was helping me with my calculus homework. We used his copy of Thomas, “Calculus and Analytic Geometry.” I still have it among my books.

TOM VAN VLECK: Wow.

ERROL MORRIS: But he had a low opinion of himself – which I think is so nuts – because he had trouble with chemistry at MIT, but it seems to me in those days, MIT was designed to make smart people feel stupid.

TOM VAN VLECK: Yep. It definitely was. We always said it was like a railroad station. Nobody cared if you were there or not, you know? You were supposed to get through and get to where you were going, and you didn’t come there for support or anything like that.

ERROL MORRIS: Where are you from originally?

TOM VAN VLECK: I grew up in the Chicago area. And then came out to MIT, and stayed in Cambridge for 20 years. Had my haircut at the Coop, the same barber for 20 years. Then went to Silicon Valley for 20 years, and now I’m in Ocean City, N. J.

ERROL MORRIS: Why do you live in Ocean City, if I may ask?

TOM VAN VLECK: Well, my wife’s from Baltimore and summered here when she was a girl. And so it was heaven to her. When we lived in California, we wanted to live at the beach. Out here, real estate is reasonable. Compared to California, anyways. And so, we live about five blocks from the beach, and we take a five-mile beach walk almost every day we can.

*******

ERROL MORRIS: Were you an undergraduate at MIT?

TOM VAN VLECK: Yes. I got out in ’65.

ERROL MORRIS: Which is when Noel would have graduated if he had stayed.

TOM VAN VLECK: That’s right. He finally finished up a few years later thanks to Art Evans. [9]

ERROL MORRIS: I was told that they graded on a curve and routinely flunked out a certain percentage of students.

TOM VAN VLECK: Well, yes, they did. We took a perverse pride in that. But the attitude of MIT was that you were there to learn and if you weren’t, there were other people who wanted to be there in your place. And it was competitive just because people all wanted to be the best. And there was the issue that if you didn’t have good enough grades, you might lose any scholarship aid you had, and it was an expensive school. So that was an issue for a lot of people. But it was competitive and it was very free, you could basically sign up for just about any course. You could take as much as you thought you could handle, and if you couldn’t handle as much as you thought you could handle, then you had to deal with it. So it was a very big step for many kids – including me and I think Noel – from a much less stressful high school experience.

ERROL MORRIS: But you finished on time?

TOM VAN VLECK: I finished ahead of time, actually, because I’d skipped some calculus at the beginning.

ERROL MORRIS: And so when did you first meet my brother?

TOM VAN VLECK: I may have met Noel when we took course 6.251 together, which is system programming. But we really didn’t meet until the fall of ’64 when we both started to work for Professor Ithiel de Sola Pool.

ERROL MORRIS: What work were you doing?

TOM VAN VLECK: Data handling code for social scientists. So the first two programs that we worked on, one was a cross tabulation system. If you have survey data, you produce a table that says how many people had this and how many people had that. And the other one was a simulation program which simulated the diffusion of information within a social group. We may have been funded by the CIA, but nobody mentioned that at the time. [10]

ERROL MORRIS: This is before you went to work for Project MAC?

TOM VAN VLECK: That’s right. Project MAC had been founded by that time and had had its famous summer study. But the work that Noel and I were doing for political science was initially just using MIT computer center facilities and then later on, we got accounts on the Project MAC machine because they were trying to see what people would do with computers if they had access to them. [11]

ERROL MORRIS: I remember that Noel had concerns about Pool’s politics. Maybe that’s all related to the CIA stuff.

Ithiel De Sola PoolMIT Museum Ithiel de Sola Pool (third from left) in his International Communications Seminar.

TOM VAN VLECK: I think so. Pool hobnobbed with a bunch of people from Washington, and we were dissuaded from asking questions about it, I guess you could say. He would say, “Well, I have to do something, I have to do some fundraising” or something, and he’d go off to Washington. Pool had been one of the people who helped with the Kennedy election back in whatever that was.

ERROL MORRIS: ’60.

TOM VAN VLECK: ’60, right. And you may have read a popular book called “The 480,” which talked about survey analysts dividing the population into 480 different categories of socioeconomic status, and so on, and devising a pitch for each group. Well, Pool contributed to some of the theoretical underpinnings of that, which was supposedly part of Kennedy getting elected. [12] But I don’t know whether Noel was concerned with that or not, or whether it was concerned with being cozy with Washington and possibly the CIA. I was naïve and that all just went right over my head. There were later issues on the MIT campus when the anti-Vietnam War sentiment really became prevalent in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s. And at that time, Pool’s work had metamorphosed into a social science research project which was called The Cambridge Project, which had Department of Defense funding, and provided data analysis tools that were used by government agencies. There were rabble-rousing articles against them, and it could have been by then that Pool’s politics began to be suspect.

ERROL MORRIS: So, you and my brother found yourselves in the same office together?

TOM VAN VLECK: Yes. We worked together and it turned out we got on pretty well. We worked effectively as a team encouraging each other and when one would be losing interest a little, the other would pull them along. And we accomplished a lot more than either one of us could have singly. I think two is just the right size for a lot of teams and certainly this worked great for us.

*******

Noel MorrisCourtesy of Tom Van Vleck Noel Morris

Later, Tom kindly sent me his memories of my brother. They had met in 1963.

I knew Noel slightly from when we took class 6.251, “System Programming.” The final set of exercises for the course had students submit batches of changes to an elementary machine language assembler: you got points for each of a set of possible improvements, some required, some optional. Noel and I tried to get as many points as we could, far beyond what was needed to get an A.

We applied for part-time student programming jobs in fall of 1964 for Prof. Ithiel de Sola Pool, who taught political science.

The first office Noel and I shared was in Building 14, the MIT library. There was a row of windowless offices on the second floor, on a corridor accessible through the stacks. Our office had a nameplate that said “T Lehrer / N Morris.” (Yes, that Tom Lehrer. We shared an office with him but never met him. He had an appointment at Harvard, and also worked with the MIT Center for International Studies, which was the organization that paid our salaries too. If he used the office at all, it was in the mornings or early afternoon, when Noel and I had classes and labs. We were more the night shift. I once mentioned Lehrer to Mrs. Pool, who said, “He’s quite nice, but very shy.”)

Rhino Entertainment

The great thing about the office was the IBM 1050 terminal, which had a golf-ball printing mechanism and could produce letter quality output.

IBM 1050 Data Communications SystemIBM Corporate Archives IBM 1050 Data Communications System

The first program we worked on together was a “cross tabulation” system. That is, it read in survey data with one or more cards per response, each having responses punched in one or more columns. Our program counted how many responses picked each answer and printed totals, e.g. marital status versus number of dogs. The program was quite complex, adaptable to many kinds of coding schemes, and supported many ways of specifying tables and statistical calculations. For years after the MIT 7094 was gone, we would get queries from social scientists who wanted to use it. One thing we did was to write a memo describing the program, using RUNOFF, the brand new facility for editing a document online with the time-sharing system and printing it out nicely formatted, with justified right margins.

IBM 7094 Data Processing SystemIBM Corporate Archives IBM 7094 Data Processing System

I now believe that the Center for International Studies was paid for indirectly by the CIA. The source of funds was never mentioned to us. We did other work on a simulation of how people in Eastern Bloc countries got their information, e.g. by rumor, radio, etc. which was supposedly paid for by Radio Free Europe, the US funded station that broadcast across the Iron Curtain into the Communist satellites. We used the cross-tabs system to analyze some very poor survey data and try to match it up to the simulation output from a grad student’s thesis.

Office space at any university is under a lot of pressure, and time-sharing terminals were scarce. The newly formed Project MAC had both available, and Prof. Pool arranged for us to get an office on the fifth floor of the new Tech Square building, right next to a public terminal room, in 1964. It was great. We could almost always find a free terminal, either next door or upstairs, and more importantly there were other programmers there at all hours. We learned from them, shared code, made friendships, tried to impress. The term “hacker” is now disreputable, but it was not so then, and we learned from some of the greatest hackers in the world.

I managed to graduate in February 1965 and was offered a full-time position on the MIT research staff, working for Prof. Pool. My stating salary was $550/month. I think Noel made the same amount. (This was slightly less than a substitute mailman made.) An important feature of a job on the MIT Division of Sponsored Research staff was that MIT would write to your local draft board requesting an occupational deferment. This was during the Vietnam War, and the draft was a serious consideration. (One reason I abandoned hopes of going to graduate school was that my Illinois draft board had indicated that it would not support educational deferments for graduate school.)

I don’t remember when Noel stopped his studies and became a full-time staff member; it was probably in fall of 1964. After I became full-time too, our usual pattern was to come in to Tech Square by 10 or 11 o’clock, and work until quite late, perhaps 3 AM. We would usually go out to dinner somewhere: DSR staff could eat at the MIT Faculty Club if they wore ties, so we did that sometimes, or we would go to Jack and Marion’s, or the English Room, or S&S in Inman Square. [13]

Courtesy of the Cornell University Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections
Courtesy of the Cornell University Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections

The offices in Tech Square were luxurious by modern standards. They had solid walls, doors that closed, and windows. Each programmer had his own desk, file cabinet, and bookcase. In our office we also had a 20-drawer file cabinet for punch cards, because we had program decks for lots of the Political Science batch programs. Noel always had a small hi-fi tuned to classical music in his office. The main feature of any system programmer’s office in those days was stacks of paper: program listings and core dumps.

We disagreed sometimes. We argued. We fought. We solved our problems and went on. We tolerated each other, we defended each other, we learned from each other, we got stuff done. It was exhilarating and exhausting: work, go home and sleep, back to work, for days on end.

Outside of work we led independent lives. I dated several different women; if Noel dated at all I don’t remember discussing it. I think he used to go folk dancing and attend concerts, with friends from outside work.

Noel lived on Lee St in Cambridge during part of the 60s; I moved every year, always looking for a better place.

In the Spring of 1965, we were working for Political Science, using CTSS, the Compatible Time-Sharing System, as our programming environment. We wrote code in MAD, a FORTRAN-like language, and in FAP, the assembly program for the IBM 7094. I wrote a few programs for the Computation Center’s IBM 1401, which was used to create input and print output tapes for the 7094, but sat idle a lot. I had learned the 1401 from summer jobs in previous years, and I taught Noel the machine language.

CTSS was the cutting edge of computing in those days: using the computer on-line instead of running batch jobs was new and controversial; and Noel and I had offices on the same floor as the system programmers, and got to know them, got invited to meetings they attended, socialized and became friends. This was exciting and interested us more than adding features to the data analysis programs. We wanted to show the system folks what we could do and maybe eventually get jobs as system programmers.

In 1965, the system programmers at Project MAC were phasing out of developing CTSS. The IBM 7094 was stretched to its limit and often overloaded: one reason we worked late hours was to have access to the computer when it was less busy. Project MAC had obtained funding and begun to plan a new computer system, called Multics, Multiplexed Information and Computing Service. CTSS was the tool that the Multics programmers would use to build the first version of the new system. We were tantalized by discussions of the features that the new system would have, and in some cases, found ways to implement the new ideas on the old system, CTSS.

*******

Van Vleck’s account and the fragments of source code published on his Web site suggest an opportunity to look further. Did e-mail emerge in the process of building a time-sharing system? Or was it envisioned from the very beginnings. And if it was envisioned, who were the architects? Who were the builders? Would it be possible, digging into the code itself, to determine who wrote what, when?

*******

Try writing some code and then send an e-mail from 1965. Go to the interactive feature »

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[1] Tom Van Vleck’s Web Page

[2] Van Vleck wrote in an e-mail, “I met John H. Van Vleck twice. When I had an office at MIT in the early 70s, I occasionally got mail addressed to ‘John H Van Vleck, MIT’ with no room number. I presume these were former colleagues of his who worked with him on RADAR at the MIT Radiation Laboratory during World War II. The MIT mail service matched the last name and would deliver his mail to me. I would stick them in an inter-department envelope and write John H Van Vleck, Harvard, and send them on. So one day, my office phone rang, and a voice said, ‘This is your second cousin once removed!’ It was Prof. Van Vleck, and he invited me to lunch at the Harvard Faculty Club. I said yes. I was a little shy of meeting a great man (this was before the Nobel Prize but I knew he was famous) and asked a friend who was a professor of Physics at MIT if he knew JHVV and what he was like. ‘If the conversation gets dull, ask him about trains in Europe,’ my friend advised. ‘He has the timetable in his pocket.’ Turned out I didn’t need this advice: Prof. Van Vleck was wonderful, polite, charming, and full of anecdotes from the history of Physics…’”

[3] Van Vleck Crater, Lunar and Planetary Institute

[4] Indeed. The document is posted and described by Tom Van Vleck in his Web page on electronic mail. A proposed CTSS MAIL command was described in an undated Programming Staff Note 39 by Louis Pouzin, Glenda Schroeder, and Pat Crisman. Numerical sequence places the note in either Dec 64 or Jan 65. PSN 39 proposed a facility that would allow any CTSS user to send a message to any other. The proposed uses were communication from “the system” to users informing them that files had been backed up, and communication to the authors of commands with criticisms, and communication from command authors to the CTSS manual editor.”

[5] I asked Van Vleck about the differences between the mail command proposed in PSN 39 and the mail command implemented by Van Vleck and my brother. He wrote back, “Noel and I thought it would be better to write a simple program that could send any message from any user to any other, and then use that as the basis for more complicated systems that had strictly formatted messages or where the recipient name came from a program. It was clear that one piece of the code would have to have special powers, and we thought it would be better if that piece could be compact and clear, so that it would be easy to make sure it had no bugs in it. A general purpose, very simple, MAIL program could be used to support various application patterns, without locking the system into limited patterns like those of LOG and REMARK, or entering addresses in binary from the console. [Take a look in the 1965 CTSS manual, section AH.9.02, where a command called LOG is described. It sent messages between members of the same project. Section AH.9.03 describes the REMARK command, which let a user type in a message that would be sent to the system programmers. (The manual section describes the function of REMARK as “Users talk to GOD.”) These facilities already existed prior to PSN 39. The desire to communicate, to send messages from one user to another, was already in the air.] Pouzin, Schroeder, and Crisman had gone one step further in this direction, run into some disagreements and technical questions, and focused elsewhere. We saw a technical approach, the use of the new ATTACH. call, and a design approach, reducing function to the minimum, that made the facility work, and avoided arguments about features.”

[6] Tom Van Vleck had written, “I was a new member of the MIT programming staff in spring 1965. When I read the PSN document [Program Staff Note 39] about the proposed CTSS MAIL command, I asked “where is it?” and was told there was nobody available to write it. My colleague Noel Morris and I wrote a version of MAIL for CTSS in the summer of 1965. Noel was the one who saw how to use the features of the new CTSS file system to send the messages, and I wrote the actual code that interfaced with the user.”

[7] The first telegraph message: On May 24, 1844, Samuel Morse sends the telegraph message “What hath God wrought?” from the Supreme Court chamber in the Capitol in Washington, D.C., to the B & O Railroad Depot in Baltimore, Md. The first telephone call: On March 10, 1876, Alexander Graham Bell makes the first telephone call to his assistant, Thomas Watson: “Mr. Watson, come here, I want to see you.”

Alexander Graham Bell’s notebook entry, March 10th, 1876. Library of CongressAlexander Graham Bell’s notebook entry, March 10th, 1876.

[8] Van Vleck mentioned e.e. cummings and suggested that I read his Norton Lectures. Could e.e.cummings – who lived in Cambridge, Mass. – have been part of the first e-mail message? Or was it something far more prosaic?

[9] Arthur Evans, later at Carnegie Mellon, wrote about my brother in response to a posting by Tom Van Vleck: “When I joined the MIT faculty in 1965 I looked him up, and we gradually became close friends. Noel was then one of those folks who have trouble completing an undergraduate program. He needed only a few credits and never quite got around to getting them. I persuaded him to earn academic credit by being a Teaching Assistant in the subject I was teaching, and later I persuaded the Undergraduate Educational Policy Committee (or whatever it was called) to award a few more credits for Noel’s by-then extensive professional experience. I was pleased to have taken part in his receiving an MIT degree. He was surely a credit to the school.” //www.errolmorris.com/noel.html

[10] In an article in the Political Science journal Background written in 1966, Pool wrote, “The organization with which I am affiliated, the Center for International Studies of M.I.T. has in the past had contracts with the CIA. A year ago we decided regretfully not to take any new ones, not because of the fact that some people do not like the CIA but for the simple reason that the classification placed on the existence of contracts, even though the work was unclassified and published, prevented disclosure of whom the work was being done for. This was a condition we were unwilling to accept. We were perfectly willing to do public, published university research for the United States government via any of its departments, but we have to say who the sponsor is.” Ithiel De Sola Pool, “The Necessity for Social Scientists Doing Research for Governments.” Background, Vol. 10, No. 2 (Aug., 1966), pp. 111-122

[11] Project MAC was founded in 1963. MAC was an acronym that stood both for Machine Aided Cognition and Multiple Access Computer. Others joked that it stood for “More Assets to Cambridge.” Political Science work began at MIT in 1955, under the aegis of the Department of Economics and Social Science. It became an independent department in 1965.

[12] Professor Pool responded to the criticisms and suspicion of his work in an article in the Chicago Sun-Times. He directly addresses “The 480”: “…in the scarce literature about computers in politics, such as Eugen Burdick’s ‘The 480,’ the computer is portrayed as somehow a diabolical, almost live, thing that manipulates men. This is science fiction, not reality. In truth, all a computer can do is to give a human being some knowledge which he must consider and act upon. Computers frighten people. It is not clear why. … There was no ‘people machine’; nor were there super-human manipulators pulling magic out of computers. Responsible people, not computers, ran the [1960 Kennedy] campaign.”

[13] I remember, in particular, the menu for Jack and Marion’s. They had enormous sandwiches. I was fascinated by “The Surprise Sandwich.” The description in the fine print said, “Made only by Jack – Especially for you. We don’t tell you what’s in it or even the price…. So please do not ask your waitress…” And then, “P.S. A terrific profit item for Jack & Marion’s, but you’ll love it.” They were shameless.