11 Feb
2023
11 Feb
'23
1:13 a.m.
Paul Winalski wrote:
Thanks for the story! In the early 70s the music was mostly playing
from the old PDP-6 (the loudspeakers are visible in photos from inside
the lab). However, it was always located on the 9th floor. I wonder if
what you heard could have been from the Logo group, which was part of
the AI lab? I understand they had a "music box" for children to play
with.
The MIT AI lab
seemed to favor Beatles and Bach.
That they did. In the late '70s I was
interning at IBM's Cambridge
Scientific Center, which at that time was on the 4th floor of 545
Technology Square in Cambridge MA. We had about half the floor. The
other half was part of MIT's AI lab. Our timesharing terminals were
in a room with a rather thin wall with the AI lab on the other side.
Someone in that room was debugging a music-playing program. The test
song was the Beatles' "Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite".