I had spent the summer of 1966 working at MIT in the group that was the MIT component of the Multics effort.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
I probably learned most at MIT by teaching and working with Peter Diamond, who acted like a big brother to me during my time in the department.
Of course, MIT was notable not just for its faculty but also for its students. And, facing such extremely bright kids as a rookie teacher was something like being thrown to the wolves.
One of the terrific aspects of MIT in those days was the enormous variety of experimental work that either took place there or was talked about in seminars by outside speakers aggressively recruited by the faculty.
One of the obvious things that went wrong with Multics as a commercial success was just that it was sort of over-engineered in a sense. There was just too much in it.
I moved to MIT from Stanford in 1984 to teach, and became the founding director of MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab.
I went to Princeton in the fall of 1930 as a half-time instructor.
The Director of the Laboratory, George Reynolds, was most supportive of my efforts to work independently. There followed for ten years a glorious time for research.
I was very fortunate to be elected to the Society of Fellows at Harvard, which is, in effect, a small research center where you are given three years to do whatever work you want.
I joined the Army and was sent to the MIT radiation laboratory after a few months of introduction to electromagnetic wave theory in a special course, given for Army personnel at the University of Chicago.
Working in Korea with the talent and staff there was very eye-opening. I was in awe of everyone's talent, passion, and love for the process.