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2025-12-08 19:24:48 UTC

Karl Auerbach on Nostr: Back when I worked at SDC in Santa Monica (roughly 1971 through 1980) one of our ...

Back when I worked at SDC in Santa Monica (roughly 1971 through 1980) one of our department's projects was an early AI project.

We had an entire IBM 370 mainframe running CP/67 (which became IBM's VM) running LISP based AI code.

I think that the group may have been using it for continuous speech recognition - which we knew our "national security' customer was planning to use to automate wiretaps.

(I used the speech recognition project's soundproof room as a place I could play music really loud when working on my own network security projects. That room was also used as a set for a silly Peter Graves "documentary" about searching for Bigfoot/Yeti.)

I never got near that project, in part because I never learned LISP, but more because the group had lots of cigar smokers and my lungs simply could not abide meeting with them.