Linguistics Research Center, HRC DEC-10, ARPA

The explanation for this post will hopefully become apparent along the way. Winfred Lehmann founded the Linguistics Research Center at UT Austin in 1961 and led the Department of Germanic Studies in Schoch Hall for many years. ARPA's Bob Taylor studied experimental psychology and psychoacoustics at UT until 1959, focusing on the mechanisms of hearing and neural processing. UT was designated as an ARPANET site from 1977 and the ARPANET Directory from 1978 lists the Linguistics Research Center and Computation Center. Taylor moved to Xerox PARC, and the LRC later utilized Xerox PARC laser printer technology to produce complex, multi-character linguistic publications, such as Lehmann's A Gothic Etymological Dictionary, which required rendering over 500 special characters. [1]

Thanks to more fantastic discussion from Clive Dawson, we know a little about the LRC and this is the perfect place to share some of that. For context, Clive and Rich were discussing the lab and offices in the Harry Ransom Center where the KI DEC-10 was located from 1975 to 1982. The LRC clearly had offices adjacent to the DEC-10. Probably the DEC-10 offices were officially Computation Center, but it's even possible that UTCC and LRC were to some extent overlapping and unified? Here's a note from Clive.

Rich, the person you are thinking about across the hall at the Linguistics Research Center (LRC) was Dr. Helen Jo Hewitt, aka “HJ”.  She was a BIG fan of TECO, and was one of my “power” users.  She was one of the early “font hackers”, and I had developed a bunch of TECO macros for her.  She would come across the hall and pose an interesting problem, and a few minutes, or hours, or days(!) later, I would present her with another TECO macro for her growing collection. These tools would enable her, for example, to use a meta-language of her own creation to insert diacritics into a document, and then apply the appropriate macro to convert the meta-language into actual escape-sequence commands for the robotic typewriter to backspace, make micro-adjustments to the carriage, and type the appropriate symbol(s) to produce the desired diacritic at j-u-s-t the right position. Later on, as her daisy-wheel collection of different type-fonts grew, a macro would be used to type a partially-filled page of text, then command the typewriter to roll the page back to the beginning and pause. She could then switch in, say, the Greek daisy-wheel, after which the job would continue with the typewriter skipping directly to each blank spot where a Greek character needed to be typed.

All of this returned because of rereading the excellent ARPANET history [2], especially the section discussing the 1967 meeting where the IMPs were in some sense first thought of [3]. IMPs first became operational in 1969 and arrived at UT in 1977. A fun note from [2], "How could anyone program the TX-2, for instance, to talk to the Sigma-7 at UCLA or the computer at SRI?" This Sigma-7 at UCLA is the machine that Mike Mayfield wrote the first BASIC Trek game on [4].

View of HRC many of us are familiar with, approaching the entrance. 

[1] The university held high-value contracts for computational linguistics and translation directed by Winfred Lehmann, as well as sonar range modeling directed by Chester McKinney. The research was largely funded through traditional military service branches, such as the Air Force, Army, and Navy. The Ann Arbor meeting was uniquely focused on solving the physical and logical challenges of networking computer hardware together.

[2] Hafner, Katie, and Matthew Lyon. Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins of the Internet. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996

[3] UT Austin was not represented at the 1967 ARPA Principal Investigators meeting in Ann Arbor, Michigan. This spring gathering involved thirteen Principal Investigators who held active contracts with ARPA's Information Processing Techniques Office. The attendees, such as MIT, UCLA, Stanford, and the University of Michigan, were already deeply involved in time-sharing, computer graphics, and networking research.

[4] The SDS Sigma-7, located at UCLA's Boelter Hall, was the first computer node on the ARPANET, the precursor to the internet. On October 29, 1969, student programmer Charley Kline used the Sigma-7 to send the first message to Stanford Research Institute, establishing a crucial, albeit initially buggy, connection. At 10:30 p.m., the first message intended to be "LOGIN" was sent, but the system crashed after "LO", making "LO" the very first message. UCLA served as the Network Measurement Center, with the Sigma-7, under Leonard Kleinrock, analyzing network behavior. This event is recognized as the first footsteps of the internet.