Project Genie
Project Genie was a
computer research project started in
1964 at the
University of California, Berkeley. Project Genie was formed by
J.C.R. Licklider, the head of DARPA at that time, as a smaller counterpart to
MIT's
Project MAC.
Project Genie pioneered several computer hardware techniques, such as being thefirst commercial time-sharing system which allowed end-user programming in
machine language. Project Genie also pioneered the use of separated protected user modes, memory paging, and
protected memory. Concepts from Project Genie influenced the development of the
TENEX operating system for the
PDP-10 and
Unix (Unix co-creator
Ken Thompson worked on an SDS 940 while at Berkeley). The SDS 940
mainframe would be used as the hardware for
Douglas Engelbart's at the
Stanford Research Institute. The SRI SDS 940 would later be the first computer used by the Community Memory Project in Berkeley.
The system that
SDS (later XDS) would call the 940 was created by modifying an SDS 930 24-bit commercial computer so that it could be used for timesharing. The work was funded by
ARPA and directed by the late Dr. Mel Pirtle at and Dr. Wayne Lichtenberger at UC Berkeley.
Butler Lampson,
Chuck Thacker, and
L. Peter Deutsch were among the young technical leaders of that project. When completed and in service, the first 940 ran reliably in spite of its array of hairy mechanical peripherals such as a huge disk drive driven by hydraulic arms! It served about forty or fifty users at a time, and also drove a graphics subsystem that was quite capable for its time.
When SDS realized the value of the time sharing system, and that the software was in the public domain, they came back to Berkeley and collected enough information to begin manufacturing. Because the SDS/XDS engineers did not understand the hardware modifications well, 940s were manufactured by building 930s and then revising them exactly as the Berkeley engineers had done to make a 940.
Members of the project left UCB to form the Berkeley Computer Corporation (BCC), which produced one prototype, the BCC-500. When the company went bankrupt, the BCC-500 was transferred to the
University of Hawaii, where it continued in use though the 1970s.
Several BCC employees became the core of
Xerox PARC's computer research group (Deutsch, Lampson and Thacker) in
1970. Dr. Lichtenberger went to the University of Hawaii, and Dr. Pirtle became technical director for the
ILLIAC IV project at NASA
Ames Research Center.
See also: DARPA,
California,
computer science*
Project Genie Documentation
