How did Bell Labs start to work on Project MAC?

[Acceptable Name]

Did Bell Labs approach MIT or was it the other way around? Did participating in Project MAC come from researchers requesting management at Bell Labs/MIT or did management make the decision due to dealing with other managers in each of the two organizations? Did it grow out of an informal arrangement into a format one?

[Dan Cross]

In article <7e680266-e06e-4dd4...@googlegroups.com>,

Interesting question. Corby's oral history from the
computer history museum sheds some light on this; it
seems that Ed David at Bell Labs was good friends with
Bob Fano at MIT and they decided to work together. See
page 16 of:
http://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/access/text/2013/05/102658041-05-01-acc.pdf

- Dan C.

[Lars Brinkhoff]

Acceptable Name wrote:
> Did Bell Labs approach MIT or was it the other way around? Did participating in Project MAC come from researchers requesting management at Bell Labs/MIT or did management make the decision due to dealing with other managers in each of the two organizations? Did it grow out of an informal arrangement into a format one?

Noel Chiappa wrote to the COFF mailing list:
https://minnie.tuhs.org/pipermail/coff/2023-January/001361.html
https://minnie.tuhs.org/pipermail/coff/2023-January/001362.html

[Acceptable Name]

Thanks, Lars.

https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/26233/how-did-bell-labs-start-to-work-on-project-mac