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In 1968 Shirley Chisholm became the first Black woman elected to the United States Congress. In 1972 she launched a campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination, breaking another political barrier.
MORE →Reflects the personal views, recollections, and perspective of the author, Mike Davis.
This is a personal recollection on the Move fire on May 13, 1985
Project Genie was a computer research project started in 1964 at the University of California, Berkeley. It produced an early Berkeley Timesharing System, which was then commercialized as the SDS 940. The project influenced innovations in memory paging and protected memory. It also led to the development of the BCC-500 computer system which could support 500 users, a large number at the time.
The project also led to the development of the Sigma series computers in 1966. The first internet message was then sent in October 1969 from a Sigma 7 series computer operated by Leonard Kleinrock's group at UCLA.
Project Genie was funded by J. C. R. Licklider, the head of ARPA's Information Processing Techniques Office at that time. The project was a smaller counterpart to Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Project MAC.
The Scientific Data Systems SDS 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 Melvin W. Pirtle and Wayne Lichtenberger at UC Berkeley. Butler Lampson, Chuck Thacker, and L. Peter Deutsch were among the students involved in the project.[1] When completed and in service, the first 940 ran reliably in spite of its array of tricky mechanical issues such as a huge disk drive driven by hydraulic arms. It served about forty or fifty users at a time and still managed to drive 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 (funded by the US federal government), they came back to Berkeley and collected enough information to begin manufacturing. Because SDS manufacturing was overloaded with the 9 series production and the startup of the Sigma Series production, it could not incorporate the 940 modifications into the standard production line. Instead, production of the 940s was turned over to the Systems Engineering Department, which manufactured systems customised to user requirements. To produce a 940, the Systems Engineering Department ordered a 930 from SDS manufacturing, installed the modifications developed by the Berkeley engineers, and shipped machine to the SDS customer as a 940.
The Sigma series computers had a role in the history of the internet. The first message sent on the internet (then ARAPNET) was sent by Charley Kline, a student of Leonard Kleinrock at UCLA using a Sigma 7 computer in October 1969.[2]
Project Genie pioneered several computer hardware techniques, such as commercial time-sharing which allowed end-user programming in machine language, separate 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, which inherited the concept of process forking from it[3] (Unix co-creator Ken Thompson worked on an SDS 940 while at Berkeley). An SDS 940 mainframe was used by Douglas Engelbart's OnLine System at the Stanford Research Institute and was the first computer used by the Community Memory Project at Berkeley, effectively the first computer based bulletin board system.
In 1968, Lampson also helped design a different timesharing system at Berkeley: Cal TSS for the CDC 6400 with Extended Core Storage. Lampson was only involved until 1969,[4] but Cal TSS continued until 1971.[5]
Several members of project Genie such as Pirtle, Thacker, Deutsch and Lampson left UCB to form the Berkeley Computer Corporation (BCC), which produced one prototype, the BCC-500.[6] The system was named as such because it could support 500 users, more than the typical 32 user systems of the time. [7]
After BCC went bankrupt when its funding from the computer mainframe lessor Data Processing Financial & General (DPF&G) suddenly stopped, the BCC-500 was transferred to the University of Hawaiʻi, where Lichtenberger was a professor, and continued to be used through the 1970s.[8] It became part of the ALOHAnet.[9]
Several BCC employees became the core of Xerox PARC's computer research group (Deutsch, Lampson and Thacker) in 1970. Lichtenberger went to the University of Hawaii, retired from there in 1981 and returned to California. He worked at Hewlett Packard and was also an early employee at Cisco Systems.[10]
Pirtle became technical director for the ILLIAC IV project at NASA Ames Research Center.[11]
Source: Wikipedia. Article content is retrieved live through the MediaWiki API.
Project Genie was a computer research project started in 1964 at the University of California, Berkeley. It produced an early Berkeley Timesharing System, which was then commercialized as the SDS 940. The project influenced innovations in memory paging and protected memory. It also led to the development of the BCC-500 computer system which could support 500 users, a large number at the time. The project also led to the development of the Sigma series computers in 1966. The first internet message was then sent in October 1969 from a Sigma 7 series computer operated by Leonard Kleinrock's group at UCLA.
Genie is a world model developed by Google DeepMind that generates interactive virtual worlds. It is a spatiotemporal transformer, a type of neural network that models what appears in each frame and how the scene changes over time. First introduced in 2024, Genie was initially trained on video game footage and could only generate two-dimensional environments. Later versions had higher resolution and increased memory capabilities and could generate three-dimensional environments. Waymo used Genie 3 to create a variant called the Waymo World Model for simulating edge cases for robotaxis. In 2026, Google released Project Genie, a web interface that allows subscribers to use Genie 3. Genie is used in video game design and autonomous vehicles.
The Berkeley Timesharing System was a pioneering time-sharing operating system implemented between 1964 and 1967 at the University of California, Berkeley. It was designed as part of Project Genie and marketed by Scientific Data Systems for the SDS 940 computer system. It was the first commercial time-sharing system which allowed general purpose programming, as well as the use of machine language.
GEnie (General Electric Network for Information Exchange) was an online service created by a General Electric business, GEIS (now GXS), that ran from 1985 through the end of 1999. In 1994, GEnie claimed around 350,000 users. Peak simultaneous usage was around 10,000 users. It was one of the pioneering services in the field, though eventually replaced by the World Wide Web and graphics-based services, most notably AOL.
Before the 1921 destruction of Tulsa’s Greenwood District, Black residents had created a remarkable center of business and community life. The district included stores, professional offices, entertainment venues and homes owned by Black citizens. Understanding Greenwood means learning what was built—not only what was burned.
MORE →Joe Louis.