Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory

The Stanford Artifical Intelligence Laboratory (often known as the Stanford AI Lab, or SAIL for short) was an influential early computer science research organization, at Stanford University.

It was founded in 1963 by John McCarthy, and was initially housed in the D. C. Power building (named after a person, Donald Clinton Power, not D. C. power), located in the foothills of the Santa Cruz Mountains, over the campus.

Although focused on AI work, on which it achieved much, SAIL made a number of significant contributions in computer science generally, such as the WAITS operating system.

In 1980, SAIL was shut down as an independent institution. The AI lab moved out of the famed D. C. Power building, leaving CCRMA behind. The remains of the Lab were merged into Stanford's Computer Science Department, and moved into the CS Department's location in Margaret Jacks Hall on the main campus.

SAIL was re-opened in 2004.

File repository

From 1972 to 1990, the files on the SAIL time-sharing PDP-10 were regularly backed up onto magnetic tapes, which were carefully saved and stored. By the end of SAIL's (first) life, these amounted to almost 3,000 low-density, 7-track tapes. These were carefully copied onto a final set of 229 reels of high-density 9-track magnetic tape, in a project that completed in 1990. In 1998, the contents were copied again, onto other media, and a project, SAILDART, was started to make them publicly available over the Internet. SAILDART is "a digital archive promulgating records from SAIL"; it is now available (see links below).

See also

• WAITS

External links

• Early Computers at Stanford
• DECsystem-10/20 Hardware Manual - contains details on changes to SAIL's PDP-6 and -10's
• SAIL Away (archived copy)
• SAILDART
  • About SAIL DART ● ORG
  • SAILDART Archive Preview
  • SAILDART - also contains a good summary history of SAIL
  • SAILDART Prolegomenon - lengthy; a Table of Contents is on pp. 140-144 of the PDF