Project GENIE

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Project GENIE (later often given as Project Genie, but original documentation uses the upper-case version) was an early, and indirectly influential, research project at the University of California, Berkeley.

It started in 1964, funded by ARPA, from J. C. R. Licklider, the head of the Information Processing Techniques Office there, in his program of "just sprinkling money around to schools where they thought they’d get a return".

Its most notable direct product was the influential Berkeley Time-Sharing System, running on an enhanced SDS 930. A later attempted system by a related group, the CAL Time-Sharing System, did not succeed, nor did an attempted commercial spinoff, the Berkeley Computer Corporation. Its alumni, however, have had a profound impact; they include Ken Thompson of UNIX, and Butler Lampson, Peter Deutsch, and Chuck Thacker, all of Xerox PARC.

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