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I pass the following letter on with permission. It has been lightly edited to remove some irrelevant remarks. We are VERY lucky to have Donald Michie as a contributor. I'm giving serious thought to flying over to Scotland in July myself to help examine and scan/OCR his archive! He doesn't explicitly mention having any old source code, but even if there's no code, we really must transfer as much of this history to online media as we can. I'll ask him if he has anything in electronic form. I don't personally know much about the MIRU; I remember Rae R giving me a tour and showing me some of the early Computer Chess work. I'm looking forward to learning some of this history myself. -- Graham
Dear Graham Toal
I have an archive brimming with documentation of every kind covering the early days, -- technical reports, minutes of the weekly staff meetings in the EPU and DMI, correspondence galore with University Admin and Court, with international AI scientists, with visitors and Machine Intelligence Workshop contributors, with editors, authors, other Departments of the University at that time, proposals, manifestos and goodness knows what else.
There is in addition a complete History of the Machine Intelligence Research Unit written by my wife, then a member of the said MIRU. The special point of interest is that it documents an organization that had a ten-year run, from 1974 - 1984. But its existence and history remains I believe almost entirely unknown. This is because a usual account of events is that after the departure from Edinburgh of Professors Richard Gregory (who left in 1970) and Christopher Longuet- Higgins (around 1974) I also departed, to Glasgow to found the Turing Institute, at the same time that the Department of Artificial Intelligence was being set up in Edinburgh. In actuality I did not leave for Glasgow and set up the TI until 1984.
The dramatic collapse of funding following the Lighthill report temporarily stranded a community of several dozen AI research workers. The University had to set up new structures and a new mission for as many as could be retained in Edinburgh.
The DAI was the main result. In the process each person was asked whether he or she would accept assignment to undergraduate teaching. Uniquely, my University post was a so-called Personal Chair. In those days such appointments carried no teaching obligation. Never having done any teaching in my life, I opted out. I also had private doubts about whether the field had yet sufficiently matured to support undergraduate courses*.
The University accordingly set up two Departments, of which the DAI was one. The other, named the Machine Intelligence Research Unit, consisted of myself, my secretary, and 1/11th of the time of Dr Horace Townsend, of the medical faculty. We were allotted space for four postgraduate students. One or two self-funded workers also attached themselves, including Jean Hayes who ten years later wrote the History, and there was also a constant stream of visiting workers from overseas. So although from the outside the MIRU was almost invisible, it had a vigorous internal life and a steady and varied output. It was quite unbelievably crowded and chronically broke. But in its peculiar way the MIRU was fun.
My boxes of documents are of course overkill from your point of view. I am sure you will only want to retain or copy a few fragments. At the same time it seems pointless to try to offer anything from here in Australia.
It will be best, I think to wait until I get back, unfortunately not until July 1st. I will be delighted then to get access to my files and give you the run of them.
For the Computer Science Dept history, Peter Schofield's memory should stretch back to the beginning. He also contributed an excellent paper to one of the first two Machine Intelligence volumes.
Best wishes
Donald Michie
* My doubts were soon refuted by the newly- formed DAI's publication of ![[WWW]](/wiki/img/moin-www.gif "[WWW]"){kind=small}
the world's first-ever AI textbook. Written by Alan Bundy, Rod Burstall and Pat Ambler this set a standard that no subsequent text that I have seen has come near.
