Introduction to the COMTEX Microfiche Edition of the Early MIT Artificial Intelligence Memos

These are the voyages of the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, and these remarks may help to understand the context of this collection, though in many ways the memoranda speak quite clearly for themselves and my comments are not, in any case, to be regarded as history, for I have written them quite hastily, in much the same spirit of the memos themselves, when it was our strategy in those early days to be unscholarly: we tended to assume, for better or for worse, that everything we did was so likely to be new that there was little need for caution or for reviewing literature or for double -checking anything. As luck would have it, that almost always turned out true.