When Dreams Become Real

In the summer of 1964, engineers at the Digital Equipment Corporation, a computer company located in an old textile mill in Maynard, Massachusetts, gathered around a new computer they had developed for a photograph. The computer was called a "PDP-6," and it represented a new direction for the small company. The PDP-6 and its successors were among the most significant computers ever designed. The computers were designed to be used in a so-called "timesharing" mode, allowing individuals to use them as if they were a personal computer. They, and other similar computers from the Digital Equipment Corporation, were the most common among those connected to the Defense Department's famed "ARPANET," the technical predecessor to the Internet. The engineers in this photograph thus were among those who laid the foundations, in silicon, for the "dream machines" and "cyberspace" advocated by computer enthusiasts on the West Coast a few years later.