The AI Lab was founded as the AI project in 1959. The Lab pioneered new methods for image-guided surgery and natural-language-based Web access, produced new generations of micro displays, made haptic interfaces a reality, and developed bacterial robots and behavior-based robots that are used for planetary exploration, military reconnaissance and in consumer devices.

Project MAC (Multiple Access Computer and Machine Aided Cognition) was founded on July 1, 1963 with the goal of developing a computing system that would allow individuals to access computational power much as we are able to access electricity for our homes. The result was time-sharing and a new paradigm of interactive computing, which laid the foundation for many of today’s basic design concepts for software systems.

Launched with a grant from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and subsequently funded by both DARPA and the National Science Foundation (NSF), Project MAC led to the foundation of an official academic computer science curriculum at MIT and marked the beginning of an enormously productive era of computing research at MIT. Out of Project MAC came MIT’s Laboratory for Computer Science (LCS) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) Lab, which then merged in 2003 to form CSAIL.

Did you know that the first email to ever travel across a computer network was sent to two computers that were right next to each other? It came from MIT alum Ray Tomlinson of BBN Technologies - he’s the one you can credit (or blame) for the @ symbol.

David Silver’s “Silver Arm,” which was actually mostly black, was the first computer-controlled robot intended for small-parts assembly. Its fine movements and high precision required great mechanical engineering skill and used feedback from touch and pressure sensors.

As a PhD at MIT, Danny Hillis pioneered the concept of parallel computers that is now the basis for most supercomputers. His leadership of Thinking Machines Corporation spearheaded technology that allowed computers to use a large number of processors to perform sets of coordinated computations in parallel.

MIT’s Artificial Intelligence Lab pioneered the field of underwater robotics with “Sea Squirt,” a three-foot-long autonomous underwater robot (AUV) used for naval experiments around the globe. Such innovations spurred the exploration of our deepest seas for everything from sunken treasure to new aquatic species.

In 1989 CSAIL researcher Tim Berners-Lee, then at CERN, proposed his idea for “a distributed hypertext system” that eventually became the World Wide Web. He invented HTTP, HTML, URL, the first web browser (Nexus) and many of the elements that make up our online lives today.

On the fortieth anniversary of Project MAC's establishment, July 1, 2003, LCS was merged with the AI Lab to form the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, or CSAIL. This merger created the largest laboratory (over 600 personnel) on the MIT campus and was regarded as a reuniting of the diversified elements of Project MAC.