In August 1980, I flew from Ohio to attend the Artificial Intelligence conference (AAAI) held at Stanford University, leading to my Byte cover story about AI. It was a huge adventure, connecting me with some incredible people… I have fond memories of an evening with astounding brains at Xerox PARC after playing with the Dolphin and Dorado bitmapped machines that later inspired the Macintosh, hanging with computer-music geeks, a sparkling dinner with Doug Hofstadter and Scott Kim, meeting science fiction authors James Hogan and Vernor Vinge, stumbling into the FORTH subculture, diving into the wildly premature exuberance of the AI community, reconnecting with the gang at Godbout Electronics that had sparked my Cybertonics parts business 6 years earlier, and getting a heady glimpse of what life would have been like had I landed in Silicon Valley instead of languishing in the midwest. Gratuitous name-dropping and maudlin retrospective aside, it was an insane week, complete with a side adventure that involved catching a prowler breaking into Stanford dorm rooms and getting to know the campus cops (narrowly escaping a scary encounter, alone in a three-story dorm building, a few days before the conference began).

While the AI event was wrapping up, I found out that the first LISP conference was about to take place, so I urged my editor at Byte to extend my stay on campus. On a whim, they said to go for it, so I threw myself into the culture of the language as a newbie. (I also ran into the lead cop over at Tresidder Memorial Union and gave him the news. “Alright! Maybe we catch us another burglar!”)

Anyway, here is the resulting piece, which was never published (the editor wanted a detailed technical article on LISP programming, and this was more cultural-philosophical… though it informed my AI Programming section in the textbook I was writing). My thanks to Steve Orr for the 2018 scan/OCR of the manuscript I sent him in 1980, bringing it back to life after 38 years.