In the 70’s, the AI folks were at the D. C. Power building (the benefactor’s name!) up in the hills behind campus (pass 280 on Page Mill, turn right on Arastradero; but don’t expect to see it: it was torn down some time ago, as being too decrepit).
They had a customized DEC10 (and certainly no IBM mainframes) on which Knuth actually wrote Sail TeX, as they had the best development environment around. The rest of the CS department was in Polya Hall on campus, and then Margaret Jacks Hall in the main quad, with a standard DEC20 and Vaxen and Sun Workstations by and by (and still no IBM stuff).
In the 80’s the AI folks moved in, too, bringing their DEC10 with them, so there was no more need to trek to the lab. Eventually, the insulation on the wire-wrapped backplane wires started to fail, and the CPU was kept going by strategically placing toothpicks to avoid shorts where the wires took a 90 degree turn around a pin (Don Coates was an old-old-school magician). Finally it was too much effort to keep going, and Knuth moved over to *nix when it was retired in 91 or so.
Anyway, no, the AI group, while strong and independent, was still officially part of CS. Now, the hardware and chip stuff was over in EE, which was separate (but still no IBM mainframe).
They had a customized DEC10 (and certainly no IBM mainframes) on which Knuth actually wrote Sail TeX, as they had the best development environment around. The rest of the CS department was in Polya Hall on campus, and then Margaret Jacks Hall in the main quad, with a standard DEC20 and Vaxen and Sun Workstations by and by (and still no IBM stuff).
In the 80’s the AI folks moved in, too, bringing their DEC10 with them, so there was no more need to trek to the lab. Eventually, the insulation on the wire-wrapped backplane wires started to fail, and the CPU was kept going by strategically placing toothpicks to avoid shorts where the wires took a 90 degree turn around a pin (Don Coates was an old-old-school magician). Finally it was too much effort to keep going, and Knuth moved over to *nix when it was retired in 91 or so.
Anyway, no, the AI group, while strong and independent, was still officially part of CS. Now, the hardware and chip stuff was over in EE, which was separate (but still no IBM mainframe).