Net work: Robert Fano (left) with Marvin Minsky, a cofounder of MIT’s Artificial Intelligence Lab, which was part of Project MAC courtesy of the mit museum Credit: Courtesy of the MIT Museum

In 1970, MIT Ford Professor of Engineering Robert Fano wrote an essay for this magazine called "Computers in Human Society--For Good or Ill?" Having experimented with the scarce and expensive machines for more than a decade, he knew that a revolution was at hand. And he worried that if computing power did not become broadly accessible, human liberty would be gravely threatened.

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