Background Link to heading

Recently, I was going down the rabbit hole on John McCarthy, best known to me as the inventor of the Situation Calculus but more widely know for the creation the Lisp family of programming languages and his folk designation as one of the “founding fathers” of artificial intelligence. While digging into him, I came across a very interesting letter sent to (and later released by) his coworker at Stanford, Les Ernest. The letter regards a visit by John McCarthy to Czechoslovakia in the wake of the Prague Spring and subsequent invasion by the Warsaw Pact. Ernest considered the letter to reflect a pivotal moment in McCarthy’s life, and an insight into a later shift in McCarthy’s politics. Regardless of Ernest’s thoughts, it serves as an interesting primary account of McCarthy’s inner thoughts and the feelings expressed by various Czechoslovak researchers regarding the invasion.

Ernest released the letter in McCarthy’s cursive handwriting. As as someone who does not frequently read cursive I found the letter difficult to get through so first transcribed it for myself. I release my transcription here with some annotations in hopes to help other people who find his handwriting a bit difficult to read, or want some context on some of the names of people and places in the letter. My transcription may contain mistakes, feel free to reach out if you catch one so I may correct it. Particular words I was unsure about in the transcription are placed in square brackets […] and some are footnoted with additional info.

Provenance and Disclaimer Regarding the Letter Link to heading

The full text of the letter in McCarthy’s original handwriting is available from the Internet Archive here. I am not sure when Ernest released the letter to the public, the Internet Archive shows it being publicly available as early as 2014 on Ernest’s Stanford homepage. Note that McCarthy explicitly states at the end of the letter

You can show this letter to people but don’t post it on a bulletin board or allow any part of it to be quoted in print.

Now, 56 years later, with both the sender and recipient dead, as well as Ernest’s posting of the original to his website ~10 years ago, I conster my posting this transcription to be permissible.

The Letter Link to heading

Nov 1, 1968
Vienna

Dear Les,

I had quite an interesting visit to Czechoslovakia. First there were two days in Prague, then a car trip to Bratislava, then a visit to their Institute of Technical Cybernetics1, then a long weekend in the Tatra mountains (Monday was a holiday, the 50th anniversary of Czechoslovakia), and then they drove me to Vienna where I have been IBMing. Details:

I was met at Prague airport (saw about 5 big Russian helicopters) by Ivan Plander2 from above mentioned Bratislava Institute. No questions, no baggage inspection from customs. 4 hours late on account of London fog so direct to hotel. Travelog concerned August; here is Wenceslaus square3 where demonstration held, one or more students shot, see bullet scars on museum building, see flowers in front of statue in square, see burned out radio building. Next day visited Institute of Technical Information – [losers]4. Met Culik5 and [Bechvan]6 from mathematical institute; they are very smart but work on semi-[boring]4 problems (complexity of Turing machines), dinner in former monastery, talked politics till 10, then on my initiative to rock music club full of teenagers & college students. That day a disk jockey played mostly American soul, no West Coast music, some British. Very slick pattern. He told me he knew and liked the West Coast stuff but didn’t consider it danceable enough for this club. He gets most of his records on trips to west by cadging them from record company sales executives. No light show, though some were advertised on posters - as well as live bands with English names but apparently either local or from West Germany.

On the way to Bratislava we found ourselves scooting in and out of Russian truck convoys heading east. The way is incredibly full of detours, all two lane and at one point we got lost along with several Russian trucks and a car from Holland. Our driver found his way back, don’t know about others. At one point, all vehicles were stopped by some bottleneck ahead and Petraš,7 director of Slovak institute,7 got into conversation with Russian officers who complained about postal service because his aunt who lived in western Czechoslovakia had not answered his letters. The Slovaks could think of another reason why his letters went unanswered.

The Institute of Technical Cybernetics in Bratislava is on the whole a non-[loser]4. Its projects look like they might succeed and could be useful if they did. They are designing a 17-bit computer for process control and possibly time sharing to be built out of Czech TTL. If D. Poole8 wants an adventure they would be glad to have help.

Czechoslovak scientific institutions have cut all their contacts with the Russians and other eastern countries that invaded them. They are eager for scientific connections with the West. Petraš even asked if they could get subcontracts to do programming or hardware design. This might be worth thinking about for programming firms or outfits like III9 because wages and overhead are low and the cream of talent might be available for skimming.

The trip to Tatras took 3 days, one each way driving over very bad roads. Once there the trails and [woods and rocks]10 looked exactly like Sierras. In fact when the trail bent right over a wooden bridge, I half expected to see down Yosemite falls, but the falls were one 20 [?]11 high. We went on a telepherique to the peak above the clouds, a single span of 1 ½ miles. It is interesting to see the cables disappear above into the clouds. The top was [nice], signs in many languages, but [well], some of the Russian signs [removed].

There were still large numbers of anti-Russian signs in Slovak and Russian on roads, fences and buildings. For example:

  • [Cyrillic script]12 - Ivan go home
  • [Cyrillic script]12 - Lenin Awake! Breshnev has gone crazy
  • [Cyrillic script]12 - Father liberates! Son occupies.

Most prevalent of all, however, were signs in praise of Dubček and Svoboda, and their pictures were everywhere. So far the Russians have achieved the opposite of their purpose in occupying Czechoslovakia. The people here were their friends but now consider the Russians enemies. At the Inst. Tech Cyb, they preferred to translate sentence by sentence than to have me talk Russian. Gvozdjak13, Ruzena’s boss, took me to dinner in a restaurant with his wife who doesn’t speak English. When I offered to speak Russian, he said “not in a public place.” He is dean of the faculty at the university and has to watch his position. He said there would be no trouble in extending Ruzena’s leave.

One of the computer designers there had spent two months in Novosibirsk in May-June studying time sharing with Ershov. He told me that two weeks after the invasion he received a phone call from Novosibirsk asking him what was the truth about the invasion. Since the Russian had to call three times, this obviously required some courage.

The Czechoslovaks still have personal freedom except for freedom of the press. Apparently, no-one but the top leaders was arrested either by the Russians or Czechs, and Plander had no difficulty in driving me to Vienna in the institute car. However, they worry about the Russian’s possible next move. Since the Russian’s failure was essentially the inability to find collaborators, it seems to me that if they want to continue they must create a success gradient according to collaboration but they certainly have not done it yet. They have not got the Czechoslovaks to admit that counter-revolutionaries existed. If their existence were admitted, someone would have to be arrested and this would destroy the trust between people and government.

Zemanek at IBM in Vienna is the world’s best host. I gave a lecture on Zohar’s results and did some consulting. They are the best group in computer science in IBM.

When I turned on the radio in my hotel room in Vienna, the first thing I heard was, “Und nun wer haben die West Coste gruppe Blue Cheer mit dir Summer Time Blues.”14 On the whole it was a very good program with two Blue Cheer pieces, the Jefferson Airplane Greasy Heart, some Beatles, Otis Redding, Wilson Pickett etc. The third channel of Austrian Radio seems to play on American and British stuff and some of it is quite bad.

Today at 11:50 AM I go on to Moscow. Zemanek gave me a preprint by C.H. Lindsey of Manchester called “Algol 68 with less tears”15 which is almost completely comprehensible. It’s really quite a good language, and I think I will probably leave Novosibirsk in time to go to the meeting in Munich Dec 16-20 to see if Algol 68 can be [saved] from the syntax of its inventor.

I am getting very eager to get back to Stanford as I have lots of new enterprises in mind. Please write me in Novosibirsk about the state of the project et al.

You can show this letter to people but don’t post it on a bulletin board or allow any part of it to be quoted in print.

Best Regards,
John

  1. There does not seem to be many online records of the Institute of Technical Cybernetics at Bratislava. I was only able to dig up this note which mentions that the Institute of Informatics of the Slovak academy of sciences came out of the Laboratory of Theoretical and Applied Mechanics, which became the Institute of Technical Cybernetics in 1966, which later became the Institute of Computer Systems in 1991, and finally the Institute of Informatics in 1999. ↩︎

  2. Plander at time of writing is still alive. ↩︎

  3. This is misspelled in the original so I kept it in. ↩︎

  4. This stands out as quite a comment. It is very possible “losers” and “boring” are wrong; both words appear to start with the same 3 cursive letters. Neither “borers” nor “semi-losing problems” read correctly to me, but the second letter looks much more like an “s” than an “r” in both. He later uses the same word two paragraphs ahead to describe the Bratislava Institute as “non-loser/non-borer.” ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎

  5. I believe this to be Karel Culik, but it may also be Karel Culik II, they both worked on turing machines. ↩︎

  6. I am unable to figure out who this is. ↩︎

  7. I believed originally this to be Dušan Petraš, although I now find it unlikely, he would have only been 26 at the time. ↩︎ ↩︎

  8. Dave W. Poole, a member of McCarthy’s Stanford AI lab. He appears frequently doing experiments in their archives. He was also a tuba player and was a pioneer early computer generated music, more info can be found here. A picture of him can be found as #38 here. Not to be confused with the more famous AI researcher David L. Poole. ↩︎

  9. Probably referring to Information International, Inc. ↩︎

  10. This is almost certainly wrong. I believe its actually probably “worlds” and something. ↩︎

  11. This unit in the text appears to read “as”. Unclear what the actual unit should be. ↩︎

  12. Transcribing Cyrillic cursive is a bit out of my wheelhouse, particularly when McCarthy himself is kind enough to provide us his translations. ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎

  13. I believe this is Ladislav Gvozdjak, as described in the paper “On the history of computer science, computer engineering, and computer technology development in Slovakia”. ↩︎

  14. German, translates to “And now we have the West Coast group Blue Cheer with the Summertime Blues”. ↩︎

  15. This paper was later published under the name “ALGOL 68 with Fewer Tears” in 1972. ↩︎