In the Beginning …

John Mc-Carthy, then an assistant mathematics professor at Dartmouth, organized the conference and coined the name "artificial intelligence" in his conference proposal. This summer AAAI celebrates the first 50 years of AI; and continues to foster the fertile fields of AI at the National AI conference (AAAI-06) and Innovative Applications of AI conference (IAAI-06) in Boston. The computer age was just dawning in 1956. MIT researchers that year built the TX-0, the first general-purpose, programmable computer with transistors. IBM shipped the first magnetic disk storage, the 305 RAMAC, composed of 50 magnetically coated metal platters with 5 million bytes of data.