Project MAC is founded
ARPA gave MIT a large grant for time-sharing and machine cognition, and Minsky's AI group joined the project.
Why it matters
AI research got a standing institutional budget for the first time, rather than separate grants for separate tasks.
Robert Fano became director; the initiative came from Licklider at ARPA. The project combined work on time-sharing systems with AI; the AI laboratory split off in 1970 and Project MAC itself later became the Laboratory for Computer Science. The two merged again as CSAIL in 2003.