The program manager responsible for the DARPA grant was J. C. R. Licklider, who had previously been at MIT conducting research in RLE, and would later succeed Fano as director of Project MAC.

Its contemporaries included Project Genie at Berkeley, the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, and (somewhat later) University of Southern California's (USC's) Information Sciences Institute.

An "AI Group" including Marvin Minsky (the director), John McCarthy (inventor of Lisp), and a talented community of computer programmers were incorporated into Project MAC.

In 1966, Scientific American featured Project MAC in the September thematic issue devoted to computer science,[5] that was later published in book form.

The project enlisted students in various classes to use the terminals simultaneously in problem solving, simulations, and multi-terminal communications as tests for the multi-access computing software being developed.

Two professors, Hal Abelson and Gerald Jay Sussman, chose to remain neutral — their group was referred to variously as Switzerland and Project MAC for the next 30 years.

[6] On the fortieth anniversary of Project MAC's establishment, July 1, 2003, LCS was merged with the AI Lab to form the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, or CSAIL.

This merger created the largest laboratory (over 600 personnel) on the MIT campus[7] and was regarded as a reuniting of the diversified elements of Project MAC.

In 2018, CSAIL launched a five-year collaboration program with IFlytek, a company sanctioned the following year for allegedly using its technology for surveillance and human rights abuses in Xinjiang.

Its aim is to find and implement long-term, sustainable solutions which will increase the availability of educational technology and resources to domestic and international communities.