together to describe their section of the system, they found that it was too large to fit in memory, let alone have room for user programs. To make it fit, the programmers began a marathon effort to shrink the system requirements. Announcement and initial marketing The system was announced at the Fall Joint Computer Conference in November 1971. By early 1972 the system was up and running with three prototype machines completed. However, MPE development was by this time far behind schedule. This led to a February 1972 memo outlining the development schedule with various features being delivered over time. Ultimately the realtime support was dropped, and none of the dates on the memo were met. Meanwhile, a turf war had broken out between the engineering lab and the marketing department, who were actively trying to sell the system. It got to the point where "People from marketing were banned from the lab." Engineers continued to provide performance estimates to marketing, which would pass these along to customers, even though the engineers were aware they were inaccurate. Increasing concern among upper management led to the May 1972 formation of the Systems Management Group, who would work within the engineering labs as an internal marketing team and drive the development according to customer needs. Among the changes implemented, Jim Peachy was hired to do performance testing on the system. Peachy had previously worked on the first timesharing systems at Dartmouth College, and had since worked at General Electric and Memorex. After only three days he pronounced that there was "absolutely no way" the machine would meet the performance requirements being quoted by sales. First deliveries, recall As a result of the MPE delays, the ship date was pushed back from August to November 1972, and MPE was reduced solely to timesharing support, with additional features slated to arrive through 1973. The November date was held firm, and eventually, someone put up posters claiming "November is a happening", referring to the contemporary "happening" movement in performance art. The first machine was shipped to the Lawrence Hall of Science in Berkeley on November 1, although as one engineer, Frank Hublou, noted, "they should have put it on the truck, drove it around the block, and brought the machine back." After setup, it was found the machine would only support one or two users before slowing to a crawl, and it crashed every 10