Machine Translation (MT) of natural human languages is not a subject about which most scholars feel neutral. This field has had a long, colorful career, and boasts no shortage of vociferous detractors and proponents alike. During its first decade in the 1950s, interest and support was fueled by visions of high-speed high-quality translation of arbitrary texts (especially those of interest to the military and intelligence communities, who funded MTprojects quite heavily). During its second decade in the 1960s, disillusionment crept in as the number and difficulty of the linguistic problems became increasingly obvious, and as it was realized that the translation problem was not nearly so amenable to automated solution as had been thought. The climax came with the delivery of the National Academy of Sciences ALPAC report in 1966, condemning the field and, indirectly, its workers alike. The ALPAC report was criticized as narrow, biased, and short-sighted, but its recommendations were adopted (with the important exception of increased expenditures for long-term research in computational linguistics), and as a result MT projects were cancelled in the U.S. and elsewhere around the world.